Part 15

Well, then, he rode over the Down and came out through the Combe to his cousin’s house. The gate out of the field into the park was shut, and as he leaned over to open it he dropped his crop. I am ashamed to say that--it was the only act of the kind in his career, but men who desire to succeed ought not to act in this fashion--he did not get down to pick it up because he was afraid that if he did he might not be able to get on to the horse again. With infinite trouble, leaning right down over the horse’s neck, he managed to open the gate with his hands, but in doing so he burst his collar, and he had to keep it more or less in place by putting down his chin in a ridiculous and affected attitude. His hopes of making a fine entry at a pretty ambling trot, that perhaps his cousin would be watching from the window, were already sufficiently spoilt by the necessity he was under of keeping his collar thus, when the accursed animal bolted, and with the speed of lightning passed directly in front of a little lawn where his cousin, his cousin’s wife, and their little child were seated admiring the summer’s day. It was not until the horse had taken him nearly half a mile away that he got him right again, and so returned hot, dishevelled, and very miserable.

But they received him kindly, and his cousin’s wife, who was a most motherly woman, put him as best she could at his ease. She even got him another collar, knowing how terrible is the state of the soul when the collar is burst in company. And he sat down with them to make friends and discuss the future. He had always heard that among the chief avenues to success is to play with and be kind to the children of the Great, so he smiled in a winning manner at his cousin’s little boy, and stretching out his arms took the child playfully by the hand. A piercing scream and a sharp kick upon the shin simultaneously informed him that he had fallen into yet another misfortune, and the boy’s mother, though she was kindness itself, was startled into speaking to him very sharply, and telling him that the poor lad suffered from a deeply cut finger which was then but slowly healing. He made his apologies in a nervous but sincere manner, and in doing so was awkward enough to upset the little table which they had carried out upon the lawn, and upon which had been set the cups and saucers for tea. The whole thing was exceedingly annoying.

In this way did the Unfortunate Man enter the great arena of modern political life.

You must not imagine that he failed to obtain the sinecure which his father had sent him to secure. As I have already said, the failure of the Unfortunate Man was not a failure in major plans but in details. There may have been some to whom his career appeared enviable or even glorious, but Fate always watched him in a merry mood, and he was destined to suffer an interior misery which never failed to be sharpened and enlivened by the innumerable accidents of life.

He obtained for his cousin from the North of Scotland a man of sterling capacity, whose methods of agriculture had more than doubled the income of a previous employer; but as luck would have it this fellow, whose knowledge of farming was quite amazing, was not honest, and after some few months he had absconded with a considerable sum of money. A well which he had advised to be dug failed to find water for some two hundred feet, and then after all that expense fell in. He lamed one of his cousin’s best horses by no fault of his own; the animal trod upon a hidden spike of wood and had to be shot; and in doing his duty by upbraiding a very frousty old man who was plunging about recklessly just where a lot of she (or hen) pheasants were sitting on their eggs he mortally offended the chief landowner of the neighbourhood, who was none other than the frousty old man himself, and who was tramping across the brushwood to see his cousin upon most important matters. It was therefore in a condition of despair that his cousin finally financed him for Parliament. The constituency which he bought after some negotiations was a corrupt seaport upon the coast of Rutlandshire (here is no libel!). He was at first assured that there would be no opposition, and acting upon this assurance took the one brief holiday which he had allowed himself for five years. The doctor, who was anxious about his nerves, recommended a sea voyage of a week upon a ship without wireless apparatus. He landed in Jamaica to receive a telegram which informed him that a local gentleman of vast influence, eccentric, and the chief landowner in the constituency, had determined to run against him, and which implored him to cable a considerable sum of money, though no such sum was at his disposal.

In the earthquake the next day he luckily escaped from bodily injury, but his nerves were terribly shaken. Thenceforward he suffered from little tricks of grimace which were to him infinitely painful, but to others always a source of secret, sometimes of open, merriment. He returned and fought the election. He was elected by a majority of 231, but not until he had been twice blackmailed, and had upon at least three occasions given money to men who afterwards turned out to have no vote. I may say, to put the matter briefly, that he retained the seat uninterruptedly until the last election, but always by tiny majorities at the expense of infinite energy, sweating blood, as it were, with anxiety at every poll, and this although he was opposed by the most various people. It was Fate!

He spoke frequently in the House of Commons, and always unsuccessfully, until one day a quite unexpected accident of war in a foreign country gave him his opportunity. It so happened that the Unfortunate Man knew all about this country; he had read every book published upon it; it was the one thing upon which he was an authority. And ridiculous as had been his numerous efforts to engage the attention of the august assembly, upon this matter at least his judgment was eagerly expected. The greatest courtesy was shown him, the Government arranged that he should speak at the most telling time of the debate, and when he rose it was before a full House, strained to an eager attention.

