Part 7

“That last book of mine,” says the writer, “was nearly as good as ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’ I think myself that the death-scene was better in a way.”

Ah! but if we only did say these things aloud, instead of thinking them in silence. For ’tis only in silence now—as they would understand it in Ireland—that we say what we really mean.

So is it that there creeps this spirit of working by comparison into the soul and tissue of everything we do. Yet you would think, would you not, that the Church had kept herself free of it? But the Church is more eaten away with the spirit of competition than is many a humble labourer, driven to earn his living wage by making his work better than the rest.

Take this story for what it is worth; apply it as you will. It has only one meaning for me.

In Ireland, they call the wandering beggars, who live an itinerant existence, living from one town to another—they call them tinkers. A certain tinker woman, then, came into the city of Cork. Down one of the quays, seeking the scraps that fall in these places, dragging three wretched children at the frayed hem of her skirt, she was seen by a Protestant vicar.

Shifting one bare foot behind the other, she bobbed him a curtesy.

“For the love an’ honour av God, yeer riv’rance, give a poor ’ooman a copper, that the Almighty blessin’s av God may discind on ye, yeer riv’rance. Oh, sure, God Almighty give ye grace.”

The Vicar stopped.

“Where do you come from?” he asked.

“I’m after walkin’ all the ways from Macroon, yeer riv’rance—an’ I in me feet.”

She held up a bare blistered foot, at the sight of which the Vicar shudderingly closed his eyes.

“Where’s your husband?” he inquired.

“Me husband, yeer riv’rance? Shure, glory be, I haven’t had a sight or a sound av him these two years. ’Twas the day Ginnet’s circus was in Dingarvin, an’ he along wid ’em clanin’ the horses, and faith that was the last I saw av him, good or bad. I’m thinkin’ he’s gone foreign—he has indeed.”

“Why don’t you go to a priest? He’s the person to help you—not me. I’m a Protestant clergyman.”

“Shure, I know that yeer riv’rance—an’ why would I be goin’ to a preyst, an’ I wid me three little children here—the poor darlin’s—they’ve had divil a bit to eat this whole day.”

The competitive instincts of the Vicar cried aloud with a resonant voice in his ear.

“Do you mean to say they haven’t been brought up in the Roman Catholic Church?” he asked quickly.

“They have not indeed. Shure, what good would that be doin’ them?”

“Haven’t they been baptised at all into any Church?”

“They have not.”

The Vicar felt in his pocket and produced a sixpence.

“Get them something to eat,” said he, “and then come and see me. I shudder when I think they haven’t been baptised. Have you?”

“I was when I was a child,” said she, “but I haven’t been to Mass these fifteen years. Glory be to God, what’ud I be doin’ at Mass when I might be gettin’ charity from a grand gintleman like yeerself?”

“My poor woman,” said the Vicar, “it was Christ’s wish that we should help the poor. I’m thinking, too, of the hereafter of those poor little children of yours. What hope of salvation do you think there is for them if they have never been baptised?”

“If ’tis as difficult in this world as it is to get a bite or a sup, ’tis a hard thing indeed. But what good would I be getting to baptise ’em?”

“If you let them come to my church and be baptised, I’ll see that you won’t be forgotten.”

“Will yeer riv’rance give me something the way I cud be goin’ on with?”

“I will, of course.”

“An’ how much?”

“I’ll give you five shillings, my poor woman. You can get a week’s lodging and food with that.”

“Oh—shure I’d want five shillings for each wan of them,” she replied quickly.

The Vicar paused. The tone of this bargaining jarred upon his ears; but yet, as he thought of it—three little souls saved—three little souls caught from the grasp of the Roman Church—three more names upon his baptismal register. And only fifteen shillings! It was money nobly spent, honourably set aside for the great interest and reward hereafter.

“I’ll give you fifteen shillings,” said he, “if you bring them to the church to-morrow morning to be baptised.”

She clasped her hands in ecstasy.

“May the Almighty God give ye the blessings of his Holy Name, and may all the saints be wid ye in the hour of need. Faith, I niver met a finer Christian or a grander gintleman in all me life.”

