II
I had rather a shock to-day. I was sitting down to write an article on a subject that had still to be found, and had almost reached the point of decision, when a letter which had been addressed to the Editor of _The Star_, and which he had sent on to me, started another and more attractive hare. It was a letter announcing my lamented demise. There was no doubt about it. There was the date and there was the name (a nice name, too), and there were the circ.u.mstances all set out in black and white. And the writer wanted to know, in view of all this, why no obituary notice of me had appeared in the columns of the paper I had adorned.
Now this report, however it arose, is, to use Mark Twain"s famous remark in similar circ.u.mstances, "greatly exaggerated." I am not dead.
I am not half dead. I am not even feeling poorly. I had a tooth out a week or two ago, but otherwise nothing dreadful has happened to me for ever so long. I was once nearly in a shipwreck, but that was so long ago that I had almost forgotten the circ.u.mstance. Moreover, as all the people in the ship were saved I could not possibly have died then even if I had been on board. And I wasn"t on board, for I had left at the previous port of call. It was a narrow escape, but I can"t pretend that I wasn"t saved. I was. But though I am most flagrantly and aggressively alive, the announcement of my death has set me thinking of myself as if I were dead. I find it quite an agreeable diversion. Not that I am morbid. I do not share my friend Clerihew"s view, expressed in his chapter on Lord Clive in that n.o.ble work "Biography for Beginners." You may remember the chapter. If not, it is short enough to repeat:
What I like about Clive Is that he is no longer alive.
There"s something to be said For being dead.
That is overdoing the thing. What I find agreeable is being alive and thinking I am dead. You have the advantage of both worlds, so to speak. In company with this amiable correspondent, I have shed tears over myself. I have wept at my own grave-side. I have composed my own obituary notice, and I don"t think I have ever turned out a more moving piece of work. I have met my friends and condoled with them over my decease, and have heard their comments, and I am proud to say that they were quite nice. Some of them made me think that I might write up the obituary notice in a rather higher key, put the virtues of the late lamented "Alpha of the Plough" in more gaudy colours, tone down the few, the very few, weak points of his austere, saintly, chivalrous, kindly, wise, humorous, generous character--in a word, let myself go a bit more. Old Grumpington at the club, it is true, said that I should be no great loss to the world, and that so far as he was concerned I was one of the people that he could do without. But then Old Grumpington never says a good word for anybody, living or dead. I discounted Grumpington. I took no notice of Grumpington--the beast.
And then I pa.s.sed from the living world I had left behind to the contemplation of the said Alpha, fallen on sleep, and I found his case no subject for tears. After all, said I, the world is not such a gay place in these days, that I need worry about having quitted it. I have left some dear friends behind, but they will pa.s.s the toll-gate, too, in due course, and join me and those who have preceded me. "What dreams may come!" Well, so be it. I have no fear of the dreams of death, having pa.s.sed through the dream of life, which was so often like a nightmare. If there are dreams for me, I think they will be better dreams. If there are tasks for me, I think they will be better tasks.
If there are no dreams and no tasks, then that also is well. "I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep," said Byron in one of his letters, "and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome." And so, dreamless or dreaming, I saw nothing in the circ.u.mstances of the departed Alpha to lament....
Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you. If you p.r.i.c.k me I shall still bleed. If you tickle me I shall still laugh. And with due encouragement I shall still write.
III
I was going home late last night from one of the Tube stations when my companion pointed to a group--a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper, two women and a child--sitting on a seat on the platform. "There they are," he said. "Every night and any hour, moonlight or moonless, you"ll find them sitting there." "What for?" I asked. "Oh, in case there"s a raid. They are taking things in time; they are running no risks. You"ll see a few at most stations." And as the train pa.s.sed from station to station I noticed similar little groups on the platforms, sleeping or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular, and waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no longer.
There is no discredit in taking reasonable precautions against danger, but these good people carry apprehension to excess. We need not underrate the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves ridiculous about them. So far as the average individual life is concerned they are almost negligible. a.s.suming that the circ.u.mference of danger of an exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans drop two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, I understand, calculated that it will be thirty-four years before we have all come in the zone of danger. But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs a month, nor twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs. Let us a.s.sume, however, that they get up to an average of twenty bombs. It will be over three hundred years before we have all come within the range of peril. I do not suggest that this reflection justifies us in going out into the streets when a raid is on. It is true I may not get my turn for three hundred years, but still there is no sense in running out to see if my turn has come. So I dive below ground as promptly as anybody. It is foolish to take risks that you need not take. But it is not less foolish to go and sit for hours every night on a Tube station platform, not because there is a raid, but because there may be a raid.
