Джон Голсуорси
The Island Pharisees
CHAPTER XV
POLE TO POLE
The waiting in London for July to come was daily more unbearable to Shelton, and if it had not been for Ferrand, who still came to breakfast, he would have deserted the Metropolis. On June first the latter presented himself rather later than was his custom, and announced that, through a friend, he had heard of a position as interpreter to an hotel at Folkestone.
“If I had money to face the first necessities,” he said, swiftly turning over a collection of smeared papers with his yellow fingers, as if searching for his own identity, “I ‘d leave today. This London blackens my spirit.”
“Are you certain to get this place,” asked Shelton.
“I think so,” the young foreigner replied; “I ‘ve got some good enough recommendations.”
Shelton could not help a dubious glance at the papers in his hand. A hurt look passed on to Ferrand’s curly lips beneath his nascent red moustache.
“You mean that to have false papers is as bad as theft. No, no; I shall never be a thief – I ‘ve had too many opportunities,” said he, with pride and bitterness. “That’s not in my character. I never do harm to anyone. This” – he touched the papers – “is not delicate, but it does harm to no one. If you have no money you must have papers; they stand between you and starvation. Society, has an excellent eye for the helpless – it never treads on people unless they ‘re really down.” He looked at Shelton.
“You ‘ve made me what I am, amongst you,” he seemed to say; “now put up with me!”
“But there are always the workhouses,” Shelton remarked at last.
“Workhouses!” returned Ferrand; “certainly there are – regular palaces: I will tell you one thing: I’ve never been in places so discouraging as your workhouses; they take one’s very heart out.”
“I always understood,” said Shelton coldly; “that our system was better than that of other countries.”
Ferrand leaned over in his chair, an elbow on his knee, his favourite attitude when particularly certain of his point.
“Well,” he replied, “it ‘s always permissible to think well of your own country. But, frankly, I’ve come out of those places here with little strength and no heart at all, and I can tell you why.” His lips lost their bitterness, and he became an artist expressing the result of his experience. “You spend your money freely, you have fine buildings, self-respecting officers, but you lack the spirit of hospitality. The reason is plain; you have a horror of the needy. You invite us – and when we come you treat us justly enough, but as if we were numbers, criminals, beneath contempt – as if we had inflicted a personal injury on you; and when we get out again, we are naturally degraded.”
Shelton bit his lips.
“How much money will you want for your ticket, and to make a start?” he asked.
The nervous gesture escaping Ferrand at this juncture betrayed how far the most independent thinkers are dependent when they have no money in their pockets. He took the note that Shelton proffered him.
“A thousand thanks,” said he; “I shall never forget what you have done for me”; and Shelton could not help feeling that there was true emotion behind his titter of farewell.
He stood at the window watching Ferrand start into the world again; then looked back at his own comfortable room, with the number of things that had accumulated somehow – the photographs of countless friends, the old arm-chairs, the stock of coloured pipes. Into him restlessness had passed with the farewell clasp of the foreigner’s damp hand. To wait about in London was unbearable.
He took his hat, and, heedless of direction, walked towards the river. It was a clear, bright day, with a bleak wind driving showers before it. During one of such Shelton found himself in Little Blank Street. “I wonder how that little Frenchman that I saw is getting on!” he thought. On a fine day he would probably have passed by on the other side; he now entered and tapped upon the wicket.
No. 3 Little Blank Street had abated nothing of its stone-flagged dreariness; the same blowsy woman answered his inquiry. Yes, Carolan was always in; you could never catch him out – seemed afraid to go into the street! To her call the little Frenchman made his appearance as punctually as if he had been the rabbit of a conjurer. His face was as yellow as a guinea.
“Ah! it’s you, monsieur!” he said.
“Yes,” said Shelton; “and how are you?”
“It ‘s five days since I came out of hospital,” muttered the little Frenchman, tapping on his chest; “a crisis of this bad atmosphere. I live here, shut up in a box; it does me harm, being from the South. If there’s anything I can do for you, monsieur, it will give me pleasure.”
