Robert Falconer Part 92

'A perpendicular rock, going right down into the blue waters,' I answered.

'Look at it: what is the outline of it like? Whose face is it?'

'Shakspere's, by all that is grand!' I cried.

'So it is,' said Andrew.

'Right. Now I'll tell you what I would do. If I were very rich, and there were no poor people in the country, I would give a commission to some great sculptor to attack that rock and work out its suggestion.

Then, if I had any money left, we should find one for Bacon, and one for Chaucer, and one for Milton; and, as we are about it, we may fancy as many more as we like; so that from the bounding rocks of our island, the memorial faces of our great brothers should look abroad over the seas into the infinite sky beyond.'

'Well, now,' said the elder, 'I think it is grander as it is.'

'You are quite right, father,' said Robert. 'And so with many of our fancies for perfecting G.o.d's mighty sketches, which he only can finish.'

Again we seated ourselves and looked out over the waves.

'I have never yet heard,' I said, 'how you managed with that poor girl that wanted to drown herself--on Westminster Bridge, I mean--that night, you remember.'

'Miss St. John has got her in her own house at present. She has given her those two children we picked up at the door of the public-house to take care of. Poor little darlings! they are bringing back the life in her heart already. There is actually a little colour in her cheek--the dawn, I trust, of the eternal life. That is Miss St. John's way.

As often as she gets hold of a poor hopeless woman, she gives her a motherless child. It is wonderful what the childless woman and motherless child do for each other.'

'I was much amused the other day with the lecture one of the police magistrates gave a poor creature who was brought before him for attempting to drown herself. He did give her a sovereign out of the poor box, though.'

'Well, that might just tide her over the shoal of self-destruction,'

said Falconer. 'But I cannot help doubting whether any one has a right to prevent a suicide from carrying out his purpose, who is not prepared to do a good deal more for him than that. What would you think of the man who s.n.a.t.c.hed the loaf from a hungry thief, threw it back into the baker's cart, and walked away to his club-dinner? Harsh words of rebuke, and the threat of severe punishment upon a second attempt--what are they to the wretch weary of life? To some of them the kindest punishment would be to hang them for it. It is something else than punishment that they need. If the comfortable alderman had but "a feeling of their afflictions," felt in himself for a moment how miserable he must be, what a waste of despair must be in his heart, before he would do it himself, before the awful river would appear to him a refuge from the upper air, he would change his tone. I fear he regards suicide chiefly as a burglarious entrance into the premises of the respectable firm of Vension, Port, & Co.'

'But you mustn't be too hard upon him, Falconer; for if his G.o.d is his belly, how can he regard suicide as other than the most awful sacrilege?'

'Of course not. His well-fed divinity gives him one great commandment: "Thou shalt love thyself with all thy heart. The great breach is to hurt thyself--worst of all to send thyself away from the land of luncheons and dinners, to the country of thought and vision." But, alas! he does not reflect on the fact that the G.o.d Belial does not feed all his votaries; that he has his elect; that the altar of his inner-temple too often smokes with no sacrifice of which his poor meagre priests may partake. They must uphold the Divinity which has been good to them, and not suffer his wors.h.i.+p to fall into disrepute.'

'Really, Robert,' said his father, 'I am afraid to think what you will come to. You will end in denying there is a G.o.d at all. You don't believe in h.e.l.l, and now you justify suicide. Really--I must say--to say the least of it--I have not been accustomed to hear such things.'

The poor old man looked feebly righteous at his wicked son. I verily believe he was concerned for his eternal fate. Falconer gave a pleased glance at me, and for a moment said nothing. Then he began, with a kind of logical composure:

'In the first place, father, I do not believe in such a G.o.d as some people say they believe in. Their G.o.d is but an idol of the heathen, modified with a few Christian qualities. For h.e.l.l, I don't believe there is any escape from it but by leaving h.e.l.lish things behind. For suicide, I do not believe it is wicked because it hurts yourself, but I do believe it is very wicked. I only want to put it on its own right footing.'

'And pray what do you consider its right footing?'

'My dear father, I recognize no duty as owing to a man's self. There is and can be no such thing. I am and can be under no obligation to myself.

