The Bed-Book of Happiness Part 30

I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his "History of Civilisation" in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the other appurtenances of intellectual life are not to be procured. I am acquainted with birds, and the building of nests--with wildflowers, and the seasons in which they blow,--but with the big world far away, with what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am acquainted only through the _Times_, and the occasional magazine or review, sent by friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but by whom, it seems, I am not yet forgotten. The village has but few intellectual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly measured by the demand. Still, there is something. Down in the village, and opposite the curiously carved fountain, is a schoolroom which can accommodate a couple of hundred people on a pinch. There are our public meetings held. Musical entertainments have been given there by a single performer. In that schoolroom last winter an American biologist terrified the villagers, and, to their simple understandings, mingled up the next world with this. Now and again some rare bird of an itinerant lecturer covers dead walls with posters, yellow and blue, and to that schoolroom we flock to hear him. His rounded periods the eloquent gentleman devolves amidst a respectful silence. His audience do not understand him, but they see that the clergyman does, and the doctor does; and so they are content, and look as attentive and wise as possible. Then, in connection with the schoolroom, there is a public library, where books are exchanged once a month. This library is a kind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels and romances. Each of these books has been in the wars; some are unquestionably antiques. The tears of three generations have fallen upon their dusky pages. The heroes and the heroines are of another age than ours. Sir Charles Grandison is standing with his hat under his arm. Tom Jones plops from the tree into the water, to the infinite distress of Sophia. Moses comes home from market with his stock of s.h.a.green spectacles. Lovers, warriors, and villains,--as dead to the present generation of readers as Cambyses,--are weeping, fighting, and intriguing. These books, tattered and torn as they are, are read with delight to-day. The viands are celestial, if set forth on a dingy table-cloth. The gaps and chasms which occur in pathetic or perilous chapters are felt to be personal calamities. It is with a certain feeling of tenderness that I look upon these books; I think of the dead fingers that have turned over the leaves, of the dead eyes that have travelled along the lines. An old novel has a history of its own. When fresh and new, and before it had breathed its secret, it lay on my lady's table. She killed the weary day with it, and when night came it was placed beneath her pillow. At the sea-side a couple of foolish heads have bent over it, hands have touched and tingled, and it has heard vows and protestations as pa.s.sionate as any its pages contained.

Coming down in the world, Cinderella in the kitchen has blubbered over it by the light of a surrept.i.tious candle, conceiving herself the while the magnificent Georgiana, and Lord Mordaunt, Georgiana's lover, the pot-boy round the corner. Tied up with many a dingy brother, the auctioneer knocks the bundle down to the bidder of a few pence, and it finds its way to the quiet cove of some village library, where with some difficulty--as if from want of teeth--and with numerous interruptions--as if from lack of memory--it tells its old stories, and wakes tears, and blushes, and laughter as of yore. Thus it spends its age, and in a few years it will become unintelligible, and then, in the dust-bin, like poor human mortals in the grave, it will rest from all its labours. It is impossible to estimate the benefit which such books have conferred. How often have they loosed the chain of circ.u.mstances!

What unfamiliar tears--what unfamiliar laughter they have caused! What chivalry and tenderness they have infused into rustic lovers! Of what weary hours they have cheated and beguiled their readers! The big, solemn history-books are in excellent preservation; the story-books are defaced and frayed, and their out-of-elbows condition is their pride, and the best justification of their existence.

In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audience in my garden rather than in my house. In all my interviews the sun is a third party. Every village has its Fool, and of course Dreamthorp is not without one. Him I get to run my messages for me, and he occasionally turns my garden borders with a neat hand enough. He and I hold frequent converse, and people here, I have been told, think we have certain points of sympathy.

Although this is not meant for a compliment, I take it for one. The poor, faithful creature's brain has strange visitors: now 'tis fun, now wisdom, and now something which seems in the queerest way a compound of both. He lives in a kind of twilight which observes objects, and his remarks seem to come from another world than that in which ordinary people live. He is the only original person of my acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form a singular commentary on those generally accepted. He is dull enough at times, poor fellow; but anon he startles you with something, and you think he must have wandered out of Shakespeare's plays into this out-of-the-way place. Up from the village now and then comes to visit me the tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hankering after Red-republicanism, and the destruction of Queen, Lords, and Commons. Guy Fawkes is, I believe, the only martyr in his calendar. The sourest-tempered man, I think, that ever engaged in the manufacture of sweetmeats. I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikes himself. To be at all consistent, he should put poison in his lozenges, and become the Herod of the village innocents. One of his many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often to have a look at my greenhouse and my borders. I listen to his truculent and revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomy egotist away with a nosegay in his hand, and a gay-coloured flower stuck in a b.u.t.ton-hole. He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire.