“Nothing,” replied Shelton, “I was just passing, and thought I should like to hear how you were getting on.”
“Come into the kitchen, – monsieur, there is nobody in there. ‘Brr! Il fait un froid etonnant’.”
“What sort of customers have you just now?” asked Shelton, as they passed into the kitchen.
“Always the same clientele,” replied the little man; “not so numerous, of course, it being summer.”
“Could n’t you find anything better than this to do?”
The barber’s crow’s-feet radiated irony.
“When I first came to London,” said he, “I secured an engagement at one of your public institutions. I thought my fortune made. Imagine, monsieur, in that sacred place I was obliged to shave at the rate of ten a penny! Here, it’s true, they don’t pay me half the time; but when I’m paid, I ‘m paid. In this, climate, and being ‘poitrinaire’, one doesn’t make experiments. I shall finish my days here. Have you seen that young man who interested you? There ‘s another! He has spirit, as I had once – ’il fait de la philosophie’, as I do – and you will see, monsieur, it will finish him. In this world what you want is to have no spirit. Spirit ruins you.”
Shelton looked sideways at the little man with his sardonic, yellow, half-dead face, and the incongruity of the word “spirit” in his mouth struck him so sharply that he smiled a smile with more pity in it than any burst of tears.
“Shall we ‘sit down?” he said, offering a cigarette.
“Merci, monsieur, it is always a pleasure to smoke a good cigarette. You remember, that old actor who gave you a Jeremiad? Well, he’s dead. I was the only one at his bedside; ‘un vrai drole’. He was another who had spirit. And you will see, monsieur, that young man in whom you take an interest, he’ll die in a hospital, or in some hole or other, or even on the highroad; having closed his eyes once too often some cold night; and all because he has something in him which will not accept things as they are, believing always that they should be better. ‘Il n’y a riens de plus tragique’.”
“According to you, then,” said Shelton – and the conversation seemed to him of a sudden to have taken too personal a turn – “rebellion of any sort is fatal.”
“Ah!” replied the little man, with the eagerness of one whose ideal it is to sit under the awning of a cafe, and talk life upside down, “you pose me a great problem there! If one makes rebellion; it is always probable that one will do no good to any one and harm one’s self. The law of the majority arranges that. But I would draw your attention to this” – and he paused; as if it were a real discovery to blow smoke through his nose – “if you rebel it is in all likelihood because you are forced by your nature to rebel; this is one of the most certain things in life. In any case, it is necessary to avoid falling between two stools – which is unpardonable,” he ended with complacence.
Shelton thought he had never seen a man who looked more completely as if he had fallen between two stools, and he had inspiration enough to feel that the little barber’s intellectual rebellion and the action logically required by it had no more than a bowing acquaintanceship.
“By nature,” went on the little man, “I am an optimist; it is in consequence of this that I now make pessimism. I have always had ideals; seeing myself cut off from them for ever, I must complain; to complain, monsieur, is very sweet!”
Shelton wondered what these ideals had been, but had no answer ready; so he nodded, and again held out his cigarettes, for, like a true Southerner, the little man had thrown the first away, half smoked.
“The greatest pleasure in life,” continued the Frenchman, with a bow, “is to talk a little to a being who is capable of understanding you. At present we have no one here, now that that old actor’s dead. Ah! there was a man who was rebellion incarnate! He made rebellion as other men make money, ‘c’etait son metier’. when he was no longer capable of active revolution, he made it getting drunk. At the last this was his only way of protesting against Society. An interesting personality, ‘je le regrette beaucoup’. But, as you see, he died in great distress, without a soul to wave him farewell, because as you can well understand, monsieur, I don’t count myself. He died drunk. ‘C’etait un homme’.”
Shelton had continued staring kindly at the little man; the barber added hastily:
“It’s difficult to make an end like that one has moments of weakness.”
