Chapter IV: Part 4

For the past half hour, I have been trying to concentrate all my attention upon some fairly cheerful matter, and I have failed. It has been impossible to keep out the sound of this mouth-organ. Its formless, unknown, unending tune, only fit for bewailing a ruined world, has gradually invaded my room, penetrated through the ear into my brain, and coloured or discoloured all the thoughts there. There is in it no trace of that noble sadness which great music, like great poetry, so often brings with it; the mouth-organ knows nothing of ‘divine despair.’ It seems to whimper before ‘the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world.’

‘Oh de-ar!’ I seem to hear it crying, ‘No hope for yo-ou and yo-ours; Me-eser-able world! Oh de-ear!’ It has brought with it a fog of depression; my spirits have been sinking lower and lower; and under the influence of this evil mangler of good, heartening tunes I have begun to think that life is not worth living.

Most music worthy of the name has such beauty that it will either raise us to a kind of ecstasy or give us a feeling of vague sadness, which some delicate persons prefer to wild joy. Sir Thomas Browne, you remember, has something to say on this point, in a passage that can never become hackneyed no matter how many times it is quoted: ‘Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do embrace it; for even that vulgar and tavern-music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer.’

But these mouth-organ strains will make a man neither mad nor merry, nor yet strike in him a deep fit of devotion; but if his ear is like mine, they will make him sink into depression and dye his world a ghastly blue.

It is curious that certain other popular musical instruments seem to have the same characteristics as the mouth-organ. The concertina and the accordion, good friends of the sailor, the lonely Colonist, and rough, kindly fellows the world over, seem to me to possess the same power of transforming all the tunes played upon them into one long wail. I have read about their ‘lively strains,’ but I have never heard them. The sound of a concertina a quarter of a mile away is enough to shake my optimism. An average accordion could turn the Sword Theme from ‘Siegfried’ into a plea for suicide. A flageolet or a tin-whistle has not such a shattering effect; nevertheless, both of them can only give a tune a certain subdued air, which is certainly preferable to the depressing alchemy of the other instruments, but which certainly does not make for liveliness.

The bagpipe, which has been so long the companion of the lonely folk of northern moors and glens, can produce at times a certain rousing martial strain, but, even then, a wailing air creeps into the music like a Scotch mist. Its very reels and strathspeys, which ought to be jolly enough, only sound to me like elaborate complaints against life; their transitory snatches of gaiety are obviously forced. At all other times, the bagpipe is frankly pessimistic, and laments its very existence.

There is probably some technical reason why these instruments produce such doleful tones. Perhaps our sophisticated ears rebel against their peculiar harmonies and discords. But it is certainly curious that mouth-organs, concertinas, tin-whistles, and the rest, so beloved of simple people, should be intolerable to so many of us. Is it that we have no miseries to express in sound? Or is it that our optimism is so brittle that we dare not submit it to the onslaught of this strange music? I do not know.

All that I do know is that at the present moment I am sitting in my armchair before a bright fire, depressed beyond belief by the sound that floats through my window; while outside, in the cold, there stands a small boy, holding a mouth-organ in his numbed hands and bravely sliding his lips over the cold metallic edges of the thing; and by this time he is probably as gay as I am miserable.

AN APOLOGY FOR BAD PIANISTS

Ignoring those musical labourers who are paid so much per hour, at cinemas and dance-halls, to make some sort of rhythmical sound, all pianists, I think, may be divided into four classes. There are, first, the great soloists, the masters, Paderewski, Pachmann, and the rest, who would seem to have conquered all difficulties. With them the piano, a dead thing of wires and hammers, becomes a delicately responsive organism; its hammers are extra muscles, and its strings added nerves, running and leaping to obey every fleeting impulse; their playing is as saturated with personality as their gait or speech. Not so with the members of the second class, which is, to my mind, a dubious fraternity. They may be called the serious amateurs. Very often they take expensive lessons from some professor, who undertakes to ‘finish them off.’ But they never are finished off. The sign and mark of the serious amateur is that he practises assiduously some piece of music, maybe a Chopin study or a Brahms sonata, until he has it by heart; after which he assembles a number of friends (or, more often, new acquaintances), squashes their attempts at conversation, and, amid a tense silence, begins to play--or, as he would say, ‘interpret’--his laboured solo. The fourth class consists of odd strummers, vampers and thumpers; young ladies who play waltzes and old ladies who play hymns; cigarette-in-mouth youths with a bang-and-rattle style of performance; all inexorable, tormenting noise-makers, from those who persist in riveting--rather than playing--Rachmaninoff’s C sharp minor Prelude to those who buy Sunday newspapers in order that they may pick out with one finger the tune of a comic song. All such are the enemies of peace and harmony, and as they cannot be ignored in any other place, here they can be quickly dismissed with all the more pleasure.