The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine; they come to visit me often, and smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a good-humoured pa.s.sage of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a humorist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles.

Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its death-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit, and put a tenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a man who so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature produces sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is a tree that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful is his reverence for the Book, his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have come to colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his ordinary speech. He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else, and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him at his tea-table, or walking with him on the country roads. He does not feel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air.

The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the clergyman, but he is impatient of pale or limit; he never comes to a fence without feeling a desire to get over it. He is a great hunter of insects, and he thinks that the wings of his b.u.t.terflies might yield very excellent texts; he is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in the company of the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at Moses. He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons--to annoy if he cannot subdue--and, when his purpose is served, he puts his scepticism aside--as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great arguments arise between them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss of temper, which, however, he regains before any harm is done. For the worthy man is irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him.

TWO OLD GENTLEMEN [Sidenote: _H.B._]

Old Joe, who has been a pirate, a buffalo-hunter, a soldier, a pastrycook, and a seller of bootlaces, collar-studs, and tie-clips in the London gutters, sits paralysed in his grandfather chair, which has a thin pad strung to the back and a flattened cus.h.i.+on on the seat, and declares, vainly trying to keep his tongue inside his mouth, and with his whole body shaken by paralysis, that he is happy and jolly.

"Happy and jolly," roars Joe, struggling with his frightful stammer. "It 'tain't no good bein' nuffin kelse. Why, I've been dead and pretty near buried. In Charing-crost 'orspital; yerse! I heard 'em say, 'He's a gonner,' and I couldn't give 'em the lie. I come to, wrapped up like a mummy, and hollered so as they pretty near 'opped out of their skins!

Ho, I've had a terrible life! Run over by a horse and van. Knocked all to pieces. Been to the bottom of the sea! Many a time. But here I am, happy and jolly. What's the odds?" He goes off into such a fit of laughter that the chair is shaken and he himself nearly suffocated by a cough like an earthquake.

He looks extremely like one of those lay figures employed by ventriloquists. He is a thin, flat, pasteboard-looking old fellow; his trousers hang over the edge of his chair apparently empty of legs, and his s.h.i.+rt and open waistcoat (he never wears a coat) are pressed flat against the high back of the chair, apparently empty of trunk. His body and his features are for ever on the jerk. His shoulders twitch. He is for ever laughing and gurgling. He is for ever struggling to say something important, ending in a great spluttering stammer and a roar of tremendous laughter.

For all he is eighty-two years of age, his hair is yet thick, and the blackness of it is of too stubborn an order ever to go more than iron-grey. He has gla.s.sy eyes, puffed and bagged with flesh; heavy black eyebrows half-way up his sloping forehead; a heavy black moustache under his strong nose; a tongue several sizes too large for his mouth; and under the mouth a chin which recedes so sharply that it becomes neck before you are really aware that it is chin. He reminds us a little, as he sits there laughing and chuckling, of early caricatures of Sir Redvers Buller.

Opposite Old Joe sits Mr. Wells, a little old white-haired gentleman, very spruce and tidy, with neatly clipped moustache and neatly pointed beard, and peering little cloudy eyes which are sightless.

The two old gentlemen, as they are called, live together in a tiny two-roomed house in a narrow flagged court which is generally strung with was.h.i.+ng. The low-roofed kitchen is their sitting-room, and its smoky-panelled walls are decorated only with church almanacs and a few faded photographs.

The room is beautifully clean, and so is the bedroom above, where the two pensioners sleep in neat little beds. Out of the money allowed them by a neighbouring church--some nine s.h.i.+llings a week between the two--they pay a woman five s.h.i.+llings a week "to do for them." As for themselves, they smoke their pipes in front of the fire, and laugh to find themselves, after much rough work on the high seas, so happy and jolly at the end of their days.

"It wasn't always as clean as this, you must understand," says Mr. Wells confidentially, his sightless eyes blinking with amus.e.m.e.nt. "When we first come here the place was simply swarming; swarming it was--you know, _gentlemen in the overcoats_ we call 'em down here. And the amusing thing was--there, I did laugh!--Joe could see 'em but couldn't catch 'em, and I, who might have caught 'em, couldn't see 'em." He leans over to Joe and shouts, "I was telling the genneman about the bugs when we first came here!" And Joe lifts his eyebrows, rubs his shoulder against his chair, and laughs, and says with his pipe in his mouth, "Ess, sir!" making a pantomimic gesture supposed to represent the slaughter of vermin.