She caught her children round her and told them the great things that were in store for them. With a warm feeling that the day had not passed in vain, the Vicar hurried away.

Directly he was out of sight, the woman made her way to the presbytery of the first Roman Catholic church she could find.

“I want to see the preyst,” said she, when they opened the door to her knocking.

They looked at her ragged clothes. It was with difficulty that she gained an audience.

“Go round into the chapel,” they said, “and Father —— will be with you in a minute.”

She plunged quickly into her story directly he came.

“Indeed, he was a nice gintleman,” she concluded, “and ’twas fifteen shillings he offered me if I’d bring the three of them to the church to-morrow morning.”

She gazed down at them and they gazed up at her. In some vague way they realised that they were under discussion. Their little mouths were open in wonder.

“’Tis a disgraceful thing, indeed!” said the priest in wrath, “to think ye’d go and sell the souls of yeer own children to one of those Protestant fellas who’d only be too glad the way they could be counting three more names in their Church. I’m ashamed of ye—I am indeed! If I give ye twelve shillings now, will ye bring them here to me?”

“Oh—glory be to God, Father—shure that’s only four shillings for each wan of the pore t’ings. I thought ’twas the way ye’d have offered me a poond at least to save the pore creatures the way they wouldn’t be havin’ their souls damned.”

“Yeer a disgraceful woman,” said he, “to barter the souls of yeer children like that. I’ll give ye seventeen shillings, and I won’t give ye a penny more.”

She clasped her hands again and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

“The blessing av God and av the Blessed Mother be wid ye,” she cried. “Ye’ve saved the souls of three pore creatures this blessed day.”

XXII

BELLWATTLE ON THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS

XXII

BELLWATTLE ON THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS

I have already been at some pains in a few of these pages to give an idea of the feminine appreciation of mathematics. Undoubtedly it is more practical than that of many an eminent mathematician. For let it at once be understood that the first function of a higher mathematician is to express himself in terms of mathematics, just as an artist expresses himself in the colours he lays upon his canvas, or a musician by the little black and white dots he writes between and through the lines.

“Nobody”—so a scientist once said to me—“nobody seems to understand this. They have never learnt the language we talk in and they fancy that we only fit our place in the universe so long as we are useful. If I were to talk to you now of the things I am doing in my laboratory, using the terms and the technicalities that I use there, you’d probably think I was endeavouring to be scientifically brilliant in my conversation, stringing together all the most exaggerated words to get an effect which you could not understand; whereas, in reality, I should be talking the most ordinary commonplaces which even the boy who cleans out the vessels and the flasks can probably understand. Let a man invent a talking machine, or a calculating machine, and they call him a great scientist. Good heavens! If you knew how the real scientists and the real mathematicians despise him. Why, I’ve seen a mathematician express the soul in himself so absolutely by the solution of an abstruse problem, that he has cried with joy like a child—like an artist when he has finished his masterpiece, a writer when he has ended his book.”

“May I never burst into tears, if ever I write a book,” said I.

“Well—you know what I mean,” said he.

And I suppose I did know. Utility is the prostitution of most things as well as science and mathematics. But that is just where women are more practical mathematicians than men. I have never known a woman set out to express herself in mathematics yet. What is more, I pray God, most fervently, I never shall. She will employ the wildest means of expression in the world, but nothing so wild or incoherent as mathematics.

I try to conceive a woman in a fit of jealousy sitting down to express her emotions through the medium of the binomial theorem—which I must tell you I know to be a method of expanding X and Y, bracketed to the Nth power, to an infinite series of powers—I try to conceive her doing that, but my conception always fails. Far more readily can I see her inviting to tea the creature who is the cause of her jealousy, and evincing the sweetest friendship for her. Now that is expression, if you like, bracketed, moreover, without any necessity for your binomial theorem, to the Nth power, and expanded to an infinite expression of femininity.

To give you just the simplest example of this matter of the practicality of women in mathematics, I must tell you that Cruikshank and I the other evening were recalling our prowess at Euclid; setting each other problems to prove—well, you know the routine of the propositions of Euclid.