It remains now to say something of the third class of pianists, which, if it were reduced to such straits, could count me among its members. To write at some length of one’s own class after perfunctorily dismissing others may seem to savour of egotism, but the truth is, we--I speak fraternally--have been so much maligned and misunderstood up to now, we have endured so many taunts in silence, that we have a right to be heard before we are finally and irrevocably condemned.

It is only on the score of technique, the mere rule of thumb business, that we stand below the serious amateurs; we belong to a higher order of beings and have grander souls; in spirit we come nearer to the great masters. The motives of the serious amateur are not above suspicion. In his assiduous practice, his limited repertoire, his studied semi-public style of performance, is there not a suggestion of vanity? Is his conscious parade of skill, taken along with his fear of unknown works, the mark of a selfless devotion to music, and music alone? I doubt it.

But our motives are certainly above suspicion. Music has no servants more disinterested, for not only do we gather no garlands in her service, but daily, for her sake, we risk making fools of ourselves, than which there can be no greater test of pure devotion. We, too, are the desperate venturers among pianists; every time that we seat ourselves at the keyboard we are leading a forlorn hope; and, whether we fall by the way or chance to come through unscathed, the only reward we can hope for is a kindly glance from the goddess of harmony.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on the fact that our execution is faulty, that we are humanly liable to make mistakes, seeing that our weaknesses have been for years the butt of musical pedants and small souls. In the dim past we received some sort of instruction, perhaps a few years’ lessons, but being bright children with wills of our own we saw no use in labouring at scales and arpeggios, at the tepid compositions of Czerny, when there were balls to throw, stones to kick, and penny dreadfuls to be devoured. An unlocked door or an open window--and we escaped from the wretched drudgery, thus showing early that eager zest of life which still marks our clan.

Now, it is enthusiasm alone that carries us through. Our performance of any ‘piece of average difficulty’ (as the publishers say) is nothing short of a series of miracles. As we peer at the music and urge our fingers to scurry over the keys, horrid gulfs yawn before us, great rocks come crashing down, the thick undergrowth is full of pitfalls and mantraps, but we are not to be deterred. Though we do not know what notes are coming next, or what fingers we shall use, if the music says _presto_, then _presto_ it must be; the spirit of the tune must be set free, however its flesh may be lacerated. So we swing up the dizzy arpeggios as a hunted mountaineer might leap from crag to crag; we come down a run of demi-semi-quavers with the blind confidence of men trying to shoot the rapids of Niagara. Only the stout-hearted and great of soul can undertake these perilous but magnificent ventures.

Unlike the serious amateurs, we do not pick and choose among pieces until we have found one to which we can give the cold glitter of an impeccable rendering. We attend concerts (for, above all, we are the concert-goers and dreamers of dreams, as O’Shaughnessy might have said) and come reeling out, intoxicated with sound; for days we are haunted by a lovely theme or an amazing climax, until we can bear it no longer; we rush off to the music-shops to see if it is possible to capture this new lovely thing and keep it for ever; more often than not we return home in triumph, hardly giving ourselves time to flatten out the music before plunging into the opening bars. Nothing that has been arranged for the piano or that can be played in some sort of fashion on the instrument comes amiss if it has once aroused our enthusiasm; symphonies, operas, tone-poems, string-quartets are all welcome. Nay, we often prefer the arrangements of orchestral things, for we do not think of the piano merely as a solo instrument; to us it is the shining ivory and ebony gateway to the land of music. As our fingers wander over the keys our great dream-orchestras waken to life.

I believe that at the very end, when the depths of our folly and ignorance are fully revealed, when all our false notes have been cast up into one awful total by the recording angel of music, it will be found that we, the bad pianists, have been misjudged among men, that we, too, have loved and laboured for the divine art. When we file into Elysium, forlorn, scared, a shabby little band, and come within sight of Beethoven, whom we have murdered so many times, I believe that a smile will break through the thunder-cloud of his face. ‘Ach! Come you in, children,’ he will roar, ‘bad players, eh?... I have heard.... Very bad players.... But there have been worse among you.... The spirit was in you, and you have listened well.... Come in.... I have composed one hundred and fifty more symphonies and sonatas, and you shall hear them all.’