He struck an attitude at once impressive and refined, stretched forth his hand in a manner that gave promise of much to come, and was suddenly seized with an immoderate fit of coughing. An aged gentleman, a wool merchant by profession, who sat immediately behind him, thought to do a kindly thing by slapping him upon the back, being ignorant of that Shoulder Trouble with which the jolly reader is acquainted. And the Unfortunate Man, in the midst of his paroxysm of coughing, could not restrain a loud cry of anguish. Confused interruptions, rising to a roar of protest, prevented him from going further, and he was so imprudent, or rather so wretchedly unlucky, as to be stung into a violent expression of opinion directed towards another member sitting upon his immediate left, a moneylender by trade and very sensitive. This fellow alone had heard the highly objectionable word which the Unfortunate Man had let drop. It is a word very commonly used by gentlemen in privacy, but rare, indeed, or rather wholly unused on the public occasions of our dignified political life. In vain did those about the moneylender pull at his skirts and implore him not to rise. He was white with passion. He rose and appealed to the Chair. He reiterated the offensive expression in the clearest and most articulate fashion, apologising to the horrified assembly for having to sully the air it breathed by the necessary repetition of so abominable an epithet, and he demanded the correction of the monster in human form who had descended to use it. The reprimand which the Unfortunate Man received from the Chair was lengthy and severe, and from that day forward he determined that the many omens of ill-fortune which had marked his life had reached their turn. He was too proud to resign, but his caucus, in spite of further considerable gifts of money, indignantly repudiated their Member, and when the election came he had not the courage to face it.

He is now living, broken and prematurely aged, in a brick house which he has built for himself in a charming part of the County of Surrey. He has recently discovered that the title to his freehold is insecure: an action is pending. Meanwhile, a spring of water has broken out under the foundations of the building, and some quarter of a mile before its windows, obscuring the view of the Weald in which he particularly delighted, a very large factory with four tall chimneys is in process of erection. These things have depressed him almost to the verge of despair, and he can only forget his miseries in motoring. He is continually fined for excessive speed, though by nature the most cautious of men, and terrified by high speeds, and I learn only to-day that as he was getting ready to go into Guildford to dispute a further fine before the Bench a backfire has put his wrist out of joint, and he suffers intolerable pain. _Militia est Vita Hominis!_

The Contented Man

Lucifer, for some time a bishop in Southern Italy (you did not know that, but it is true nevertheless, and you will find his name in the writings of Duchesne, and he took part in councils; nay, there was a time when I knew the very See of which he was bishop, but the passage of years effaces all these things)--Lucifer, I say, laid it down in his System of Morals that contentment was a virtue, and said that it could be aimed at and acquired positively, just as any other virtue can. Then there are others who have said that it was but a frame of mind and the result of several virtues; but these are the thinkers. The great mass of people are willing to say that contentment is strictly in proportion to the amount of money one may have, and they are wrong. I remember now there was a Sultan, or some such dignitary, in Spain, who counted the days of his life which had been filled with content, and found that they were seventeen. He was lucky; there are not many of us who can say the same. Then once a man told me this story about contentment, which seemed to me full of a profound meaning. It seems there was once an old gentleman who was possessed of something over half a million pounds, a banker, and this old gentleman every night of his life would go through certain little private books of his, compare them with the current list of prices, and estimate to a penny what he was worth before he slept. It was always a great pleasure to him to note the figures growing larger, and a great pain to him to note the rare occasions when they had shrunk a little in twenty-four hours. It so happened that this old gentleman lost a considerable sum of money which he had imprudently lent to a distant and foreign country too much praised in the newspapers, and he worried so much over the loss that he became ill and could not go to his office. His sons kept on the business for him, and every succeeding week they lost more and more of the money. But such was their filial piety that every night they gave the old gentleman false information, and that in some detail, so that he could put down his little rows of figures and see them growing larger night after night. You see, it was not the wealth that he desired, it was the increase in the little rows of figures; the wealth he consumed was the same; he wore the same clothes, he ate the same food, he lived in the same house as before, and he had for a companion eternally one or another of the two nurses provided by the doctor. The figures increasing regularly as they did filled him with a greater and a greater joy. After two years of this business he came to die, but his passing was a very happy one: he blessed his sons fervently and told them that nothing had more comforted his old age than their sober business sense; they had nearly doubled the family fortune during their short administration of it; he congratulated them and was now ready to go to his God in peace. Which he did, and two weeks after the petition in bankruptcy was presented by the young people themselves, always the more decent way of doing it: but the old man had died content.

