Chapter 3
One evening I spoke to Mr. Monk of his boy. The boy, I said, seemed a strange little fellow. Mr. Monk, in his soiled, white apron, turned on me, and said nothing at first, but tapped his bald head solemnly. "Can't make him out," he said. "I think this is where it is"--and pressed a fat thumb against his head again. "But you have to put up with any boy you can get here." He sighed. "The bright kids go. Clear out. There's nothing fer 'em here but farm labour an' the poor rate. I don't know how the farmers about here could make a do of it if we didn't pay rates to keep their labourers from dying off. My boys get fed up. Off they go, 'nd I doan' blame 'em. One of 'em's in a racin' stable now, doin' well. Another's got a potman's job London somewhere. Doin' well. But the kid I've got now, he'll stop. No ginger in that boy. Can't see anything five minutes off, either. Must be under his nose, and your finger shouting at it. He's got a cloudy mind. Yet he's clever, in his way. There's the door-mat of the shop. As soon as any one puts a foot on that mat, the clock in my kitchen strikes two. All his fake. But he does rile the customers. Silly young fool. If there's two parcels to deliver, it's the wrong one gets first chance."
In a land where discovery had not gone beyond the blacksmith's forge and the arable fields, a native boy who had turned a door-mat into a watchdog was an interesting possibility. There the boy was at that moment, stepping off his responsive mat, ill-clad, the red nose of his meagre face almost as evident as his magnified stare of surprised inquiry, and his mouth open. Mr. Monk chaffed him. I spoke with some seriousness to him, but he was shy, and gave no answer except some throat noises. Yet presently he ceased to rub a boot up and down one leg, and became articulate. He mumbled that he knew the telegraph instrument too. ("Oho!" said Mr. Monk, looking interested. "You do, do yer? What about learning not to leave Mrs. Brown's parcel at Mrs. Pipkin's?") Had I ever been to London, the boy asked, his big eyes full on my face. Had I ever seen a Marconi station? I talked to him, perhaps unwisely, of some of the greater affairs. He said nothing. His mouth remained open and his stare full-orbed.
There was one grey, still Sunday when it was not raining, the grey sky being exhausted, and I met the grocer's boy a little distance from the village, sitting on a fence, reading. The boy closed his book when he saw me, but not before I had noticed that the volume was open at a page showing one of those highly technical diagrams of involved machinery which only the elect may read. I took the book--it was a manual of civil engineering--and asked questions with some humility; for before the man who understands the manipulating of metals and can make living servants for himself out of pipes, wheels, and valves, I stand as would a primitive or an innocent and confiding girl before the magician who interprets for them oracles. With the confidence of long familiarity and the faint hauteur of shyness he explained some of the diagrams in which, at that moment, he was interested.
We talked of them, and of Clayton; for I wished to know how this grocer's boy, who went about masked with a mouth open a little fatuously, an insignificant face, goggles, and a hand-truck, himself of no account in a flat and unremarkable place aside from the press of life's affairs, had discovered there were hills to which he could lift his eyes after those humiliating interviews with Mr. Monk concerning the wrong delivery of cheese and bacon. I was aware of the means by which news of the outer world got to Clayton. It came in a popular halfpenny paper, and that outer world must therefore have seemed to Clayton to be all aeroplanes, musical-comedy girls, dog shows, and Mr. Lloyd George. The grocer's boy got his tongue free at last, and talked. He was halt and obscure, but I thought I saw a mind beating against the elms and stones of the village, and repelled by the concrete, asphalt, and lodging-houses of the seaside place. But I am impressionable, too. It may have been my fancy. What the boy finished with was: "There's no chance here. You never hear of anything."
You never heard of anything. That countryside really looked remote enough from the centre of affairs, from the place where men, undistracted by the news and pictures of the halfpenny illustrated Press, were getting work done. Clayton was deaf and dumb. Some miles away the smoke of the London train was streaming across the dim fields like a comet. We both stood watching that comet going sure and bright to its destiny, leaving Clayton behind, regardless of us, and as though all we there were nothing worth. We were outside the pull of life's spinning hub. Beyond and remote from us things would be happening; but no voice or pulse of life could vibrate us, merged as we were within the inelastic silence of Clayton.
We walked back to the village, and the boy said good-night, passing through a white gate to a cottage unseen at that late hour of the evening. Near midnight I left my stuffed birds, with their fixed and upturned gaze, and went into the open, where above the shapeless lumps of massive dark of Clayton the stars were detaching their arrows, for the night was clear and frosty at last. Sirius, pulsing and resplendent, seemed nearer and more vital than anything in the village.