A FATHER’S TRAGEDY

I have lately received a visit from an old acquaintance who floated in my direction on such a sea of trouble that I have been in low spirits ever since. Moreover, as it was a family affair, I could not interfere in any way, and the knowledge of my own impotence has only increased my depression. My only hope of keeping my thoughts from what is, after all, no business of mine lies in passing on the tale--if such a mournful recital of family dissensions can be called a tale--and thus making others share the burden.

I cannot remember, for the moment, when and where I first met old Tom Cribcrack, my late visitor, but we have been acquainted for a good many years. He must be past fifty now (how the time goes on!), but being a fine upstanding fellow, closely shaved and with his bristly hair always cropped short, he looks considerably younger. His father, a dear old man--I met him once--was in the coining business in its best days, but such a sedentary occupation did not suit young Cribcrack, and he was soon apprenticed to a successful burglar. In his own way, Tom was an enthusiastic, clever lad, and it was not long before he became an expert craftsman himself. He decided to devote his life to the profession, and though, like other men, he has had his bad times, he has been on the whole a very successful practitioner, respected by all workers in the same field. He has had a good connection, mostly among the upper middle-class, and has always preferred a rather slow but steady run of business to a few brilliant coups; he has kept away from the showy work, and has never had the slightest desire for publicity, which is probably the reason why his name is not so well known to the general public as that of many an inferior craftsman. ‘No fancy work for Tom Cribcrack,’ he has said more than once in my hearing. ‘Punctuality, neat workmanship, despatch--that’s the motto for a man what wants to get on in my line.’ In short, he was a good specimen of the modest self-made Englishman, and is still, to this day, though now subdued in spirit by a great disappointment, as you shall learn.

It was not until Cribcrack was thirty or so and had got on to his feet that he did what most sensible men do sooner or later--he took a wife. This was a Miss Judy Graggins, eldest daughter of ‘Basher’ Graggins, of Cod’s Alley, a well-known character in his day. The result of this happy union was a family of several daughters but only one son, greatly to the disappointment of both parents. Looking back, as Cribcrack pointed out the other day, one cannot help noticing how small things have often an important bearing on the future; for whereas there had been no difficulty about the girls’ names, when it came to naming the boy there was for a time some difference between the doting parents. The father wished to give the boy a plain, sturdy sort of name, Jem or Bill, such as all the Cribcracks had borne; but, greatly to his surprise, his wife, for no apparent reason, but from sheer feminine perversity, would have none of these, and insisted on the child being called Ernest, a name unknown to the Cribcrack family and one which the father himself regarded with the greatest contempt. In the end, the mother’s whim prevailed, and the boy was known henceforth as Ernest Cribcrack.

As might be expected, the advent of a son made a great difference to my old acquaintance, who, like many other fathers, began to see a fresh purpose in life. His enthusiasm for his professional work was unabated, but his son came to share with it the first place in his thoughts, and it was not long before his one aim was to bring together these two all-absorbing, beloved things, his son and his work. Morning after morning, after the nightly duties were at end, Cribcrack would sit smoking by the fire, watching the sturdy infant at play and dreaming of the time when he could teach the boy all he knew of the ancient craft, and they could go out to work together. Then some day they would be known as Cribcrack and Son to other members of the profession, and in many a tavern some old hand would remark: ‘That was a fine piece of work young Cribcrack pulled off the other night. Just like his father, he is....’

For a time all went well. It was not long before Ernest, a sturdy little boy, would hear of no other calling for his manhood but his father’s profession. On his seventh or eighth birthday he was given the boy’s burglary outfit, and he would play for hours on end with the little jemmy and other implements, under the direction of his delighted parent. At times the boy would seem to prefer piracy or even engine-driving, but Tom knew that these were only the vagaries of childhood; the boy would soon see the course before him. Like most fathers, however, Cribcrack never opened out his heart to young Ernest, or Ern’, as he was known to the family. He cherished his dream in secret, and waited for the appointed time to speak, so that the lad might choose for himself. But again, like most fathers, he never doubted that when the moment did come the boy would choose the right course. As time went on, however, Ernest became rather a puzzle. For example, contrary to his father’s expectations, he did not show any particular aversion to ordinary schooling; indeed, he seemed to become fond of it as he grew older. In this, as in some other things, his father, a little uneasy, humoured him, so that at the time when he should have begun his real apprenticeship he was still spending his time with copy-books and geography primers. After all, Tom reflected, the boy was a Cribcrack, and would know where his duty lay.