Which parable leads up to the point at which I should have begun all this, which is, that once in my life, in the year 1901, during a heavy fog in the early morning of the month of November, in London, I met a perfectly contented man. He was the conductor of an omnibus. These vehicles depended in those days entirely on the traction of horses. They were therefore slow, and as the night, or rather the early morning, was foggy (it was a little after one) people going Westward--journalists for instance, who are compelled to be up at such hours--did not choose to travel in this way. There was no one in the ’bus but myself. I sat next the door as it rumbled along; there was one of those little faint oil lamps above it which are unique in Christendom for the small amount of light they give. It was impossible to read, but by the slight glimmer of it I saw suddenly revealed like a vision the face of that really happy man. It was a round face, framed in a somewhat slovenly hat and coat collar, but not slovenly in feature, though not severe. And as its owner clung to the rail and swung with the movements of the ’bus he whistled softly to himself a genial little air. It was not I but he that began the conversation. He told me that few things were a greater blessing in life than gas fires, especially if one could regulate the amount of gas by a penny in the slot. He pointed out to me that in this way there were never any disputes as to the amount of gas used, and he also said that it kept a man from the curse of credit, which was the ruin of so many. I told him that in my house there was no gas, but that his description almost made me wish there was. And so it did, for he went on to tell me how you could cook any mortal thing with any degree of heat and at any speed by the simple regulation of a tap.

It may be imagined how anxious I was on meeting so rare a being to go more deeply into the matter and to find out on what such happiness reposed; but I did not know where to begin, because there are always some questions which men do not like asked, and unless one knows all about a man’s life one does not know what those questions are. Luckily for me, he volunteered. He told me that he was married and had eight children. He told me his wages, which were astonishingly low, his hours of labour, which were incredibly long, and he further told me that on reaching the yard that night he would have to walk a mile to his home. He said he liked this, because it made him sleep, and he added that in his profession the great difficulty was to get enough exercise. He told me how often a day off was allowed him and how greatly he enjoyed it. He told me the rent which he paid for his two rooms, which appeared to be one-third of his income, and congratulated himself upon the cheapness and commodity of the place; and so he went on talking as we rumbled down the King’s Road, going farther and farther and farther West. My day would end in a few hundred yards; his not for a mile or two more. Yet his content was far the greater, and it affected me, I am sorry to say, with wonder rather than with a similar emotion of repose and pleasure.

The next part of his conversation discovered what you will often find in the conversation of contented men (or, rather, of partially contented men, for no other absolutely contented man have I ever met except this one), that is, a certain good-humoured contempt for those who grumble. He told me that the drivers of ’buses were never happy; they had all that life can give: high wages, fresh open-air work, the dignity of controlling horses, and, what is perhaps more important, ceaseless companionship, for not only had they the companionship of chance people who would come and sit on the front seats of the ’bus outside, but they could and did make appointments with friends who would come and ride some part of the way and talk to them. Then, again, as their work was more skilled, their tenure of it was more secure, nor were they constrained to shout “Liverpool Street” at the top of their voices for hours on end, nor to say “Benk, Benk, Benk” in imitation of the pom-pom. Nevertheless they grumbled. He was careful to tell me that they were not really unhappy. What he condemned in them was rather the habit and, as it were, the fashion of grumbling. It seemed as though no weather pleased them; it was always either too hot or too cold; they took no pleasure in the healthy English rain beating upon their faces, and warm spring days seemed to put them in a worse humour than ever. He condemned all this in drivers.

When we had come to the corner of my street in Chelsea as I got out I offered him a cigar which I had upon me. He told me he did not smoke. He was going on to tell me that he did not drink, and would, I had no doubt, if he had had further leisure, have told me his religion, his politics, and much more about himself; but though the ’buses in those days would wait very long at street corners they would not wait for ever, and that particular ’bus rumbled and bumped away. I looked after it a little wistfully, for fear that I might never see a happy man again. And I walked down my street towards my home more slowly than usual, thinking upon the thing that I had just experienced.