This is carrying the fear of death to extremities. I have referred to Caesar"s sane axiom on the subject, and to his refusal to take what seemed to others reasonable precautions against danger. In the end he was murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no one whose life is one nervous apprehension of danger can possibly live. You may, of course, carry this philosophy of fearless living to excess. Smalley, in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward (then Prince of Wales) was staying at Homburg he said one day to Lord Hartington (the late Duke of Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink all that champagne." "No, sir, I know I ought not," said Hartington. "Then why do you do it?" "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would rather be ill now and then than always taking care of myself." "Oh, you think that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?" "Sir, if you will ask me then I will tell you. I do not antic.i.p.ate."
I do not commend Hartington"s example for imitation any more than the example of those forlorn little groups on the Tube platforms. He was not refusing, like Caesar, to be bullied by vague fears; he was, for the sake of a present pleasure, laying up a store of tolerably certain misery. It was not a case of fearless living, but of careless living, which is quite another thing. But at least he got a present pleasure for his recklessness, while the people who h.o.a.rd up life like misers, and see the shadow of death stalking them all the time, do not live at all. They only exist. They are like Chesterfield in his later years.
"I am become a vegetable," he said. "I have been dead twelve years, but I don"t want any one to know about it." Those people in the Tube are quite dead, although they don"t know about it. What is more, they have never been alive.
You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly. You know that the Great Harvester is tracking you all the time, and that one day, perhaps quite suddenly, his scythe will catch you and lay you among the sheaves of the past. Every day and every hour he is remorselessly at your heels. A breath of bad air will do his work, or the p.r.i.c.k of a pin, or a fall on the stairs, or a draught from the window. You can"t take a ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in the sea, or a bat at the wicket without offering yourself as a target for the enemy. I have myself seen a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven by his companion at the wicket. Why, those people so forlornly dodging death in the Tube were not out of the danger zone. They were probably in more peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their vitality, and incubating death than they would have been going about their reasonable tasks in the fresh air above. You may die from the fear of death. I am not preaching Nietzche"s gospel of "Live dangerously."
There is no need to try to live dangerously, and no sense in going about tweaking the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow you are. The truth is that we cannot help living dangerously. Life is a dangerous calling, full of pitfalls. You, getting the coal in the mine by the light of your lamp, are living with death very, very close at hand. You, on the railway shunting trucks, you in the factory or the engine-shop moving in a maze of machinery, you, in the belly of the ship stoking the fire--all alike are in an adventure that may terminate at any moment. Let us accept the fact like men, and dismiss it like men, going about our tasks as though we had all eternity to live in, not foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other hand, declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the scythe that dogs our steps.
IV
It is, I suppose, a common experience that our self-valuations are not fixed but fluctuating. Sometimes the estimate is extravagantly high; sometimes, but less frequently, it is too low. There are people, no doubt, whose vanity is so vast that no drafts upon it make any appreciable difference to the fund. It is as inexhaustible as the horn of Skrymir. And there are others whose humility is so established that no emotion of vain-glory ever visits them. But the generality of us go up and down according to the weather, our health, our fortune and a hundred trifles good or bad. We are like corks on the wave, sometimes borne buoyantly on the crest of the heaving sea of circ.u.mstance, then sinking into the trough of the billows. At this moment I am in the trough. I have been pa.s.sing through one of those chastening experiences which reveal to us how unimportant we are to the world.
When we are in health we bustle about and talk and trade and write and push and thrust and haggle and bargain and feel that we are tremendous fellows. However would the world get on without us? we say. What would become of the office? Who could put those schemes through that I have in hand? What on earth would that dear fellow Robinson do without my judgment to lean on? What would become of Jones if he no longer met me after lunch at the club for a quiet and confidential talk? How would _The Star_ survive without...
And so we inflate ourselves with a comfortable conceit, and feel that we are really the hub of things, and that if anything goes wrong with us there will be a mournful vacuum in society. Then some day the bubble of our vanity is p.r.i.c.ked. We are gently laid aside, deflated and humble, the world forgetting, by the world forgot. Our empire has shrunk to the dimensions of a sick-room, and there fever plays its wild dramas, turning the innocent patterns of the wall-paper into fantastic shapes, and fearsome conflicts, filling our unquiet slumbers with dreadful phantoms that, waking, we try to seize, only to fall back defeated and helpless. And then follow the days--those peaceful days--of sheer collapse, when you just lie back on the pillow and look hour by hour at the ceiling, desiring nothing and thinking of nothing, and when the doctor, feeling your stagnant pulse, says, "Yes, you have had a bad shaking."
These are the days of illumination. Outside the buses rumble by, and you know they are crowded with people going down to or returning from the great whirlpool. And you realise that the mighty world is thundering on in the old way as though it had never heard of you.