But when the time came for the father to speak, the great blow fell. Ernest steadfastly refused to follow his father’s profession, and swept aside the career that Tom had marked out for him. Now vehement, now sulky, sometimes tearful, at other times derisive--the boy would be neither persuaded nor bullied into changing his mind. It was not that he loathed the burglar’s ancient craft, but while the father had been dreaming his dreams so, too, he had had his own vision--he would be a clerk, and nothing else would do for him. On his way to school he had seen clerks in their stiff white collars and shiny blue suits, crowding out of their offices at the dinner hour; he had caught glimpses of them as they bent over their ledgers beneath the shaded electric lights; his boy’s heart had been thrilled, and he too had had his dream. It was useless to argue that the Cribcracks had never descended to office stools; that the glamour would soon fade and leave him face to face with cold reality. Ernest had decided that he was meant to be a clerk, and a clerk he would be, however difficult and dangerous the road he must travel.

What more need be said. Cribcrack entreated, reproached, threatened, but all in vain. His great dream was shattered, and, cursing the fateful name of Ernest, he bundled the lad out of his house, and shortly afterwards came, a broken man, to see me. Ernest, I believe, is now in the office of the Origen Orange-Ale Company, and though he occasionally pilfers a few stamps, there is little of the fine old Cribcrack spirit about him.

ON GETTING OFF TO SLEEP

What a bundle of contradictions is a man! Surely, humour is the saving grace of us, for without it we should die of vexation. With me, nothing illustrates the contrariness of things better than the matter of sleep. If, for example, my intention is to write an essay, and I have before me ink and pens and several sheets of virgin paper, you may depend upon it that before I have gone very far I feel an overpowering desire for sleep, no matter what time of the day it is. I stare at the reproachfully blank paper until sights and sounds become dim and confused, and it is only by an effort of will that I can continue at all. Even then, I proceed half-heartedly, in a kind of dream. But let me be between the sheets at a late hour, and I can do anything but sleep. Between chime and chime of the clock I can write essays by the score. Fascinating subjects and noble ideas come pell-mell, each with its appropriate imagery and expression. Nothing stands between me and half-a-dozen imperishable masterpieces but pens, ink, and paper.

If it be true that our thoughts and mental images are perfectly tangible things, like our books and pictures, to the inhabitants of the next world, then I am making for myself a better reputation there than I am in this place. Give me a restless hour or two in bed and I can solve, to my own satisfaction, all the doubts of humanity. When I am in the humour I can compose grand symphonies, and paint magnificent pictures. I am, at once, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michael Angelo; yet it gives me no satisfaction; for the one thing I cannot do is to go to sleep.

Once in bed, when it is time to close the five ports of knowledge, most folks I know seem to find no difficulty in plunging their earthly parts into oblivion. It is not so with me, to whom sleep is a coy mistress, much given to a teasing inconstancy and for ever demanding to be wooed--‘lest too light winning make the prize light.’ I used to read, with wonder, those sycophantic stories of the warlike supermen, the great troublers of the world’s peace, Cromwell, Napoleon, and the like, who, thanks to their ‘iron wills,’ could lie down and plunge themselves immediately into deep sleep, to wake up, refreshed, at a given time. Taking these fables to heart, I would resolve to do likewise, and, going to bed, would clench my teeth, look as determined as possible in the darkness, and command the immediate presence of sleep. But alas! the very act of concentration seemed to make me more wakeful than ever, and I would pass hours in tormenting sleeplessness. I had overlooked the necessity of having an ‘iron will,’ my own powers of will having little or none of this peculiar metallic quality. But how uncomfortable it must have been living with these iron-willed folks! Who would want to remonstrate and argue with them? It would be worse than beating an anvil with a sledge-hammer. I must confess that I always suspect the men who boast that they unvaryingly fall asleep as soon as they get into bed--those ‘as soon as my head touches the pillow’ fellows. To me, there is something inhuman, something callous and almost bovine, in the practice. I suspect their taste in higher matters. Iron wills apart, there must be a lack of human sympathy or depth in a man who can thus throw off, with his clothes, his waking feelings and thoughts, and ignore completely those memories and fancies which

“...will sometimes leap,
From hiding-places ten years deep.”

To share a bed-room with one of these fellows is to lose one’s faith in human nature, for, even after the most eventful day, there is no comparing notes with them, no midnight confidence, no casting up the balance of the day’s pleasure and pain. They sink, at once, into stupid, heavy slumber, leaving you to your own mental devices. And they all snore abominably!

