Wandering Heath Part 17

In five minutes' time back came Carclew, followed by Mrs. Carclew, who announced--in a rich brogue--that since her man had conspired to put this fool's trick upon her, why now she would stand, begob!

"Arrah now, people, people, and a gay man he'll look houlding the babby, while I'm afther superinthendin' the Parus.h.!.+" So the Chairman declared her duly nominated. It will surprise me if she does not head the poll on the 17th.

The Chairman now invited us to interrogate the candidates, if we wished. By this time we were getting pretty well into the way of Self-Government, and all enjoying it amazingly. Of course our lady candidate, Mrs. Carclew, had the first few questions; but these were mostly jocular and domestic, and I am bound to say the lady gave as good as was brought. The only sensible question came from Old Pilot James, who asked if she believed in the ballot. For his part he had never given a vote for anybody since Forster brought in the ballot in 'seventy-one. He favoured peace and quiet; and he liked to walk up to the hustings and give his vote, and hear 'em say, "Well done!" or "You '--' old scoundrel!" as the case might be. He didn't mind being called "a '--' old scoundrel," provided it was said to him by a gentleman who weighed his words. Since Forster brought in the ballot he had always gone to the poll regular. He always took his paper and wrote opposite the names: "_Shan't say a word. Got my living to get.

Yours obediently, Matthias James_"--and would advise everybody else to do the same.

After him, Renatus Hansombody, carpenter, rose at the back of the hall and announced that he had a question to put to the Doctor.

The Doctor, by the way, is one of the most popular of the candidates.

"I should like," said Mr. Hansombody, "to ask the Doctor if he will kindly explain to the company Clauses 5, 6, and 13 of the new Act?"

The Chairman protested that this would occupy more time than the meeting had to spare.

"In that case," said Mr. Hansombody, "I will confine myself to a test question. The Act provides that the Chairman of a Parish Meeting is to be elected by the Meeting. Now suppose the votes for two gentlemen are equal. In such a case what would the Doctor advise?

For until you have a Chairman elected, there is no Chairman to give a casting vote."

The Doctor thought that, since we had long ago elected a Chairman by acclamation, the question was superfluous.

"And you call him a straightforward man!" Mr. Hansombody exclaimed, turning round on the Meeting. "What I say is, are we to have pusillanimity in our first Parish Council? What I say is, that a gentleman who gives a working man such an answer to such a question--"

At this point the door opened and a shrill voice asked, "Is Hansombody here?"

"I am here," said Hansombody, "to expose impostors!"

"Because if so, he must please come home at once. Mrs. Hansombody's cryin'-out!"

"I always said," remarked Old Pilot James, "that this cussed Act would scare half the women in the Parish before their time."

"Beggin' your pard'n, Doctor," began his denouncer lamely.

"Not at all, not at all," said the Doctor. "We must keep these matters altogether outside the sphere of party politics."

(_Loud cheering_.)

"Then I'll have to ask you to step along with me."

The two political opponents picked up their hats, and left the room together.

The Chairman rose as the door closed behind them. "I think," he said, "this should be a lesson to us to accept the Act in the spirit in which it was given. If n.o.body else wishes to ask a question, I will now take a show of hands: but I warn you all it'll be a dreary business."

At this, the first hint of tedium, the company rose, drained their gla.s.ses, and made for the door, leaving the sixty-six remaining candidates to vote for themselves.

"Well," Mr. Rabling said to me, as we stood in the street; "so far, this here Parish Meeting might be like any other Parish Meeting in the Kingdom!"

I doubted, but did not contradict him.

"There's one thing," he added; "Ironmonger Loveday has laid in a whole stock of sixpenny fire-balloons for to-night: and there isn't a breath of wind. His boy's very clever with the scissors and paste: and he've a-stuck a tissue-paper text on each--'Success to the Charter of our Liberties,' and 'Rule Britannia' and 'G.o.d Speed the Plough'; and nothing more than the sixpence charged."

Simple, egregious, delectable town! As I leaned out last night, watching the young moon and smoking the last pipe before bed-time, a dozen of these gay balloons rose from the waterside and drifted on the faint north wind, seaward, past my window. Another dozen followed, and another, until from one point and another of the dark sh.o.r.e a hundred balloons soared over the water, challenging the stars.

II.--THE SIMPLE SHEPHERD.

Troy Town, 29 January, 1895.

"And then, as he set the bowl of goat's milk on the board, that simple Tyrolean turned to me with a magnificent sweep of the hand, and exclaimed--"

Ah, my dear Prince, if you could only tell me what he exclaimed, you would restore a whole parish to its natural slumbers. For indeed he is playing the deuce with our nights, here in Troy, that guileless Tyrolean.