In the midst of darning some socks and, having listened to us in silence for at least an hour, Bellwattle looked up.

“Was Euclid mad?” she asked, quite seriously.

There was something in the nature of a ricochet in that question. It touched not only Euclid, for whom we have infinite respect, but also ourselves, for whom we have more.

“The sanest person that ever lived,” said Cruikshank, shortly.

“Then why did he waste his time inventing all that rubbish? What’s the good of it, anyhow?”

I put away my pencil with which from memory I had just been drawing the diagram for the fourth proposition of the second book.

“It develops,” I answered, “the reasoning power in the human animal—a not unworthy or wholly unnecessary purpose.”

She darned a few stitches in silence.

“Has it ever done any good besides that?” she inquired presently.

“Well,” said Cruikshank, “it teaches you, for example, how, without measuring and purely by the light of reason, to construct an equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line.”

Bellwattle laid down her sock with the knob of wood inside it and she looked at both of us as though we were creatures from another world.

“And what in the name of goodness,” said she, “is an equi—whatever-you-call-it triangle?”

Cruikshank went on with his explanation quite cheerily. On this proposition he was so sure of himself that confidence was actually glowing in his face.

“Well,” said he, “you know what a triangle is, don’t you?”

She nodded her head promisingly.

“One of those things they sometimes play in bands.”

The look of confidence dropped heavily from Cruikshank’s face; but I seized the opportunity. She understood. At least she had grasped the shape of it. It mattered not at all that in her mind its functions were to play a tune. She appreciated the shape of it. That served its end.

“You’re quite right,” said I quickly. “They have it in an orchestra. It has three sides to it—hasn’t it?”

She nodded her head vivaciously.

“Yes, and two little curly bits at the top where they tie the string on to hang it up by.”

“My God!” said Cruikshank in despair.

But I acceded her the little curly bits. She had grasped the shape of a triangle.

“Well, try and forget the curly bits,” said I. “They have three sides—haven’t they?”

She acquiesced.

“Like this,” I went on hurriedly, and, dragging out my pencil again, I drew a triangle on a piece of paper.

“That’s it,” said she; “but they don’t meet at the top.”

“Some do,” I replied; “the ones that Euclid made did.”

“Well, go on,” she said, with greater interest. “What’s an equitriangle?”

“An equilateral triangle,” said Cruikshank, now stepping in when I had done all the hard work for him, “is a triangle which has all its sides of equal length. That side,”—he pointed to my drawing—“that side and that side all equal. Now Euclid’ll show you,” he continued, “how to construct an equilateral triangle on a given finite straight line. You needn’t measure anything. You only want a compass to make a couple of circles, and he’ll prove to your reason that all the lines of that triangle are one and the same length as this line you see on the paper now.”

He turned to me.

“Lend me a ha’penny,” said he.

I gave him the only one I had and he set to work to draw the most beautiful circles, though they had but little relation to A as their centre and B as their circumference, which were the letters he had written at each end of his given finite straight line.

“Nevertheless, that’ll do,” said he.

And then, forthwith, he began to prove it to her.

I went out to get myself a cigar in the dining-room, and while there, cutting off the end of it and smiling gently to myself as I did so, I heard the voice of Cruikshank raised in the passion of despair.

“My God! my dear child,” I heard him say. “I proved those two were equal because they both came from the centre of this circle—B.F.G. to the circumference. You don’t remember anything.”

I lit my cigar with a trembling hand. Then I walked to the window of the dining-room and looked out into the garden. There were the tom-tits pecking away at the cocoa-nut shell which Bellwattle had hung up with such infinite trouble; there were the kittens, lapping from a saucer of milk as Bellwattle and their mother had taught them; there were the sweet peas in great walls of colour with the old pieces of red flannel still clinging to the pea-sticks, those same pieces of flannel which Bellwattle had tied to keep off the birds when the shoots were young and green; there was the little robin which Bellwattle fed every afternoon at tea-time; there, in fact, were all the signs of Bellwattle’s beautiful and wonderful and practical utility.

I came back into the other room at the sound of Cruikshank’s voice as he called me.