The whole thing is a fiction, and of evil invention. It comes from the upper circles of the h.e.l.l of selfishness. Or, perhaps, it may with some be merely a form of metaphysical mistake; but an untruth it is. Then for the duty we do owe to other people: how can we expect the men or women who have found life to end, as it seems to them, in a dunghill of misery--how can we expect such to understand any obligation to live for the sake of the general others, to no individual of whom, possibly, do they bear an endurable relation? What remains?--The grandest, n.o.blest duty from which all other duty springs: the duty to the possible G.o.d.

Mind, I say possible G.o.d, for I judge it the first of my duties towards my neighbour to regard his duty from his position, not from mine.'

'But,' said I, 'how would you bring that duty to bear on the mind of a suicide?'

'I think some of the tempted could understand it, though I fear not one of those could who judge them hardly, and talk sententiously of the wrong done to a society which has done next to nothing for her, by the poor, starved, refused, husband-tortured wretch perhaps, who hurries at last to the might of the filthy flowing river which, the one thread of hope in the web of despair, crawls through the city of death. What should I say to him? I should say: "G.o.d liveth: thou art not thine own but his. Bear thy hunger, thy horror in his name. I in his name will help thee out of them, as I may. To go before he calleth thee, is to say 'Thou forgettest,' unto him who numbereth the hairs of thy head. Stand out in the cold and the sleet and the hail of this world, O son of man, till thy Father open the door and call thee. Yea, even if thou knowest him not, stand and wait, lest there should be, after all, such a loving and tender one, who, for the sake of a good with which thou wilt be all-content, and without which thou never couldst be content, permits thee there to stand--for a time--long to his sympathizing as well as to thy suffering heart."'

Here Falconer paused, and when he spoke again it was from the ordinary level of conversation. Indeed I fancied that he was a little uncomfortable at the excitement into which his feelings had borne him.

'Not many of them could understand this, I dare say: but I think most of them could feel it without understanding it. Certainly the "belly with good capon lined" will neither understand nor feel it. Suicide is a sin against G.o.d, I repeat, not a crime over which human laws have any hold.

In regard to such, man has a duty alone--that, namely, of making it possible for every man to live. And where the dread of death is not sufficient to deter, what can the threat of punishment do? Or what great thing is gained if it should succeed? What agonies a man must have gone through in whom neither the horror of falling into such a river, nor of the knife in the flesh instinct with life, can extinguish the vague longing to wrap up his weariness in an endless sleep!'

'But,' I remarked, 'you would, I fear, encourage the trade in suicide.

Your kindness would be terribly abused. What would you do with the pretended suicides?'

'Whip them, for trifling with and trading upon the feelings of their kind.'

'Then you would drive them to suicide in earnest.'

'Then they might be worth something, which they were not before.'

'We are a great deal too humane for that now-a-days, I fear. We don't like hurting people.'

'No. We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon-wors.h.i.+p. But surely our tender mercies are cruel. We don't like to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst their fellows.

A weakling pity will pet.i.tion for the life of the worst murderer--but for what? To keep him alive in a confinement as like their notion of h.e.l.l as they dare to make it--namely, a place whence all the sweet visitings of the grace of G.o.d are withdrawn, and the man has not a chance, so to speak, of growing better. In this h.e.l.l of theirs they will even pamper his beastly body.'

'They have the chaplain to visit them.'

'I pity the chaplain, cut off in his labours from all the aids which G.o.d's world alone can give for the teaching of these men. Human beings have not the right to inflict such cruel punishment upon their fellow-man. It springs from a cowardly shrinking from responsibility, and from mistrust of the mercy of G.o.d;--perhaps first of all from an over-valuing of the mere life of the body. Hanging is tenderness itself to such a punishment.'

'I think you are hardly fair, though, Falconer. It is the fear of sending them to h.e.l.l that prevents them from hanging them.'

'Yes. You are right, I dare say. They are not of David's mind, who would rather fall into the hands of G.o.d than of men. They think their h.e.l.l is not so hard as his, and may be better for them. But I must not, as you say, forget that they do believe their everlasting fate hangs upon their hands, for if G.o.d once gets his hold of them by death, they are lost for ever.'