“Yes,” assented Shelton, “one has indeed.”
The little barber looked at him with cynical discretion.
“Oh!” he said, “it ‘s to the destitute that such things are important. When one has money, all these matters – ”
He shrugged his shoulders. A smile had lodged amongst his crow’s-feet; he waved his hand as though to end the subject.
A sense of having been exposed came over Shelton.
“You think, then,” said he, “that discontent is peculiar to the destitute?”
“Monsieur,” replied the little barber, “a plutocrat knows too well that if he mixes in that ‘galere’ there ‘s not a dog in the streets more lost than he.”
Shelton rose.
“The rain is over. I hope you ‘ll soon be better; perhaps you ‘ll accept this in memory of that old actor,” and he slipped a sovereign into the little Frenchman’s hand.
The latter bowed.
“Whenever you are passing, monsieur,” he said eagerly, “I shall be charmed to see you.”
And Shelton walked away. “‘Not a dog in the streets more lost,’.rdquo; thought he; “now what did he mean by that?”
Something of that “lost dog” feeling had gripped his spirit. Another month of waiting would kill all the savour of anticipation, might even kill his love. In the excitement of his senses and his nerves, caused by this strain of waiting, everything seemed too vivid; all was beyond life size; like Art – whose truths; too strong for daily use, are thus, unpopular with healthy people. As will the bones in a worn face, the spirit underlying things had reached the surface; the meanness and intolerable measure of hard facts, were too apparent. Some craving for help, some instinct, drove him into Kensington, for he found himself before his, mother’s house. Providence seemed bent on flinging him from pole to pole.
Mrs. Shelton was in town; and, though it was the first of June, sat warming her feet before a fire; her face, with its pleasant colour, was crow’s-footed like the little barber’s, but from optimism, not rebellion. She, smiled when she saw her son; and the wrinkles round her eyes twinkled, with vitality.
“Well, my dear boy,” she said, “it’s lovely to see you. And how is that sweet girl?”
“Very well, thank you,” replied Shelton.
“She must be such a dear!”
“Mother,” stammered Shelton, “I must give it up.”
“Give it up? My dear Dick, give what up? You look quite worried. Come and sit down, and have a cosy chat. Cheer up!” And Mrs. Shelton; with her head askew, gazed at her son quite irrepressibly.
“Mother,” said Shelton, who, confronted by her optimism, had never, since his time of trial began, felt so wretchedly dejected, “I can’t go on waiting about like this.”
“My dear boy, what is the matter?”;
“Everything is wrong!”
“Wrong?” cried Mrs. Shelton. “Come, tell me all, about it!”
But Shelton, shook his head.
“You surely have not had a quarrel – ”
Mrs. Shelton stopped; the question seemed so vulgar – one might have asked it of a groom.
“No,” said Shelton, and his answer sounded like a groan.
“You know, my dear old Dick,” murmured his mother, “it seems a little mad.”
“I know it seems mad.”
“Come!” said Mrs. Shelton, taking his hand between her own; “you never used to be like this.”
“No,” said Shelton, with a laugh; “I never used to be like this.”
Mrs. Shelton snuggled in her Chuda shawl.
“Oh,” she said, with cheery sympathy, “I know exactly how you feel!”
Shelton, holding his head, stared at the fire, which played and bubbled like his mother’s face.
“But you’re so fond of each other,” she began again. “Such a sweet girl!”
“You don’t understand,” muttered Shelton gloomily; “it ‘s not her – it’s nothing – it’s – myself!”
Mrs. Shelton again seized his hand, and this time pressed it to her soft, warm cheek, that had lost the elasticity of youth.
