ROBERT FALCONER, page 50
‘Hold your blasted humbug,’ answered the man, an exceptional specimen of the force at that time at all events, and shook the tattered wretch, as if he would shake her out of her rags.
Falconer gently parted the crowd, and stood beside the two.
‘I will help you,’ he said, ‘to take her to the station, if you like, but you must not treat her that way.’
‘I don’t want your help,’ said the policeman; ‘I know you, and all the damned lot of you.’
‘Then I shall be compelled to give you a lesson,’ said Falconer.
The man’s only answer was a shake that made the woman cry out.
‘I shall get into trouble if you get off,’ said Falconer to her. ‘Will you promise me, on your word, to go with me to the station, if I rid you of the fellow?’
‘I will, I will,’ said the woman.
‘Then, look out,’ said Falconer to the policeman; ‘for I’m going to give you that lesson.’
The officer let the woman go, took his baton, and made a blow at Falconer. In another moment — I could hardly see how — he lay in the street.
‘Now, my poor woman, come along,’ said Falconer.
She obeyed, crying gently. Two other policemen came up.
‘Do you want to give that woman in charge, Mr. Falconer?’ asked one of them.
‘I give that man in charge,’ cried his late antagonist, who had just scrambled to his feet. ‘Assaulting the police in discharge of their duty.’
‘Very well,’ said the other. ‘But you’re in the wrong box, and that you’ll find. You had better come along to the station, sir.’
‘Keep that fellow from getting hold of the woman — you two, and we’ll go together,’ said Falconer.
Bewildered with the rapid sequence of events, I was following in the crowd. Falconer looked about till he saw me, and gave me a nod which meant come along. Before we reached Bow Street, however, the offending policeman, who had been walking a little behind in conversation with one of the others, advanced to Falconer, touched his hat, and said something, to which Falconer replied.
‘Remember, I have my eye upon you,’ was all I heard, however, as he left the crowd and rejoined me. We turned and walked eastward again.
The storm kept on intermittently, but the streets were rather more crowded than usual notwithstanding.
‘Look at that man in the woollen jacket,’ said Falconer. ‘What a beautiful outline of face! There must be something noble in that man.’
‘I did not see him,’ I answered, ‘I was taken up with a woman’s face, like that of a beautiful corpse. It’s eyes were bright. There was gin in its brain.’
The streets swarmed with human faces gleaming past. It was a night of ghosts.
There stood a man who had lost one arm, earnestly pumping bilge-music out of an accordion with the other, holding it to his body with the stump. There was a woman, pale with hunger and gin, three match-boxes in one extended hand, and the other holding a baby to her breast. As we looked, the poor baby let go its hold, turned its little head, and smiled a wan, shrivelled, old-fashioned smile in our faces.
Another happy baby, you see, Mr. Gordon,’ said Falconer. ‘A child, fresh from God, finds its heaven where no one else would. The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the Paradise out of a woman.’
‘What can be done for them?’ I said, and at the moment, my eye fell upon a row of little children, from two to five years of age, seated upon the curb-stone.
They were chattering fast, and apparently carrying on some game, as happy as if they had been in the fields.
‘Wouldn’t you like to take all those little grubby things, and put them in a great tub and wash them clean?’ I said.
‘They’d fight like spiders,’ rejoined Falconer.
‘They’re not fighting now.’
‘Then don’t make them. It would be all useless. The probability is that you would only change the forms of the various evils, and possibly for worse. You would buy all that man’s glue-lizards, and that man’s three-foot rules, and that man’s dog-collars and chains, at three times their value, that they might get more drink than usual, and do nothing at all for their living to-morrow. — What a happy London you would make if you were Sultan Haroun!’ he added, laughing. ‘You would put an end to poverty altogether, would you not?’
I did not reply at once.
‘But I beg your pardon,’ he resumed; ‘I am very rude.’
‘Not at all,’ I returned. ‘I was only thinking how to answer you. They would be no worse after all than those who inherit property and lead idle lives.’
‘True; but they would be no better. Would you be content that your quondam poor should be no better off than the rich? What would be gained thereby? Is there no truth in the words “Blessed are the poor”? A deeper truth than most Christians dare to see. — Did you ever observe that there is not one word about the vices of the poor in the Bible — from beginning to end?’
‘But they have their vices.’
‘Indubitably. I am only stating a fact. The Bible is full enough of the vices of the rich. I make no comment.’
‘But don’t you care for their sufferings?’
‘They are of secondary importance quite. But if you had been as much amongst them as I, perhaps you would be of my opinion, that the poor are not, cannot possibly feel so wretched as they seem to us. They live in a climate, as it were, which is their own, by natural law comply with it, and find it not altogether unfriendly. The Laplander will prefer his wastes to the rich fields of England, not merely from ignorance, but for the sake of certain blessings amongst which he has been born and brought up. The blessedness of life depends far more on its interest than upon its comfort. The need of exertion and the doubt of success, renders life much more interesting to the poor than it is to those who, unblessed with anxiety for the bread that perisheth, waste their poor hearts about rank and reputation.’