“She sees it!” he exclaimed in an ecstasy. “She understands it all right. I made it clear, didn’t I, Bellwattle?”

“Oh, quite,” said she. “I understand it now right enough. But I never knew Euclid made instruments for bands.”

Cruikshank tore up his piece of paper and flung it in the grate.

So you see, if she really knew, I’ve no doubt she’d return to question Euclid’s sanity once more. I feel inclined to question it myself, but then that is because I know he did not make instruments for bands. He only expressed himself—that was all.

XXIII

THE MYSTERY OF THE VOTE

XXIII

THE MYSTERY OF THE VOTE

I never knew how really splendid a possession was this of the vote until the last election. It is no wonder to me now that women throw dignity to the four winds of heaven, leaving it to chance and the grace of God whether it ever blows back to them again. It is no wonder to me that, for the moment, they can forget their glorious heritage in order to obtain this mysterious joy of recording their vote on a little slip of paper in the secrecy of the ballot-box.

As a mystery—and all mysteries are power—it had never appealed to me. As a means of urging the laws of the country in such direction as one was pleased to consider for that country’s good, it did once seem to me to be invaluable. I know by now what a hopeless fallacy that is. But at that time, nursing a political conviction that Home Rule would be good for Ireland as a people, much as I am led to believe food is good to a starving man, or a sense of religion to a drifting woman, I listened to the eloquent appeal of a canvasser for a Unionist candidate.

When he had finished telling me much more than either of us knew about Tariff Reform, and had built such a Navy before my eyes as would have frightened the whole German Government and any single English ratepayer out of their wits, I asked him what the Unionist candidate felt about Home Rule.

“Home Rule?” said he, carefully—“You approve of Home Rule?”

I walked gently and easily into the canvasser’s trap.

“You don’t denationalise a country,” said I, “because you conquer it. You can’t cut the soul out of Ireland any more than you can wash a nigger white. You can only boycott it. You can only paint a nigger. But boycotting won’t starve the soul of any nation. If it can’t get food for itself from the nation’s stores, it will still live, feeding from the country-side on the wild herb of endurance. But there is that which you can do. You _can_ boycott it.”

“And you think that Home Rule will encourage the development of the Irish people?” said he.

I admitted that the idea had occurred to me.

“Well, Mr. —— is quite of your way of thinking,” he replied.

“He would support it with his vote in the House?” said I.

“Most assuredly!” he declared.

“I shall vote for Mr. ——,” said I.

And so I should, had I not gone to one of his meetings in the Town Hall. He, too, spoke eloquently about Tariff Reform and a Navy that would keep our country what it was; but in the midst of it, a cockney voice endeavoured to heckle him from the back of the hall.

“’Ow about ’Ome Rule?” shouted the voice.

The Unionist candidate had been heckled before.

“How about it?” he asked sharply, like the crack of a pistol.

“Are you going to let the Roman Catholics get the ’old in Ireland?”

“And make them a menace to England, too—do you think it’s likely?” replied the candidate.

I walked away. “The vote,” said I to myself, “the vote is only a catchpenny title for a popular game. It would be much better to gamble than vote. You might get something for your money if you backed the right man with a shilling; but you get nothing for backing him with your vote. In future,” said I, “I shall bet.”

Yet only a little while afterwards I was to learn what a glorious thing the vote is.

In my village there is an amiable labourer with that cast of countenance upon which, as on the possessions of his great country, the sun never sets. And with it all, he has that placidity of manner, that evenness of gait which suggest that he is always going to or coming from a service at his chapel.

No one would ever dream of consulting him upon anything, though, indeed, I once did ask him the name of a certain plant.

“There be some as call it the Deadly shade,” said he, “and some as call it the Nightly shade, but I don’t know rightly which it be.”

When later on, for my own foolish amusement, I said I had heard it was called the Deadly shade, he replied in precisely the same fashion. I tried him once more, by saying that I had looked up a book on the subject and found it to be the Nightly shade. Again he replied, word for word, as before.

At last, a few weeks later, I came to him and said—

“You know we were all wrong about that plant. I find at South Kensington Museum that the proper name for it is the Deadly Nightshade.”