I walked as far as the white gate of the cottage where I had left Mr. Monk's boy; and there he was again, to my surprise, at that hour. He came forward. At first he appeared to be agitated; but as he talked brokenly I saw he was exalted. He was no grocer's boy then. The lad half dragged me, finding I did not understand him, towards his home. We went round to the back of the sleeping cottage, and found a little shed. On a bench in that shed a candle was burning in a ginger-beer bottle. By the candle was a structure meaningless to me, having nothing of which I could make a guess. It was fragmentary and idle, the building which a child makes of household utensils, naming it anything to its fancy. There were old jam-pots, brass door-knobs, squares of india-rubber, an electric bell, glass rods, cotton reels, and thin wires which ran up to the roof out of sight.
"Listen!" said the grocer's boy imperatively, holding up a finger. I remained intent and suspicious, wondering. Nothing happened. I was turning to ask the lad why I should listen, for the shed was very still, and then I saw the hammer of the bell lift itself, as though alive. Some erratic and faint tinkling began. "That's my wireless," said the grocer's boy, his eyes extraordinarily bright. "I've only just finished it. Who is calling us?"
III. Old Junk
Business had brought the two of us to an inn on the West Coast, and all its windows opened on a wide harbour, hill-enclosed. Only small coasting craft were there, mostly ketches; but we had topsail schooners also and barquantines, those ascending and aerial rigs that would be flamboyant but for the transverse spars of the foremast, giving one who scans them the proper apprehension of stability and poise.
To come upon a craft rigged so, though at her moorings and with sails furled, her slender poles upspringing from the bright plane of a brimming harbour, is to me as rare and sensational a delight as the rediscovery, when idling with a book, of a favourite lyric. That when she is at anchor; but to see her, all canvas set for light summer airs, at exactly that distance where defects and harshness in her apparel dissolve, but not so far away but the white feathers at her throat are plain, is to exult in the knowledge that man once reached such greatness that he imagined and created a thing which was consonant with the stateliness of the slow ranging of great billows, and the soaring density of white cumulus clouds, and with the brightness and compelling mystery of the far horizon at sundown.
Some mornings, when breakfast-time came with the top of the tide, we could look down on the plan of a deck beneath, with its appurtenances and junk, casks, houses, pumps, and winches, rope and spare spars, binnacle and wheel, perhaps a boat, the regular deck seams curving and persisting under all. An old collier ketch she might be, with a name perhaps as romantic as the _Mary Ann_; for the owners of these little vessels delight to honour their lady relatives.
Away in mid-stream the _Mary Ann_ would seem but a trivial affair, no match for the immensities about her, diminished by the vistas of shores and beaches, and the hills. But seen close under our window you understood why her men would match her, and think it no hardihood, with gales and the assaults of ponderous seas. Her many timbers, so well wrought as to appear, at a distance, a delicate and frail shape, are really heavy. Even in so small a craft as a ketch they are massive enough to surprise you into wondering at the cunning of shipwrights, those artists who take gross lumps of intractable timber and metal, and compel them to subtle mouldings and soft grace, to an image which we know means life that moves in rhythmic loveliness.
Talk of the art of book and picture making! There is an old fellow I met in this village who will take the ruins of a small forest, take pine boles, metal, cordage, and canvas, and without plans, but from the ideal in his eye, build you the kind of lithe and dainty schooner that, with the cadences of her sheer and moulding, and the soaring of her masts, would keep you by her side all day in harbour; build you the kind of girded, braced, and immaculate vessel, sound at every point, tuned and sweet to a precision that in a violin would make a musician flush with inspiration, a ship to ride, lissom and light, the uplifted western ocean, and to resist the violence of vaulting seas and the drive of hurricane. She will ride out of the storm afterwards, none to applaud her, over the mobile hills travelling express, the rags of her sails triumphant pennants in the gale, the beaten seas pouring from her deck.
He, that modest old man, can create such a being as that; and I have heard visitors to this village, leisured and cultured folk, whose own creative abilities amount to no more than the arranging of some decorative art in strata of merit, talk down to the old fellow who can think out a vessel like that after supper, and go out after breakfast to direct the laying of her keel--talk down to him, kindly enough, of course, and smilingly, as a "working man."
I told you there were two of us, at this inn. We met at meals. I think he was a commercial traveller. A tall young fellow, strongly built, a pleasure to look at; carefully dressed, intelligent, with hard and clear grey eyes. He had a ruddy but fastidious complexion, though he was, I noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swift in his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he could come to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. He had no moments of laxity and hesitation, even after a breakfast, on a hot morning, too, of ham and eggs drenched in coffee. He made me feel an ineffective, delicate, and inferior being.