Fleet Street roars by night and day in happy unconcern of you; your absence from "the Gallery" in the afternoon is unnoted by a soul; Robinson gives one thought to you, and then turns to his work as though nothing had happened; Jones misses you after lunch, but is just as happy with Brown; and _The Star_--well, _The Star_ ... yes, the painful fact has to be faced.... _The Star_ goes on its radiant path as though you had only been a fly on its wheel.
It is a humbling experience. This, then, was all your high-blown pride amounted to. You were just a bubble on the surface, a snowflake on the river--a moment there, then gone for ever. This is the foretaste of death. When that comes the waters will just close over your head as they have closed now--a comment here and there, perhaps friendly, perhaps critical, a few tears it may be, and--oblivion. It is an old story--old as humanity. You remember those verses of Dean Swift on the news of his own death, with what airy jests and indifference it was received in this and that haunt where he had played so great a part.
It comes to a card party who affect to receive it in "doleful dumps."
"The Dean is dead (pray what is trumps?)"
Then "Lord have mercy on his soul!
(Ladies, I"ll venture for the vole.) Six deans, they say, must bear the pall, (I wish I knew what king to call).
Madam, your husband will attend The funeral of so good a friend?"
"No, madam, "tis a shocking sight; And he"s engaged to-morrow night; My Lady Club will take it ill If he should fail her at quadrille.
He loved the Dean (I lead a heart); But dearest friends, they say, must part.
That is the way of it. Your friend is dead: you heave a sigh and lead a heart.
Listen to that thrush outside. How he is going it! He, too, on this bright March morning sings of the world"s indifference--the indifference of the joyous, living world to those who have crept to their holes. I hear in his voice the news of the coming of spring, and know that down at "the cottage" the crocuses are out in the garden and the dark beech woods are turning to brown, and the lark is springing up into the blue like a flame of song. How I have loved this pageantry of nature, these days of revelation and promise. I used to think that I was a part of them, but now I know that the pageant goes forward in sublime unconsciousness that I am no longer in the audience.
And so I lie and look at the ceiling and feel humble and disillusioned.
I have discovered that the world goes on very well without me, and I am not sure that it is not worth spending a week or two in bed to learn that salutary lesson. When I return to the world I fancy I shall have lost some of my ancient swagger. I shall feel like a modest intruder upon a society that has shown it has no need for me. I may recover my feeling of importance in time, but in my secret heart I shall know that I am not the hub but only a fly on the mighty wheel of things. I can skip off and no one is any the wiser.
ON CLOTHES
There is one respect in which the war has brought us a certain measure of relief. It is no longer necessary to lie awake o" nights thinking about your clothes. There are some people, of course, who like thinking about their clothes. They seem to regard themselves as perambulating shop window models on which to hang things, and if you take away that subject from their conversation they are bankrupt. When I was coming down on the bus the other afternoon I could not help overhearing s.n.a.t.c.hes of a conversation which was going on between two women in the seat behind me. It was conducted with great volubility and seriousness, and it came to me in sc.r.a.ps like this: "No, I don"t like that shade.... I saw a beautiful hat at So-and-So"s at Kensington; only 25s.; it was ... Yes, she has nice taste and always looks ... No, brocaded..." And so on without a pause for the s.p.a.ce of half an hour.
I don"t offer that conversation as representative. I imagine that in the lump women are thinking less about dress to-day from the merely ornamental point of view than they ever did. If you spend twelve hours a day on a bus or a tram in a blue uniform and leggings, or driving a Carter Paterson van in a mackintosh and a sou"wester, or filling sh.e.l.ls in a yellow overall, dress cannot occupy quite its old dominion over your thoughts. You will think more about comfort and less about finery. And that, according to Herbert Spencer, is an evidence of a higher intelligence. The more barbaric you are the more you regard dress from the point of view of ornament and the less from the point of view of utility. It is a hard saying for the West End of life.
Spencer, to ill.u.s.trate his point, mentions that the African attendants of Captain Speke strutted about in their goatskin mantles when the weather was fine, but when it was wet took them off, folded them up, and went about naked and shivering in the rain.
A talk like that of the two women on the bus would not be possible among men; but that does not mean that they have souls above finery.
It is not good form among them to talk about dress--that is all. But that many of them think about it as seriously as women do, if less continuously, is certain. Pepys" Diary is strewn with such self-revelations as "This morning came home my fine Camlett cloak, with gold b.u.t.tons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray G.o.d to make me able to pay for it." He ought to have thought of that earlier. No one is ent.i.tled to order fine clothes and then throw the responsibility for paying for them on the Almighty. At least he might have prayed to G.o.d on the subject before approaching the tailor. The case of Goldsmith was not less conspicuous. He was as vain as a peac.o.c.k, and refused to go into the Church because he loved to wear bright clothes. And his spirit is not dead among men. Who can look upon the large white spats of ---- ---- as he comes down the floor of the House without feeling that he is as dress-conscious as a milliner.