And what do you think he replied? “There be some,” said he, “as call it the Deadly shade, and some as call it the Nightly shade, but I don’t know rightly which it be.”

Now that man’s wife had no respect for him, and truly I’m not surprised. I found out, too, that he knew it—it would not, of course, be a difficult fact to ascertain—and I felt sorry for him.

And then one day—the day before the polling in our village—all my pity for him was ended. I met him on the road, carrying home his bag of tools.

“Well,” said I, “are you going to vote to-morrow?”

His face broadened with a beaming smile.

“I am that,” said he.

“Who are you going to vote for?” I asked.

A cunning look crept into his little twinkling eyes, and he said—

“Ah—that’s telling.”

I admitted that there was that to it and asked him to tell me.

He shook his head.

“I keeps that to myself,” said he. “We’re not supposed to tell who we vote for. All they votes is counted secret.”

“Do you mean to say you don’t tell anybody?” I asked.

“No,” he replied—“I don’t tell none.”

“But you tell your wife,” said I.

He shook his head again, and his smile was broader and his eyes more cunning than ever.

“Surely she wants to know,” I exclaimed.

“Ah—she may want to know, but that ain’t my tellin’ her—is it?”

Then I suddenly realised what a glorious weapon he possessed. A weapon which, when everything else—even intelligence—failed, would make him master in his own house.

“That must give you a splendid sense of importance in your own home,” said I—“Don’t they think you’re a fine fellow?”

“P’raps they do.”

“And all because you’ve got the mystery of a vote.”

“I can’t think of no other reason,” said he.

So whenever the question of giving women the vote is raised, I can think, too, of no other reason for their wanting it. A woman will bow her head before a mystery when all sense of worship has left her. It is this which gives her so much respect for the priesthood; it is this perhaps which gives her her desire for the vote.

XXIV

SHIP’S LOGS

XXIV

SHIP’S LOGS

There is a yard by the river-side in London—opposite Lambeth or somewhere thereabouts, I think it must be—where you may come so close in touch with Romance as will set your fancy afire and transport you thousands of miles away upon the far-off seas of the Orient.

You may talk in disbelieving tones of wishing-rings, of seven-leagued boots and magic carpets, counting them as fairy tales, food only for the minds of children; but they are after all only the poetic materialisation of those same subtle things in life which give wings to our own imagination, or bring to eyes tired with reality the gentle sleep of a day dream.

Nearly every one must know the place I write of. It is where they break up into logs the timber of those ships which have had their day—the ships that have ridden fearless and safe through a thousand storms, that have set forth so hopefully into the dim horizon of the unknown and evaded to the last the grim, grasping fingers of the hungry sea.

And there you will see their death masks, those silent figureheads which, for so many nights and so many days with untiring, ever-watchful eyes have faced the mystery of the deep waters unafraid. There is something pathetic—there is something majestic, too—about those expressionless faces. They seem so wooden and so foolish when first you look at them; but as your fancy sets its wings, as your ears become attuned to the inwardness that can be found in all things, however material, you will catch the sound of dim, faint voices that have a thousand tales of the sea to tell, a thousand yarns to spin, a thousand adventures to relate.

Nothing is silent in this world. There is only deafness.

It has always appealed to me as the most noble of human conceptions, that burial of the Viking lord. The grandeur of it is its simplicity. There is a fine spectacular element in it, too, but never a trace of bombast. The modern polished oak coffin with its gaudy brass fittings, the super-ornate hearse, the prancing black stallions, the butchery of a thousand graceful flowers—all this is bombast if you wish. It no more speaks of death than speaks the fat figure of Britannia on the top of the highest circus car of England. Funerals to-day have lost all the grandeur of simplicity. But that riding forth in a burning ship, stretched out with folded hands upon the deck his feet had paced so oft; riding forth towards that far horizon which his eyes had ever scanned, there is a generous nobility in that form of burial. You can imagine no haggling with an undertaker over the funeral about this. Here was no cutting down of the prices, saving a little on the coffin here, there a little on the hearse.