“Oh!” she cried again; “I understand. I know exactly what you ‘re feeling.” But Shelton saw from the fixed beam in her eyes that she had not an inkling. To do him justice, he was not so foolish as to try to give her one. Mrs. Shelton sighed. “It would be so lovely if you could wake up to-morrow and think differently. If I were you, my dear, I would have a good long walk, and then a Turkish bath; and then I would just write to her, and tell her all about it, and you’ll see how beautifully it’ll all come straight”; and in the enthusiasm of advice Mrs. Shelton rose, and, with a faint stretch of her tiny figure, still so young, clasped her hands together. “Now do, that ‘s a dear old Dick! You ‘ll just see how lovely it’ll be!” Shelton smiled; he had not the heart to chase away this vision. “And give her my warmest love, and tell her I ‘m longing for the wedding. Come, now, my dear boy, promise me that’s what you ‘ll do.”
And Shelton said: “I’ll think about it.”
Mrs. Shelton had taken up her stand with one foot on the fender, in spite of her sciatica.
“Cheer up!” she cried; her eyes beamed as if intoxicated by her sympathy.
Wonderful woman! The uncomplicated optimism that carried her through good and ill had not descended to her son.
From pole to pole he had been thrown that day, from the French barber, whose intellect accepted nothing without carping, and whose little fingers worked all day, to save himself from dying out, to his own mother, whose intellect accepted anything presented with sufficient glow, but who, until she died, would never stir a finger. When Shelton reached his rooms, he wrote to Antonia:
I can’t wait about in London any longer; I am going down to Bideford to start a walking tour. I shall work my way to Oxford, and stay there till I may come to Holm Oaks. I shall send you my address; do write as usual.
He collected all the photographs he had of her – amateur groups, taken by Mrs. Dennant – and packed them in the pocket of his shooting-jacket. There was one where she was standing just below her little brother, who was perched upon a wall. In her half-closed eyes, round throat, and softly tilted chin, there was something cool and watchful, protecting the ragamuffin up above her head. This he kept apart to be looked at daily, as a man says his prayers.
PART II
THE COUNTRY
CHAPTER XVI
THE INDIAN CIVILIAN
One morning then, a week later, Shelton found himself at the walls of Princetown Prison.
He had seen this lugubrious stone cage before. But the magic of his morning walk across the moor, the sight of the pagan tors, the songs of the last cuckoo, had unprepared him for that dreary building. He left the street, and, entering the fosse, began a circuit, scanning the walls with morbid fascination.
This, then, was the system by which men enforced the will of the majority, and it was suddenly borne in on him that all the ideas and maxims which his Christian countrymen believed themselves to be fulfilling daily were stultified in every cellule of the social honeycomb. Such teachings as “He that is without sin amongst you” had been pronounced unpractical by peers and judges, bishops, statesmen, merchants, husbands – in fact, by every truly Christian person in the country.
“Yes,” thought Shelton, as if he had found out something new, “the more Christian the nation, the less it has to do with the Christian spirit.”
Society was a charitable organisation, giving nothing for nothing, little for sixpence; and it was only fear that forced it to give at all!
He took a seat on a wall, and began to watch a warder who was slowly paring a last year’s apple. The expression of his face, the way he stood with his solid legs apart, his head poked forward and his lower jaw thrust out, all made him a perfect pillar of Society. He was undisturbed by Shelton’s scrutiny, watching the rind coil down below the apple; until in a springing spiral it fell on the path and collapsed like a toy snake. He took a bite; his teeth were jagged; and his mouth immense. It was obvious that he considered himself a most superior man. Shelton frowned, got down slowly, from the wall, and proceeded on his way.
A little further down the hill he stopped again to watch a group of convicts in a field. They seemed to be dancing in a slow and sad cotillon, while behind the hedge on every side were warders armed with guns. Just such a sight, substituting spears could have been seen in Roman times.
While he thus stood looking, a man, walking, rapidly, stopped beside him, and asked how many miles it was to Exeter. His round visage; and long, brown eyes, sliding about beneath their brows, his cropped hair and short neck, seemed familiar.
“Your name is Crocker, is n’t it?”