The artificial ways of inducing sleep are legion, and are only alike in their ineffectuality. In _Lavengro_ (or is it _Romany Rye_?) there is an impossible character, a victim of insomnia, who finds that a volume of Wordsworth’s poems is the only sure soporific; but that was Borrow’s malice. The famous old plan of counting sheep jumping over a stile has never served my turn. I have herded imaginary sheep until they insisted on turning themselves into white bears or blue pigs, and I defy any reasonable man to fall asleep while mustering a herd of cerulean swine.

Discussing the question, some time ago, with an old friend, she gave me her never-failing remedy for sleeplessness, which was to imagine herself performing some trivial action over and over again, until, her mind becoming disgusted with the monotony of life, sleep drew the curtain. Her favourite device was to imagine a picture not hanging quite plumb upon the wall, and then to proceed to straighten it. This I tried--though putting pictures straight is no habit of mine--but it was of no avail. I imagined the picture on the wall without difficulty, and gave it a few deft touches, but this set me thinking of pictures in general, and then I remembered an art exhibition I had attended with my friend T. and what he said, and what I said, and I wondered how T. was faring these days, and whether his son was still at school. And so it went on, until I found myself meditating on cheese, or spiritualism, or the Rocky Mountains--but no sleep! Somewhere in that limbo which Earth describes in _Prometheus Unbound_, that vague region filled with

Dreams and the light imaginings of men,

is the dreary phantom of an unstraightened picture upon a ghostly wall. And there it shall stay, for I have no further use for it.

But I have not yet given up all hope of finding some way of hastening the approach of sleep. Even yet there is a glimmer, for re-reading (not for the first, and, please Heaven! not the last time) Lamb’s letters, I came upon the following, in a note to Southey; ‘But there is a man in my office, a Mr. H., who proses it away from morning to night, and never gets beyond corporal and material verities!... When I can’t sleep o’ nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H., upon a given subject, and go prosing on in fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer.’ ... There is promise in this, and we all have our Mr. H.’s, whose talk, bare of anything like fancy and wit, acts upon us like a dose of laudanum. This very night I will dismiss such trivial phantasies as jumping sheep and crooked pictures, and evoke the phantom of a crushing, stupendous Bore.

ON TRAVEL BY TRAIN

Remove an Englishman from his hearth and home, his centre of corporal life, and he becomes a very different creature, one capable of sudden furies and roaring passions, a deep sea of strong emotions churning beneath his frozen exterior. I can pass, at all times, for a quiet, neighbourly fellow, yet I have sat, more than once, in a railway carriage with black murder in my heart. At the mere sight of some probably inoffensive fellow-passenger my whole being will be invaded by a million devils of wrath, and I ‘could do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on.’

There is one type of traveller that never fails to rouse my quick hatred. She is a large, middle-aged woman, with a rasping voice and a face of brass. Above all things, she loves to invade smoking compartments that are already comfortably filled with a quiet company of smokers; she will come bustling in, shouting over her shoulder at her last victim, a prostrate porter, and, laden with packages of all maddening shapes and sizes, she will glare defiantly about her until some unfortunate has given up his seat. She is often accompanied by some sort of contemptible, whining cur that is only one degree less offensive than its mistress. From the moment that she has wedged herself in there will be no more peace in the carriage, but simmering hatred, and everywhere dark looks and muttered threats. But everyone knows her. Courtesy and modesty perished in the world of travel on the day when she took her first journey; but it will not be long before she is in hourly danger of extinction, for there are strong men in our midst.

There are other types of railway travellers, not so offensive as the above, which combines all the bad qualities, but still annoying in a varying degree to most of us; and of these others I will enumerate one or two of the commonest. First, there are those who, when they would go on a journey, take all their odd chattels and household utensils and parcel them up in brown paper, disdaining such things as boxes and trunks; furthermore, when such eccentrics have loaded themselves up with queer-shaped packages they will cast about for baskets of fruit and bunches of flowers to add to their own and other people’s misery. Then there are the simple folks who are for ever eating and drinking in railway carriages. No sooner are they settled in their seats but they are passing each other tattered sandwiches and mournful scraps of pastry, and talking with their mouths full, and scattering crumbs over the trousers of fastidious old gentlemen. Sometimes they will peel and eat bananas with such rapidity that nervous onlookers are compelled to seek another compartment.

Some children do not make good travelling companions, for they will do nothing but whimper or howl throughout a journey, or they will spend all their time daubing their faces with chocolate or trying to climb out of the window. And the cranks are always with us; on the bleakest day, they it is who insist on all the windows being open, but in the sultriest season they go about in mortal fear of draughts, and will not allow a window to be touched.