I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not mean the over-dressed man: he is an offence). I would be well-dressed myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way. Like Squire Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion. I find that with rare exceptions I dislike new fashions. They disturb my tranquillity.
They give me a nasty jolt. I suspect that the explanation is that beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old gra.s.s-grown turnpikes of habit. It is no uncommon paradox. Spurgeon had it like many others. He was once rebuked by a friend for his political activity on the Liberal side. Why did he yield to this weakness? "You ought to mortify the Old Man," said his friend. "I do mortify him," said Spurgeon. "You see my Old Man is a Tory and I make him vote Liberal. That mortifies him." I am conscious of the same conflict, and in the matter of clothes the Old Man of Toryism is an easy winner.
It was so with Carlyle. He raged like a bear with a sore head against the existing political fashion of things, but in the matter of clothes he was a mere antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he simply wrote to the little country tailor in far-off Ecclefechan and told him to send another "as before." And so, by taking no thought about the matter, he achieved the distinction in appearance which the people who worry about clothes do not achieve. The flavour of the antique world hung about him like a fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord Courtney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a frivolous generation.
I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the past. I am just an ordinary camp-follower of the fashions, too perverse to march with the main army, too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts as it were, a forlorn relic of the year before last. My taste in ties, I am a.s.sured, is execrable. My clothes are lacking in style, and my boots have an unconquerable tendency to shapelessness. I put on whatever is handiest without a thought of artistic design. My pockets bulge with letters and books, and I am constantly reminded by well-meaning people that the top b.u.t.ton of my waistcoat is unb.u.t.toned. I am perfectly happy until I come into contact with the really well-dressed man who has arranged himself on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial poem. I lunched with such a man a few days ago. I could not help envying the neat perfection of everything about him, and I know, as his eye wandered to my tie, that there was something there that made him shudder as a harsh discord in music would make me shudder. It may have been the wrong shade; it may have been awry; it may have been anything that it oughtn"t to have been. I shall never know.
And it is a great joy to be able not to care. The war has lightened the cloud that hangs over those of us who simply cannot be dressy no matter how much we try. It is no longer an offence to appear a little secondhand. It is almost a virtue. You may wear your oldest clothes and look the whole world in the face and defy its judgments. You may claim that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the altar of patriotism and that the hat of yester-year is another nail in the coffin of the Kaiser. A distinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has sat in Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had not bought a suit of clothes since the war began, and I had no difficulty in believing the statement.
That is the sort of example that makes me happy. It gives me the feeling that I am at last really in the fashion--the fashion of old and unconsidered clothes. It is a very comfortable fashion. It saves you worry and it saves you money. I hope it will continue when the war has become a memory. And if we want a literary or historical warrant for it we may go to old Montaigne. When he was a young fellow without means, he says somewhere, he decked himself out in brave apparel to show the world that he was a person of consequence; but when he came to his fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates and his chateaux to speak for him. That is the way of us unfashionable folk.
We leave our estates and our chateaux to speak for us.
THE DUEL THAT FAILED
"I think," said my friend, "that the war will end when the Germans know they are beaten. No, that is not quite so ba.n.a.l a prophecy as it seems. Wars do not always end with the knowledge of defeat. They only end with the admission of defeat, which is quite another thing. The Civil War dragged on for a year after the South knew that they were beaten. All that bloodshed in the Wilderness was suffered in the teeth of the incontrovertible fact that it was in vain. But the man or the nation which adopts the philosophy of the bully does not fight when the certainty of victory has changed into the certainty of defeat. I have never known a bully who was not a coward when his back was to the wall.
The French are at their best in the hour of defeat. There was nothing so wonderful in the story of Napoleon as that astonishing campaign of 1814, and even in 1870-1 it was the courage of France when all was lost that was the most heroic phase of the war. But the bully collapses when the stimulus of victory has deserted him.
"Let me tell you a story. In 1883, having graduated at Dublin, I went to Heidelberg--_alt Heidelberg du feine_. You know that jolly city, and the students who swagger along the street, their faces seamed with the scars of old sword cuts. I was one of a group of young fellows from different countries who were studying at the University, and who fraternised in a strange land.
"It was about the time when the safety bicycle was introduced in England, and one of our group, a young Polish n.o.bleman who had a great pa.s.sion for English things, got a machine sent over to him from London.
If not the first, it was certainly one of the first machines of the kind that had appeared in Heidelberg. You may remember how strange it seemed even to the English public when it first came out. We had got accustomed to the old high bicycle, and the "Safety" looked ridiculous and babyish by comparison.
"Well, in Heidelberg the appearance of the young Pole on his "Safety"