'But the chaplain may awake them to a sense of their sins.'

'I do not think it is likely that talk will do what the discipline of life has not done. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the clergyman has no commission to rouse people to a sense of their sins. That is not his work. He is far more likely to harden them by any attempt in that direction. Every man does feel his sins, though he often does not know it. To turn his attention away from what he does feel by trying to rouse in him feelings which are impossible to him in his present condition, is to do him a great wrong. The clergyman has the message of salvation, not of sin, to give. Whatever oppression is on a man, whatever trouble, whatever conscious something that comes between him and the blessedness of life, is his sin; for whatever is not of faith is sin; and from all this He came to save us. Salvation alone can rouse in us a sense of our sinfulness. One must have got on a good way before he can be sorry for his sins. There is no condition of sorrow laid down as necessary to forgiveness. Repentance does not mean sorrow: it means turning away from the sins. Every man can do that, more or less. And that every man must do. The sorrow will come afterwards, all in good time. Jesus offers to take us out of our own hands into his, if we will only obey him.'

The eyes of the old man were fixed on his son as he spoke. He did seem to be thinking. I could almost fancy that a glimmer of something like hope shone in his eyes.

It was time to go home, and we were nearly silent all the way.

The next morning was so wet that we could not go out, and had to amuse ourselves as we best might in-doors. But Falconer's resources never failed. He gave us this day story after story about the poor people he had known. I could see that his object was often to get some truth into his father's mind without exposing it to rejection by addressing it directly to himself; and few subjects could be more fitted for affording such opportunity than his experiences among the poor.

The afternoon was still rainy and misty. In the evening I sought to lead the conversation towards the gospel-story; and then Falconer talked as I never heard him talk before. No little circ.u.mstance in the narratives appeared to have escaped him. He had thought about everything, as it seemed to me. He had looked under the surface everywhere, and found truth--mines of it--under all the upper soil of the story. The deeper he dug the richer seemed the ore. This was combined with the most pictorial apprehension of every outward event, which he treated as if it had been described to him by the lips of an eye-witness. The whole thing lived in his words and thoughts.

'When anything looks strange, you must look the deeper,' he would say.

At the close of one of our fits of talk, he rose and went to the window.

'Come here,' he said, after looking for a moment.

All day a dropping cloud had filled the s.p.a.ce below, so that the hills on the opposite side of the valley were hidden, and the whole of the sea, near as it was. But when we went to the window we found that a great change had silently taken place. The mist continued to veil the sky, and it clung to the tops of the hills; but, like the rising curtain of a stage, it had rolled half-way up from their bases, revealing a great part of the sea and sh.o.r.e, and half of a cliff on the opposite side of the valley: this, in itself of a deep red, was now smitten by the rays of the setting sun, and glowed over the waters a splendour of carmine. As we gazed, the vaporous curtain sank upon the sh.o.r.e, and the sun sank under the waves, and the sad gray evening closed in the weeping night, and clouds and darkness swathed the weary earth. For doubtless the earth needs its night as well as the creatures that live thereon.

In the morning the rain had ceased, but the clouds remained. But they were high in the heavens now, and, like a departing sorrow, revealed the outline and form which had appeared before as an enveloping vapour of universal and shapeless evil. The mist was now far enough off to be seen and thought about. It was clouds now--no longer mist and rain. And I thought how at length the evils of the world would float away, and we should see what it was that made it so hard for us to believe and be at peace.

In the afternoon the sky had partially cleared, but clouds hid the sun as he sank towards the west. We walked out. A cold autumnal wind blew, not only from the twilight of the dying day, but from the twilight of the dying season. A sorrowful hopeless wind it seemed, full of the odours of dead leaves--those memories of green woods, and of damp earth--the bare graves of the flowers. Would the summer ever come again?

We were pacing in silence along a terraced walk which overhung the sh.o.r.e far below. More here than from the hilltop we seemed to look immediately into s.p.a.ce, not even a parapet intervening betwixt us and the ocean.