More to my taste are the innocents who always find themselves in the wrong train. They have not the understanding necessary to fathom the time-tables, nor will they ask the railway officials for advice, so they climb into the first train that comes, and trust to luck. When they are being hurtled towards Edinburgh, they will suddenly look round the carriage and ask, with a mild touch of pathos, if they are in the right train for Bristol. And then, puzzled and disillusioned, they have to be bundled out at the next station, and we see them no more. I have often wondered if these simple voyagers ever reach their destinations, for it is not outside probability that they may be shot from station to station, line to line, until there is nothing mortal left of them.

Above all other railway travellers, I envy the mighty sleepers, descendants of the Seven of Ephesus. How often, on a long, uninteresting journey, have I envied them their sweet oblivion. With Lethe at their command, no dull, empty train journey, by day or night, has any terrors for them. Knowing the length of time they have to spend in the train, they compose themselves and are off to sleep in a moment, probably enjoying the gorgeous adventures of dream while the rest of us are looking blankly out of the window or counting our fingers. Two minutes from their destination they stir, rub their eyes, stretch themselves, collect their baggage, and, peering out of the window, murmur: ‘My station, I think.’ A moment later they go out, alert and refreshed, Lords of Travel, leaving us to our boredom.

Seafaring men make good companions on a railway journey. They are always ready for a pipe and a crack with any man, and there is usually some entertaining matter in their talk. But they are not often met with away from the coast towns. Nor do we often come across the confidential stranger in an English railway carriage, though his company is inevitable on the Continent and, I believe, in America. When the confidential stranger does make an appearance here, he is usually a very dull dog, who compels us to yawn through the interminable story of his life, and rides some wretched old hobby-horse to death.

There is one more type of traveller that must be mentioned here, if only for the guidance of the young and simple. He is usually an elderly man, neatly dressed, but a little tobacco-stained, always seated in a corner, and he opens the conversation by pulling out a gold hunter and remarking that the train is at least three minutes behind time. Then, with the slightest encouragement, he will begin to talk, and his talk will be all of trains. As some men discuss their acquaintances, or others speak of violins or roses, so he talks of trains, their history, their quality, their destiny. All his days and nights seem to have been passed in railway carriages, all his reading seems to have been in time-tables. He will tell you of the 12.35 from this place and the 3.49 from the other place, and how the 10.18 ran from So-and-so to So-and-so in such a time, and how the 8.26 was taken off and the 5.10 was put on; and the greatness of his subject moves him to eloquence, and there is passion and mastery in his voice, now wailing over a missed connection or a departed hero of trains, now exultantly proclaiming the glories of a non-stop express or a wonderful run to time. However dead you were to the passion, the splendour, the pathos, in this matter of trains, before he has done with you you will be ready to weep over the 7.37 and cry out in ecstasy at the sight of the 2.52.

Beware of the elderly man who sits in the corner of the carriage and says that the train is two minutes behind time, for he is the Ancient Mariner of railway travellers, and will hold you with his glittering eye.

THE PEEP

My friend Glindersby is a changed man, and, for my part, I think it a change for the better. For the one thing that had always spoiled Glindersby for the company of sane men was his ever-recurring praise of the present age and its mechanical ingenuities. Though brought up to a noble old profession, he was one of those who are for ever crying up the marvels that we have of late brought into the world; he would subscribe to such things as _Wonders of Modern Science_ or _Engineering Marvels of the World_, and could be found gloating over vilely-coloured prints of airships and electric lifts. Because there was a railway at Kamchatka or a telephone at Tangiers, he could not understand why all men should not be happy. In short, he was one of those latter-day fanatics who, in a kind of ecstasy, are always crying out to each other, ‘Look at Radium ...!’ and ‘What will they do next!’ and other phrases from their dark liturgy. This was Glindersby’s one failing, and it had, I knew, kept him from much good company. Now, I say, he is changed, for he seems to have lost his old damaging enthusiasm, and in the late hours of fireside confessional he has now begun telling a certain trumpery tale, a piece of hocus-pocus if there ever was one, to account for the change.