I confess I found it a very difficult matter. That experience not only challenged all that I had heard of happiness, but also re-awoke the insistent and imperative question which men put to their gods and which never receives an answer. Ecstasy is independent of all material conditions whatsoever. That great sense of rectitude which so often embitters men but permits them to support pain is independent of material conditions also. But these are not contented moods: oblivion is ready to every man’s hand, and even the most unfortunate secure a little sleep, and even the most tortured slaves know that at last, for all the rules and fines and regulations of the workshop, they cannot be forbidden to die; but such a prospect is not equivalent to content. Further, there is a philosophy, rarely achieved but conspicuous in every rank of fortune, which so steadily regards all external accident as to remain indifferent to the strain of living and even to be, to some extent, master of physical pain. But that philosophy, that mournful philosophy which I have heard called “the permanent religion of mankind,” is not content: on the contrary, it is very close indeed to despair. It is the philosophy of which the Roman Empire perished. It is the philosophy which, just because it utterly failed to satisfy the heart of man, powerfully accelerated the triumph of the Church, as the weight and pressure of water powerfully accelerate the rise of a man’s body through it, to the sunlight and the air above, which are native and necessary to him. No, it was not the philosophy of the Stoics which had laid a foundation for the ’bus-conductor’s soul.

I could not explain that content of his in any way save upon the hypothesis that he was mad.

The Missioner

In one of those great halls which the winter darkens and which are proper to the North, there sat a group of men, kindly and full of the winter night and of their food and drink, upon which for many hours they had regaled together, and not only full of song, but satiated with it, so long and so loudly had they sung. They all claimed descent from the Gods, but in varying degrees, and their Chief was descended from the father of the Gods, by no doubtful lineage, for it was his granfer’s mother to whom a witch in the woods had told the story of her birth.

In the midst of them as they so sat, a large fire smouldered, but having been long lit, sent up so strong a shaft of rising air as drew all smoke with it, towering to a sort of open cage upon the high roof tree of that hall whence it could escape to heaven.

I say they were tired of song and filled with many good things, but chiefly with companionship. They had landed but recently from the sea; the noise of the sea was in their ears as they so sat round the fire, still talking low, and a Priest who was among them refused to interpret the sound; but he said in a manner that some mocked doubtfully, others heard with awe, that the sea never sounded save upon nights when the Gods were abroad. He was the Priest of a lesser God, but he was known throughout the fleet of those pirate fishermen for his great skill in the interpretation of dreams, and he could tell by the surface of the water in the nightless midsummer where the shoals were to be found.

He said that on that night the Gods were abroad, and, indeed, the quality of the wind as it came down the gulf of the fjord provoked such a fancy, for it rose and fell as though by a volition, and sometimes one would have said that it was a quiet night, and, again, a moment after, one heard a noise like a voice round the corners of the great beams, and the wind pitied or appealed or called. Then a man who was a serf, but very skilled in woodwork, lying among the serfs in the outer ring beyond the fire in the straw, called up and said: “Lords, he is right; the Gods have come down from the Dovrefield; they are abroad. Let us bless our doors.”

It was when he had so spoken that upon the main gate of that Hall (a large double engine of foot-thick pine swung upon hinges wrought many generations ago by the sons of the Gods) came a little knocking. It was a little tapping like the tapping of a bird. It rang musically of metal and of hollow metal; it moved them curiously, and a very young man who was of the blood said to his father: “Perhaps a God would warn us.”

The keeper of the door was a huge and kindly man, foolish but good for lifting, with whom by daylight children played, and who upon such evenings lay silent and contented enough to hear his wittier fellows. This serf rose from the straw and went to unbar. But the Chief put his hand forward, and bade him stay that they might still hear that little tapping. Then he lowered his hand and the gate was swung open.

Cold came with it for a moment, and the night air; light, and as though blown before that draught, drifted into the hall a tall man, very young, who bowed to them with a gesture they did not know, and first asked in a tongue they could not tell, whether any man might interpret for him.

Then one old man who was their pilot and who had often run down into the vineyard lands, sometimes for barter, sometimes for war, always for a wage, said two words or three in that new tongue, hesitatingly. His face was wrinkled and hard; he had very bright but very pale grey eyes that were full of humility. He said three words of greeting which he had painfully learned twenty years before, from a priest, upon the rocks of Brittany, who had also given him smooth stones wherewith to pray; and with these smooth stones the old Pilot continually prayed sometimes to the greater and sometimes to the lesser Gods. His wife had died during the first war between Hrolf and the Twin Brothers; he had come home to find her dead and sanctified, and, being Northern, he had since been also a silent man. This Pilot, I say, quoted the words of greeting in the strange tongue. Then the tall young stranger man advanced into the circle of the firelight and made a sign upon his head and his breast and his shoulders, which was like the sign of the Hammer of Thor, and yet which was not the sign of the Hammer of Thor. When he had done this, the Pilot attempted that same sign, but he failed at it, for it was many years since he had been taught it upon the Breton coast. He knew it to be magical and beneficent, and he was ashamed to fail.