‘I thought such anxiety was represented as an evil in the New Testament.’
‘Yes. But it is a still greater evil to lose it in any other way than by faith in God. You would remove the anxiety by destroying its cause: God would remove it by lifting them above it, by teaching them to trust in him, and thus making them partakers of the divine nature. Poverty is a blessing when it makes a man look up.’
‘But you cannot say it does so always.’
‘I cannot determine when, where, and how much; but I am sure it does. And I am confident that to free those hearts from it by any deed of yours would be to do them the greatest injury you could. Probably their want of foresight would prove the natural remedy, speedily reducing them to their former condition — not however without serious loss.’
‘But will not this theory prove at last an anæsthetic rather than an anodyne? I mean that, although you may adopt it at first for refuge from the misery the sight of their condition occasions you, there is surely a danger of its rendering you at last indifferent to it.’
‘Am I indifferent? But you do not know me yet. Pardon my egotism. There may be such danger. Every truth has its own danger or shadow. Assuredly I would have no less labour spent upon them. But there can be no true labour done, save in as far as we are fellow-labourers with God. We must work with him, not against him. Every one who works without believing that God is doing the best, the absolute good for them, is, must be, more or less, thwarting God. He would take the poor out of God’s hands. For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that which is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred. But through all this darkness about the poor, at least I can see wonderful veins and fields of light, and with the help of this partial vision, I trust for the rest. The only and the greatest thing man is capable of is Trust in God.’
‘What then is a man to do for the poor? How is he to work with God?’ I asked.
‘He must be a man amongst them — a man breathing the air of a higher life, and therefore in all natural ways fulfilling his endless human relations to them. Whatever you do for them, let your own being, that is you in relation to them, be the background, that so you may be a link between them and God, or rather I should say, between them and the knowledge of God.’
While Falconer spoke, his face grew grander and grander, till at last it absolutely shone. I felt that I walked with a man whose faith was his genius.
‘Of one thing I am pretty sure,’ he resumed, ‘that the same recipe Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: “Do the thing that lies next you.” That is all our business. Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the divine patience. How long it took to make the cradle! and we fret that the baby Humanity is not reading Euclid and Plato, even that it is not understanding the Gospel of St. John! If there is one thing evident in the world’s history, it is that God hasteneth not. All haste implies weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter. What they call the church militant is only at drill yet, and a good many of the officers too not out of the awkward squad. I am sure I, for a private, am not. In the drill a man has to conquer himself, and move with the rest by individual attention to his own duty: to what mighty battlefields the recruit may yet be led, he does not know. Meantime he has nearly enough to do with his goose-step, while there is plenty of single combat, skirmish, and light cavalry work generally, to get him ready for whatever is to follow. I beg your pardon: I am preaching.’
‘Eloquently,’ I answered.
Of some of the places into which Falconer led me that night I will attempt no description — places blazing with lights and mirrors, crowded with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full of the saddest of all sights, the uninteresting faces of commonplace women.
‘There is a passion,’ I said, as we came out of one of these dreadful places, ‘that lingers about the heart like the odour of violets, like a glimmering twilight on the borders of moonrise; and there is a passion that wraps itself in the vapours of patchouli and coffins, and streams from the eyes like gaslight from a tavern. And yet the line is ill to draw between them. It is very dreadful. These are women.’
‘They are in God’s hands,’ answered Falconer. ‘He hasn’t done with them yet. Shall it take less time to make a woman than to make a world? Is not the woman the greater? She may have her ages of chaos, her centuries of crawling slime, yet rise a woman at last.’
‘How much alike all those women were!’
‘A family likeness, alas! which always strikes you first.’
‘Some of them looked quite modest.’
‘There are great differences. I do not know anything more touching than to see how a woman will sometimes wrap around her the last remnants of a soiled and ragged modesty. It has moved me almost to tears to see such a one hanging her head in shame during the singing of a detestable song. That poor thing’s shame was precious in the eyes of the Master, surely.’
‘Could nothing be done for her?’
‘I contrived to let her know where she would find a friend if she wanted to be good: that is all you can do in such cases. If the horrors of their life do not drive them out at such an open door, you can do nothing else, I fear — for the time.’
‘Where are you going now, may I ask?’
‘Into the city — on business,’ he added with a smile.
‘There will be nobody there so late.’
‘Nobody! One would think you were the beadle of a city church, Mr. Gordon.’
We came into a very narrow, dirty street. I do not know where it is. A slatternly woman advanced from an open door, and said,
‘Mr. Falconer.’
He looked at her for a moment.
‘Why, Sarah, have you come to this already?’ he said.
‘Never mind me, sir. It’s no more than you told me to expect. You knowed him better than I did. Leastways I’m an honest woman.’
‘Stick to that, Sarah; and be good-tempered.’
‘I’ll have a try anyhow, sir. But there’s a poor cretur a dyin’ up-stairs; and I’m afeard it’ll go hard with her, for she throwed a Bible out o’ window this very morning, sir.’
‘Would she like to see me? I’m afraid not.’
‘She’s got Lilywhite, what’s a sort of a reader, readin’ that same Bible to her now.’