Little Mr. Wells has a great and fundamental pride in the fact that he is "eight year younger nor what Joe is." He tells you this interesting fact more than once, speaking in his wonted low tone of voice, reaching out with his pipe between his fingers to touch you lightly with his elbow, and always concluding with the appeal, "You wouldn't think so, would you?" And then, as the pipe goes back to his mouth, "Well, it is so," he says, and nods his head at the fire. And Old Joe, who doesn't care a bra.s.s farden, or a bone b.u.t.ton for that matter, whether he is eighty-two or one hundred and eighty-two, has his point of pride in the certain conviction that if only he had the use of his legs he would be as strong now as ever he was.

Now, old Joe, for all he is paralysed, has the use of his eyes, whereas Mr. Wells, who can and does shuffle about pretty freely on his feet, has not got the use of his.

Joe's sight is a great blessing to him; he can read. He has a st.u.r.dy taste in literature, and will stand none of your milk-and-water stuff.

He likes fighting, plenty of that: and Red Indians, and duels, and murders, and s.h.i.+pwrecks, and fires, and sudden deaths. He requires of his author that he keep his mind steeped perpetually in blood and thunder. You will always find that Old Joe is sitting on a penny novelette, open at the place, and but little crumpled or creased from the impress of his skeleton of a body. He is a great reader, one of the greatest readers in London; and, perhaps, to no man in all the world more than to Joe has literature brought so complete an escape from the pressing demands of self-consciousness and the inconvenient emphasis of personality.

It is at this point that we reach, by the reader's leave, the psychological interest of this our simple story. For the problem presents itself to Mr. Wells, as well as to me, whether all this violent reading has not created in Joe's mind the impression of a Joe who never was on sea or land. In other words: in the tale which Joe tells of his own life, is any part of it fact, or is it not all a figment of his brain, the creation of his b.l.o.o.d.y-minded authors? Joe himself believes every word of it; Joe believes he was the Joe he tells you about, and his face grows purple, and his gla.s.sy eyes dart fire out of their baggy flesh, if you insinuate never so delicately that one of his stories is in the very smallest detail just a little difficult of belief.

Mr. Wells never contradicts Joe; but every now and then (forgetting that Joe can see) he shakes a sceptic head, and, leaning towards you, whispers (forgetting that Joe can only hear when you shout at him) that you must be pleased to remember that "_that's_ what he thinks he done; and no doubt he _thinks_ that it was so; and it may be it was, and I should never think of contradicting, not no man; but I has my own opinion in the matter. _I don't_ think it was so. I think he's half dreaming and half telling a tale. That's what _I_ think."

"But," you inquire, "is it not true that Joe was once a pirate?"

"Oh, yes," he cries at once, smiling proudly; "Oh, yes. Joe was a pirate right enough. What, haven't you heard him tell how they boarded a Spanish s.h.i.+p, and cut the throats and broke the heads of the swarthy crew? Oh, you ought to hear him tell that. It's as good as a play." And here he leans forward, and calls across to chuckling and gurgling Joe.

"Joe! Tell the genneman how you boarded that Spanish s.h.i.+p, and cut the throats of them there swarthy Spaniards."

At this Old Joe seems to be smitten with a sudden frenzy. I have never seen anything like it. After a preliminary canter in the laughing line he suddenly makes taut his body; his eyes bulge from his head; his face becomes crimson and his nose blue; then, with his mouth open, while he hisses like a steam-saw and roars like a bull and sends the most extraordinary imitation of throat-cutting spluttering wetly from his distended lips, he waves his right arm madly and frantically in the air, makes imaginary stabs in front of him, draws imaginary knives across his throat, and brings down the b.u.t.t ends of imaginary carbines on the supposit.i.tious heads of the swarthy crew unkindly resurrected to be slain again.

It is plain that the poor old paralysed fellow is lost to the Present.

He is back in the Past--or in one of his novelettes; and in front of him, begging for mercy, as he slits their throats, or cracks open their skulls, are, indeed, hundreds of real and living men. His acting is superb. It is only made comical by the hanging legs, the fixture of the body to the seat of the chair, and the furious spluttering of his frenzied mouth.

When he has quite finished, thoroughly exhausted, he leans back in his chair, sticks his pipe into his face, strikes a match with his shaking hands, and covers his laughing face in a wreath of tobacco-smoke.