A short time ago, at the house of some friends, a cranky set, he was introduced to a Hindoo who had just arrived in this country, and who might be called Ram Dar Chubb. They said little to each other on that first evening, but a few days later they met in the street, and the Hindoo suggested that they should visit his rooms. Glindersby, suspecting that the other was feeling lonely in this new world of white faces and black streets, expressed his pleasure, and accompanied the hospitable Ram Dar up three flights of stairs. He was soon making himself comfortable in a sitting-room that seemed to contain nothing out of the common, with the exception of a large graven metal bowl and some Oriental knick-knacks on a small side-table. The two men quickly plunged into talk, and Glindersby, beginning with the difference between the Eastern and Western civilisations, was not long before he was declaiming--almost breathlessly--upon his favourite themes. Here at last he had found fit audience; Ram Dar was an ideal listener. And Glindersby rose to the occasion; telephones, telegraphy, airships, turbine engines, calculating machines, electric kettles, and a thousand other marvels were all his concern. There was no end to his talk of valves, pressures, and horse power. Very soon he had paraphrased the introduction and at least half a dozen chapters of _Wonders of Modern Science_ and _Engineering Marvels of the World_, and his monologue soon became as highly coloured and altogether detestable as their monstrous prints. Looking sturdily across at the immobile brown face, he expanded, boasted, and bragged, until it might have appeared that he himself was ready at any time to bridge the Channel and irrigate the Sahara Desert.

Throughout this untimely rhapsody Ram Dar sat motionless, his attitude expressive of that eternal patience of the East which all Glindersby’s hearers ought to have had.

‘Conquest of Nature’s just begun,’ cried Glindersby, who by this time was almost dithyrambic, and talked in capital letters and dots as if he were one of Mr. Wells’ characters. ‘You’ve been standing still for thousands of years.... Stagnation!... Now we’re going forward.... Made bigger advance in last hundred years than in all the thousands before.... Wireless Telegraphy!... Aeroplanes!... Space annihilated.... Just beginning.’ And he leaned forward impressively: ‘What will it be in one hundred years’ time?... Or three hundred?... Or seven hundred?... Nature finally conquered.... All her forces harnessed..... Man.... Master of the World.... Stupendous buildings!... Marvellous machinery!... Fleets of Airships!... What wouldn’t I give for a peep into the Future!...’

‘You would look into the future?’ broke in his hearer, for the first time.

Glindersby was somewhat taken aback by this unexpected interruption. ‘I would give anything to see what we shall achieve,’ he cried, ‘only, of course, it’s--er--impossible.’

There was a flash of white teeth opposite. ‘No, it can be done,’ murmured Ram Dar, ‘Past, Present, Future! It is all an illusion. We have known these things a long time. You wish to look into the Future?...’ And he rose to his feet.

Still suspecting some pleasantry, the other forced a laugh, and stammered out: ‘Above all things.... Pity no way of doing it.... Final Conquest of Nature.’

By this time, the Hindoo had pulled forward the little side-table, on which stood the great metal bowl. To Glindersby’s astonishment, the latter was filled with a liquid blacker than ink, and had, fastened to the edge, several little pans, into which Ram Dar quickly poured a quantity of grey powder.

‘How far forward will you look, and at what place?’ asked Ram Dar as he proceeded to set fire to the little heaps of powder.

Glindersby stared at the dense fumes that were encircling the great bowl. Half mechanically, almost unwillingly, he gasped out: ‘Oh, Coventry ... go-ahead place, I b’lieve ... eight hundred years hence.’ There was some muttering in a strange tongue, and then a dark hand waved across the rolling, sickly-smelling fumes. ‘Come!’ cried the voice of the Hindoo, who must have trafficked with the devil, whom he resembled at that moment.

Hardly knowing what he was doing, Glindersby found himself in the midst of the fumes, bending over the bowl and staring at the ebony surface of the liquid within. ‘Near Coventry.... Your year, two thousand seven hundred and thirty....’ The voice seemed to come from miles away. Next moment, the fumes, the bowl, everything had vanished, and he seemed to be looking, as from a great height, at a large meadow where a number of sheep with their lambs were browsing. It seemed a bright morning in early summer. There was no shadow of smoke; the air was perfectly clear. In one corner of the meadow a boy was seated under a large elm. He was bare-legged, sandalled and simply clad in a bright blue robe, and, all the time, he appeared to be playing upon a little pipe. Near by was a small shrine garlanded with red roses, and the grass around was strewn with crimson petals scattered by the breeze. Cloud-shadows drifted across the grass; the sheep moved steadily forward, with their lambs capering about them; a few more crimson petals were shaken from the shrine; the boy still fingered his little pipe in the shade of the elm....

‘It is not what you expected to find,’ cried a voice in his ear; and Glindersby looked up and saw the smiling face of Ram Dar Chubb above the bowl over which they had both been bending.

I say that Glindersby is a changed man, and that I, for one, approve the change in him. But I think that this story of his is full of lies; and that as for Ram Dar Chubb, he is an obvious invention, and cheap at that.