“Why! it’s the Bird!” exclaimed the traveller; putting out his hand. “Have n’t seen you since we both went down.”
Shelton returned his handgrip. Crocker had lived above his head at college, and often kept him, sleepless half the night by playing on the hautboy.
“Where have you sprung from?”
“India. Got my long leave. I say, are you going this way? Let’s go together.”
They went, and very fast; faster and faster every minute.
“Where are you going at this pace?” asked Shelton.
“London.”
“Oh! only as far as London?”
“I ‘ve set myself to do it in a week.”
“Are you in training?”
“No.”
“You ‘ll kill yourself.”
Crocker answered with a chuckle.
Shelton noted with alarm the expression of his eye; there was a sort of stubborn aspiration in it. “Still an idealist!” he thought; “poor fellow!” “Well,” he inquired, “what sort of a time have you had in India?”
“Oh,” said the Indian civilian absently, “I’ve, had the plague.”
“Good God!”
Crocker smiled, and added:
“Caught it on famine duty.”
“I see,” said Shelton; “plague and famine! I suppose you fellows really think you ‘re doing good out there?”
His companion looked at him surprised, then answered modestly:
“We get very good screws.”
“That ‘s the great thing,” responded Shelton.
After a moment’s silence, Crocker, looking straight before him, asked:
“Don’t you think we are doing good?”
“I ‘m not an authority; but, as a matter of fact, I don’t.”
Crocker seemed disconcerted.
“Why?” he bluntly asked.
Shelton was not anxious to explain his views, and he did not reply.
His friend repeated:
“Why don’t you think we’re doing good in India?”
“Well,” said Shelton gruffly, “how can progress be imposed on nations from outside?”
The Indian civilian, glancing at Shelton in an affectionate and doubtful way, replied:
“You have n’t changed a bit, old chap.”
“No, no,” said Shelton; “you ‘re not going to get out of it that way. Give me a single example of a nation, or an individual, for that matter, who ‘s ever done any good without having worked up to it from within.”
Crocker, grunting, muttered, “Evils.”
“That ‘s it,” said Shelton; “we take peoples entirely different from our own, and stop their natural development by substituting a civilisation grown for our own use. Suppose, looking at a tropical fern in a hothouse, you were to say: ‘This heat ‘s unhealthy for me; therefore it must be bad for the fern, I ‘ll take it up and plant it outside in the fresh air.’.rdquo;
“Do you know that means giving up India?” said the Indian civilian shrewdly.
“I don’t say that; but to talk about doing good to India is – h’m!”
Crocker knitted his brows, trying to see the point of view his friend was showing him.
“Come, now! Should we go on administering India if it were dead loss? No. Well, to talk about administering the country for the purpose of pocketing money is cynical, and there ‘s generally some truth in cynicism; but to talk about the administration of a country by which we profit, as if it were a great and good thing, is cant. I hit you in the wind for the benefit of myself – all right: law of nature; but to say it does you good at the same time is beyond me.”
“No, no,” returned Crocker, grave and anxious; “you can’t persuade me that we ‘re not doing good.”
“Wait a bit. It’s all a question of horizons; you look at it from too close. Put the horizon further back. You hit India in the wind, and say it’s virtuous. Well, now let’s see what happens. Either the wind never comes back, and India gasps to an untimely death, or the wind does come back, and in the pant of reaction your blow – that’s to say your labour – is lost, morally lost labour that you might have spent where it would n’t have been lost.”
“Are n’t you an Imperialist?” asked Crocker, genuinely concerned.
“I may be, but I keep my mouth shut about the benefits we ‘re conferring upon other people.”
“Then you can’t believe in abstract right, or justice?”
“What on earth have our ideas of justice or right got to do with India?”
“If I thought as you do,” sighed the unhappy Crocker, “I should be all adrift.”