"Arst him," whispers Mr. Wells, "how many he killed? Go on; you arst him."

So you lean across to Old Joe, who shoots forward to meet your lips half-way with his left ear, and you calmly, and without dread or horror, ask the gurgling and chuckling veteran how many men he has killed.

As soon as he has caught your question he bursts out laughing, flings himself suddenly back, and exclaims, with a splutter: "How many ha' I killed? How many? I couldn't say. Too many on 'em. Hundreds! Hundreds!

Hundreds of 'em!" Back goes the pipe, and, wreathed in proud smiles, his shoulders twitching, his hands never still for a moment, he sits square back in his chair and looks at you proudly, as much as to say:

"Ain't I a devil of a feller? Ain't I a monster? Ho, I've had a terrible life. You just arst me another!"

Well, I know not how true is the story told by Old Joe of his own wickedness.

But, however this may be--and it is not the province of Old Joe's humble historian to speculate--let us be content with the picture of these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the court that he may warm his old bones in the sun.

[In brackets, let me say that I have come upon Old Joe literally posing in the court as a most ferocious pirate before an audience of toddling infants not more than four years of age.]

Eighty-two years ago Old Joe, surnamed Ridley, was born in the neighbourhood of the Barbican. He remembers how murderers and highwaymen used to come and hide in the court where he was born, "because, don't you see, the police daren't come where we was living." He went to a school in Charterhouse-square. "Charterhouse School," he says. But Mr.

Wells nudges us with his pipe hand. "That's a mistake," he says. "There wasn't never no _school_ in Charterhouse Square, in those days. But never mind; let him go on. Only you must make allowance, you know."

His father was a carman who could drink porter by the two-gallon, and had an arm like a leg of mutton. But this great, l.u.s.ty carman found himself ruled with a rod of iron by the little spitfire he took for his second wife. She managed the carman, and she managed his brats of children. She particularly managed Joe because he particularly disliked being managed.

So it came about that Joe found the streets pleasanter than his home, and took to slouching about with his hands in his pockets, feeling hungry and sometimes a little concerned, perhaps, as to what was to become of him. One day, as he was wasting time at a street-corner in Aldersgate, there came up to him a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man in a blue reefer suit, who showed all his teeth when he smiled and whose voice had a sharp rattle in it like a bag full of gold coins. This noticeable man hailed Joe as a fine fellow, and asked the fine fellow whether he wouldn't step with him into a convenient tavern and wet his whistle with a gla.s.s of the best brandy.

The broad-shouldered, easy-smiling gentleman in the reefer suit told Joe, over a gla.s.s of brandy in the sanded-floor parlour of a neat tavern, that he was a rich man, with a hobby on which he spent a great deal of money. "It's a hobby of mine," he said, laughing, "to put down the slave-trade. I don't like it, and so I put it down. Now, a fine young likely fellow, such as you, is just the man I want for my s.h.i.+p.

How would you like to go sailing the lovely seas catching slave-dealers, and giving them what-for with the best steel and gunpowder that money can buy?"

Joe said he could put up with it if the money was all right. And, being a.s.sured that the money was more than all right, he agreed to go down to Plymouth with a party of the gentleman's friends and try his hand for a year or two at laying pirates by the heel.

But when our Joe got out to sea and awoke from a terrible bout of intoxication on the schooner sailed by the gentleman with a hobby, he discovered that, instead of being on the ocean to catch pirates, he was there as a pirate himself. The boy had run away from home to make a fortune catching wicked men; he now found that his bread and b.u.t.ter depended upon his ability in cracking the heads of perfectly honest men.

Some of the new hands wanted to be put back when the situation was explained to them, but Joe was among those who felt respect for the villainous seamen on board (the s.h.i.+p carried 130 men, he says,) who declared that they had as lief be pirates as catch pirates, and it was no odds to them what flag they sailed under or for what purpose.

"On board," splutters Joe, striking another match, "there was a turr'ble fellow--Jack Armstrong--six foot five in socks, strong's a lion, brave's a tiger. He and me use to fight--every day, pretty near. Bang! crack!

g-r-r-r-r-r! I used to beat him--easy! I was turr'bly strong. Make's nose bleed--bung's eyes up--split's lips. Ess! And there was a mulatto aboard. Metsi-metsi-metsi-can, he was."

"He means Mexican," whispers Mr. Wells behind his hand. "That's what Joe means. A Mexican." And then he gets up from his chair and shouts into Joe's ear, "You mean a Mex-i-can, Joe."