He would bang out to business, after breakfast and a breezy chat with me; and I lapsed, a lazy and shameless idler, into the window, to wonder among the models outside, the fascinating curves of ships and boats, as satisfying and as personal to me as music I know, as the lilt of ballads and all that minor rhythm which wheels within the enclosing harmonies and balance of stars and suns in their orbits. Those forms of ships and boats are as satisfying as the lines which make the strength and swiftness of salmon and dolphins, and the ease of the flight of birds with great pinions; and, in a new schooner which passed this window, on her first voyage to sea--a tall and slender ship, a being so radiant in the sun as to look an evanescent and immaterial vision--as inspiring and awful as the remoteness of a spiritual and lovely woman.
"I can't make out what you see in those craft," said my companion one morning. "They're mostly ancient tubs, and at the most they only muck about the coast. Now a P. & O. or a Cunarder! That's something to look at." He was looking down at me, and there was a trace of contempt in his smile.
He was right in a way. I felt rebuked and embarrassed, and could not explain to him. These were the common objects of the Channel after all, old and weather-broken, sea wagons from the Cowes point of view, source of alarm and wonder to passengers on fine liners when they sight them beating stubbornly against dirty winter weather, and hanging on to the storm. Why should they take my interest more than battleships and Cunarders? Yet I could potter about an ancient hooker or a tramp steamer all day, when I wouldn't cross a quay to a great battleship. I like the pungent smells of these old craft, just as I inhale the health and odour of fir woods. I love their men, those genuine mariners, the right diviners of sky, coast, and tides, who know exactly what their craft will do in any combination of circumstances as well as you know the pockets of your old coat; men who can handle a stiff and cranky lump of patched timbers and antique gear as artfully as others would the clever length of hollow steel with its powerful twin screws.
But when my slightly contemptuous companion spoke I had no answer, felt out of date and dull, a fogey and an idle man. I had no answer ready--none that would have satisfied this brisk young man, none that would not have seemed remote and trivial to him.
He left me. Some other visitor had left behind Stevenson's _Ebb Tide_, and trying to think out an excuse that would quiet the qualms I began to feel for this idle preference of mine for old junk, I began picking out the passages I liked. And then I came on these words of Attwater's (though Stevenson, for certain, is speaking for himself): "Junk ... only old junk!... Nothing so affecting as ships. The ruins of an empire would leave me frigid, when a bit of an old rail that an old shellback had leaned on in the middle watch would bring me up all standing."
IV. Bed-Books and Night-Lights
The rain flashed across the midnight window with a myriad feet. There was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released shadows. Black spectres danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air, but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my little friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into the solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.
They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean? It cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night, in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into distinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind all our verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like to know of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle for me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostly suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
* * * * *
As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper beside the only worshipper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone, holding the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous spectres stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness of the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood instantly and founder us in original gloom.
The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a golden lily on a silver stem!
"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman once said to me. I nearly replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife; but that is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea was that the bed-book is a soporific, and for that reason she even advocated the reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute act. Certainly you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You would enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not only unshriven, but in the act of guilt.
What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they are no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have named are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess at times they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as ours, their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For my part, they are too big for bedfellows. I cannot see myself, carrying my feeble and restricted glim, following (in pyjamas) the statuesque figure of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austere pity, the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not after midnight! Let those go who like it.
As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to leave all, including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colours are prismatic spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that. It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime on fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We should all be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, once the pillow is nicely set.
For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte to swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run, for a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us have not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about literature as there is about theology.
* * * * *
There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in the heavens where duty, honour, witty arguments, controversial logic on great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in the indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind then certainly smiles at cleverness.
For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white and lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare of illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and star-like, as a clear and lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that place must come, as it were, with honest and open pages.
* * * * *
I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in those sentences which are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortable and sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret debate on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of the evil they have created.
That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of the intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select intimacy of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of mankind, not at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and terrible nature of this genius who thought that much of us, but how it is that after such a wise and sorrowful revealing of the things we insist on doing, and our reasons for doing them, and what happens after we have done them, men do not change. It does seem impossible that society could remain unaltered, after the surprise its appearance should have caused it as it saw its face in that ruthless mirror. We point instead to the fact that Swift lost his mind in the end. Well, that is not a matter for surprise.
Such books, and France's _Isle of Penguins_, are not disturbing as bed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving it with some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughts engendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately to hand in the bookshelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day one has had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far as possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope of clouds, and _Tristram Shandy_ is sure to be found in the sun.