How trivial are the immediate causes of great events! On New Year's Day our excellent Vicar, having bought himself a Whitaker's Almanack for 1895, presented his last year's copy to the Working Men's Reading Room. In itself you would have thought this action of the Vicar's signified no more than a generous desire to keep his paris.h.i.+oners abreast of the times. In effect it inaugurated the Great Temperance Movement in Troy--a social revolution of which we are only now, after four long weeks, beginning to see the end.

You must not, of course, suppose that we had never heard of temperance before. No, Prince, we do not live so far from Abyssinia as all _that_. In a general way we understood it to be a good thing, and upon that ground (optimists that we are) believed its ultimate success to be but a question of time. But I think I may say we never regarded it as a pressing question--such as the reform of the House of Lords, for instance. The general impression (I call it no more) was that we should all be temperate sooner or later; possibly as the next step after espousing our Deceased Wife's Sister.

Well, our Vicar laid his copy of the 1894 almanack on the reading-room table at 11.30 a.m., or thereabouts, looked over the local papers for a few minutes, and left the building at ten minutes to noon. I get this information from Matthias James, our respected pilot, who happened to be in the room, reading the _s.h.i.+pping Gazette_. It is confirmed by Mr. Hansombody and four or five other members. At noon precisely, Mr. Rabling (our gasman and an earnest Methodist) came in. His eye, as it wandered round in search of an unoccupied newspaper, was arrested by the scarlet and green binding of Whitaker. He picked the book up, opened it casually, and read:

The proof gallons of spirits distilled during the year ending March 31st, 1893, were 10,691,576 in England, 20,107,077 in Scotland, and 13,615,668 in Ireland. . . .

He tells me he was on the point of closing the book as a voluptuous work of fiction, when a second and even more dazzling paragraph took his eye.

The beer charged with duty in the United Kingdom was 32,104,320 barrels, 532,047 barrels of which were exported on drawback, leaving 31,572,283 barrels for home consumption. There were also 38,580 barrels of beer, and 1,653 barrels of spruce imported from abroad.

And again:

The spirits "retained for home consumption" in the year were:-- rum, 4,268,438 gallons; brandy, 2,668,499 gallons; "other sorts," 824,078 gallons. The home consumption of tobacco in the year reached the total of 63,765,053 lbs. Though the tobacco duty was reduced by 4d. a lb. in 1887-8, the annual yield averages 1,336,240 pounds sterling more than it was ten years ago. Smuggling still continues. . . .

Mr. Rabling was declaiming aloud by this time, and when he read out about the smuggling, one or two of his audience gazed up at the ceiling and agreed that the fellow had some of his facts right.

Old Pilot James added that the book could hardly be a work of fiction, since the Vicar had left it on the table, and the Vicar was not one to scatter lies except upon due deliberation.

Mr. Rabling left the room and walked straight up to the Vicarage, and the Vicar a.s.sured him that the Customs Returns were almost as accurate as if they had been prepared under a Conservative Government. You must excuse these details, Prince. They are really essential to the story.

At 12.55 Mr. Rabling (after a hasty dinner) handed across the counter of the post-office a telegram addressed to his religious superintendent at Plymouth. The message ran:

"Here anual consumption of beer over three milion barls.

Greatly distresd, Rabling."

The telegraph clerk kindly corrected all the errors of spelling in the above, save one, which escaped him. By "here" Mr. Rabling had intended "hear" (_scilicet_ "I hear," or "we hear"). The answer arrived from Plymouth within an hour.

"Am sending missionary next train."

Thus our Temperance movement began. The missionary arrived before set of sun, borrowed a chair from Mr. Rabling, carried it down to the town quay and mounted it. A number of children at once gathered round, in the belief that the stranger intended a tumbling performance. The missionary eyed them and began, "Ah, if I can once get hold of you tender little ones--" an infelicitous opening, which scattered them yelling, convinced that the Bogey-man had come for them at last. Upon this he changed his tone and called "O Gomorrah!"

aloud several times in a rich baritone voice, which fetched quite a little crowd of elders around him from the reading-room, the fish-market, the "King of Prussia" Inn, and other purlieus of the quay.

Then the missionary gave us a most eloquent and inspiriting address, in the course of which he mentioned that if all the beer annually consumed in England were placed in bottles, and the bottles piled on one another, it would reach within five hundred miles of the moon.

He asked us if this were not an intolerable state of things and a disgrace to our boasted civilisation? Of course, there could be no two questions about it. We are not unreasonable, down in Troy.

We only want a truth to be brought home to us. The missionary said that if only a man would deny himself his morning gla.s.s, in eight months he could buy himself a harmonium, besides being better in mind and body. And he wound up by inviting us to attend a meeting in the Town Hall that evening.

Well, at the evening performance he made us all feel so uncomfortable that, as soon as it was over, we held an informal gathering in the bar of the "King of Prussia," and decided that temperance must be given a fair trial. The missionary had laid particular stress on the necessity of taking the rising generation and taking them early.