“Quite so. We always think our standards best for the whole world. It’s a capital belief for us. Read the speeches of our public men. Does n’t it strike you as amazing how sure they are of being in the right? It’s so charming to benefit yourself and others at the same time, though, when you come to think of it, one man’s meat is usually another’s poison. Look at nature. But in England we never look at nature – there’s no necessity. Our national point of view has filled our pockets, that’s all that matters.”
“I say, old chap, that’s awfully bitter,” said Crocker, with a sort of wondering sadness.
“It ‘s enough to make any one bitter the way we Pharisees wax fat, and at the same time give ourselves the moral airs of a balloon. I must stick a pin in sometimes, just to hear the gas escape.” Shelton was surprised at his own heat, and for some strange reason thought of Antonia – surely, she was not a Pharisee.
His companion strode along, and Shelton felt sorry for the signs of trouble on his face.
“To fill your pockets,” said Crocker, “is n’t the main thing. One has just got to do things without thinking of why we do them.”
“Do you ever see the other side to any question?” asked Shelton. “I suppose not. You always begin to act before you stop thinking, don’t you?”
Crocker grinned.
“He’s a Pharisee, too,” thought Shelton, “without a Pharisee’s pride. Queer thing that!”
After walking some distance, as if thinking deeply, Crocker chuckled out:
“You ‘re not consistent; you ought to be in favour of giving up India.”
Shelton smiled uneasily.
“Why should n’t we fill our pockets? I only object to the humbug that we talk.”
The Indian civilian put his hand shyly through his arm.
“If I thought like you,” he said, “I could n’t stay another day in India.”
And to this Shelton made no reply.
The wind had now begun to drop, and something of the morning’s magic was stealing again upon the moor. They were nearing the outskirt fields of cultivation. It was past five when, dropping from the level of the tors, they came into the sunny vale of Monkland.
“They say,” said Crocker, reading from his guide-book – “they say this place occupies a position of unique isolation.”
The two travellers, in tranquil solitude, took their seats under an old lime-tree on the village green. The smoke of their pipes, the sleepy air, the warmth from the baked ground, the constant hum, made Shelton drowsy.
“Do you remember,” his companion asked, “those ‘jaws’ you used to have with Busgate and old Halidome in my rooms on Sunday evenings? How is old Halidome?”
“Married,” replied Shelton.
Crocker sighed. “And are you?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said Shelton grimly; “I ‘m – engaged.”
Crocker took hold of his arm above the elbow, and, squeezing it, he grunted. Shelton had not received congratulations that pleased him more; there was the spice of envy in them.
“I should like to get married while I ‘m home,” said the civilian after a long pause. His legs were stretched apart, throwing shadows on the green, his hands deep thrust into his pockets, his head a little to one side. An absent-minded smile played round his mouth.
The sun had sunk behind a tor, but the warmth kept rising from the ground, and the sweet-briar on a cottage bathed them with its spicy perfume. From the converging lanes figures passed now and then, lounged by, staring at the strangers, gossiping amongst themselves, and vanished into the cottages that headed the incline. A clock struck seven, and round the shady lime-tree a chafer or some heavy insect commenced its booming rushes. All was marvellously sane and slumbrous. The soft air, the drawling voices, the shapes and murmurs, the rising smell of wood-smoke from fresh-kindled fires – were full of the spirit of security and of home. The outside world was far indeed. Typical of some island nation was this nest of refuge – where men grew quietly tall, fattened, and without fuss dropped off their perches; where contentment flourished, as sunflowers flourished in the sun.
Crocker’s cap slipped off; he was nodding, and Shelton looked at him. From a manor house in some such village he had issued; to one of a thousand such homes he would find his way at last, untouched by the struggles with famines or with plagues, uninfected in his fibre, his prejudices, and his principles, unchanged by contact with strange peoples, new conditions, odd feelings, or queer points of view!
The chafer buzzed against his shoulder, gathered flight again, and boomed away. Crocker roused himself, and, turning his amiable face, jogged Shelton’s arm.
“What are you thinking about, Bird?” he asked.