‘There can be no great harm in just looking in,’ he said, turning to me.
‘I shall be happy to follow you — anywhere,’ I returned.
‘She’s awful ill, sir; cholerer or summat,’ said Sarah, as she led the way up the creaking stair.
We half entered the room softly. Two or three women sat by the chimney, and another by a low bed, covered with a torn patchwork counterpane, spelling out a chapter in the Bible. We paused for a moment to hear what she was reading. Had the book been opened by chance, or by design? It was the story of David and Bathsheba. Moans came from the bed, but the candle in a bottle, by which the woman was reading, was so placed that we could not see the sufferer.
We stood still and did not interrupt the reading.
‘Ha! ha! ha!’ laughed a coarse voice from the side of the chimney: ‘the saint, you see, was no better than some of the rest of us!’
‘I think he was a good deal worse just then,’ said Falconer, stepping forward.
‘Gracious! there’s Mr. Falconer,’ said another woman, rising, and speaking in a flattering tone.
‘Then,’ remarked the former speaker, ‘there’s a chance for old Moll and me yet. King David was a saint, wasn’t he? Ha! ha!’
‘Yes, and you might be one too, if you were as sorry for your faults as he was for his.’
‘Sorry, indeed! I’ll be damned if I be sorry. What have I to be sorry for? Where’s the harm in turning an honest penny? I ha’ took no man’s wife, nor murdered himself neither. There’s yer saints! He was a rum ‘un. Ha! ha!’
Falconer approached her, bent down and whispered something no one could hear but herself. She gave a smothered cry, and was silent.
‘Give me the book,’ he said, turning towards the bed. ‘I’ll read you something better than that. I’ll read about some one that never did anything wrong.’
‘I don’t believe there never was no sich a man,’ said the previous reader, as she handed him the book, grudgingly.
‘Not Jesus Christ himself?’ said Falconer.
‘Oh! I didn’t know as you meant him.’
‘Of course I meant him. There never was another.’
‘I have heard tell — p’raps it was yourself, sir — as how he didn’t come down upon us over hard after all, bless him!’
Falconer sat down on the side of the bed, and read the story of Simon the Pharisee and the woman that was a sinner. When he ceased, the silence that followed was broken by a sob from somewhere in the room. The sick woman stopped her moaning, and said,
‘Turn down the leaf there, please, sir. Lilywhite will read it to me when you’re gone.’
The some one sobbed again. It was a young slender girl, with a face disfigured by the small-pox, and, save for the tearful look it wore, poor and expressionless. Falconer said something gentle to her.
‘Will he ever come again?’ she sobbed.
‘Who?’ asked Falconer.
‘Him — Jesus Christ. I’ve heard tell, I think, that he was to come again some day.’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because—’ she said, with a fresh burst of tears, which rendered the words that followed unintelligible. But she recovered herself in a few moments, and, as if finishing her sentence, put her hand up to her poor, thin, colourless hair, and said,
‘My hair ain’t long enough to wipe his feet.’
‘Do you know what he would say to you, my girl?’ Falconer asked.
‘No. What would he say to me? He would speak to me, would he?’
‘He would say: Thy sins are forgiven thee.’
‘Would he, though? Would he?’ she cried, starting up. ‘Take me to him — take me to him. Oh! I forgot. He’s dead. But he will come again, won’t he? He was crucified four times, you know, and he must ha’ come four times for that. Would they crucify him again, sir?’
‘No, they wouldn’t crucify him now — in England at least. They would only laugh at him, shake their heads at what he told them, as much as to say it wasn’t true, and sneer and mock at him in some of the newspapers.’
‘Oh dear! I’ve been very wicked.’
‘But you won’t be so any more.’
‘No, no, no. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’
She talked hurriedly, almost wildly. The coarse old woman tapped her forehead with her finger. Falconer took the girl’s hand.
‘What is your name?’ he said.
‘Nell.’
‘What more?’
‘Nothing more.’
‘Well, Nelly,’ said Falconer.
‘How kind of you to call me Nelly!’ interrupted the poor girl. ‘They always calls me Nell, just.’
‘Nelly,’ repeated Falconer, ‘I will send a lady here to-morrow to take you away with her, if you like, and tell you how you must do to find Jesus. — People always find him that want to find him.’
The elderly woman with the rough voice, who had not spoken since he whispered to her, now interposed with a kind of cowed fierceness.
‘Don’t go putting humbug into my child’s head now, Mr. Falconer— ‘ticing her away from her home. Everybody knows my Nell’s been an idiot since ever she was born. Poor child!’
‘I ain’t your child,’ cried the girl, passionately. ‘I ain’t nobody’s child.’
‘You are God’s child,’ said Falconer, who stood looking on with his eyes shining, but otherwise in a state of absolute composure.
‘Am I? Am I? You won’t forget to send for me, sir?’
‘That I won’t,’ he answered.
She turned instantly towards the woman, and snapped her fingers in her face.
‘I don’t care that for you,’ she cried. ‘You dare to touch me now, and I’ll bite you.’