ON VULGAR ERRORS

I often feel sorry that so many quaint and pretty fancies, such as we find gravely weighed by Sir Thomas Brown in his _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, have fluttered away from our knowing modern world like so many butterflies. After all, there was little harm and often a great deal of poetry or grotesque humour in these ‘vulgar errors,’ as Sir Thomas called them. Now that the ordinary man has flung away these gaily-coloured fancies, I do not know that he is any better off with such dismal scraps of learning as are coming his way at the present time. His ancestors were fanciful fellows with little exact knowledge; his descendants may occupy themselves with a vast accumulated store of learning; meanwhile, he himself, our contemporary, has relinquished his old fancies and quaint dreams, and received little or nothing, as yet, in return. Now, barren of belief, he stands waiting for the meagre crumbs of science.

The Wandering Jew no longer creeps past our doors; we buried him long ago, and there is the end of a grand old tale. No Salamanders live in our fires. No more do ‘swans, a little before their death, sing most sweetly’; another gleam of poetry has faded from the world. We meet with the Unicorn and the Phœnix only in coats-of-arms and commercial advertisements. The Basilisk, or Cockatrice, which came from a cock’s egg, hatched under a toad or serpent, and which could kill at a distance by the power of the eye, no longer haunts the world; perhaps we do not regret him, yet the briefest glance at him, while he was looking some other way, would have been an experience worth remembering. The mermaids and mermen have long since ridden away from our coasts on their water-horses, driving their water-bulls before them. The giants have eaten the pigmies, and have themselves succumbed to indigestion. Our acetylene lights have frightened away Jack-o’-Lanthorn himself, and there is no green cheese in the moon, and very little cheese worth eating on the earth.

Does the Glastonbury thorn still blossom at Christmastide? Certainly the ass still bears the sign of the Cross on its back, and the haddock still shows the black marks left by the finger and thumb of St. Peter. Do our seamen still take cauls with them to guard against drowning? I am afraid that barnacles, when broken off from the sides of a ship, no longer turn into geese. Nor do mandrakes shriek out when they are uprooted, these days. Do our country girls still put the Bible, with sixpence between the pages of Ruth, under their pillows at night, in order to dream of their future husbands? How many of us put bay leaves under our pillows so that we may have true dreams?

Sneezing, in our time, does not call for a blessing. Nor do we bless the moon when it is at the full, nor ask our ladies to drop it a curtsey at the time of its rebirth. Omens trouble us no longer; it does not matter how we put on our stockings and shoes, or, at least, we do not feel that good or ill fortune is bound up with the order of our dressing. We do not attempt to read our destiny in the leaping flames on the hearth, nor look for purses and coffins in the coals that fly out from time to time. On the rare occasions when we see a lighted candle, we do not expect to find it presageful, and we are not likely to try divination from the behaviour of the gas or electric light. A tingling ear, an itching nose, a burning cheek, and other little pranks of the blood and nerves pass as a jest among us. We allow no trafficking with amulets and charms, except as the merest decoration, and we attempt to read the future only through our pass-books. We leave Fate severely alone, not because we think that it is of no importance, but because our lives do not seem of sufficient consequence to be meddled with; wherein we are more modest than our forefathers, but also, I think, more miserable.

All these quaint beliefs have gone in the wind, and it is well, for the world cannot stand still. As I have said before, there was little harm in them, and often a great deal of poetry; they have furnished some good folk, high and low, with many a heartening tale for the chimney-corner; their weft of phantasy has been woven into many a fine ballad or romance. But, shrinking from the fierce light of Truth, these fanciful notions left us long ago.

Yet we must not hasten to plume ourselves. Have we not our own over-ripe crop of errors? Are we not for ever swallowing lies a thousand times more hurtful than the old pleasing or idle fancies? We cannot weave immortal romances out of the woof of falsehood that comes to us now; if we want tales, we must hire some fellow to put his tongue in his cheek and mechanically turn out volume after volume of ‘bright fiction.’ We cannot believe in the Salamander, a poetical notion, but we are always ready to take it on trust that Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who votes for us, is a very great hero, and Mr. Greatheart, who keeps his own counsel, is a very deep scoundrel.

The old fancies were sustained by the people’s sense of wonder; they arose naturally and no one benefited by them, except an occasional sorcerer. Our vulgar errors are not a natural growth, but are forced upon us by the cunning and powerful members, who tell us what we are to believe. We do not acknowledge the Basilisk, with his deadly stare, but we have still a touching faith in Such-and-Such, the scientific reformer, with his insufferable jargon. We do not put bayleaves under our pillows to have true dreams, but we put the _Daily Dope_ on our breakfast-tables so that we may have false ones. And we are too apt to believe that (in the fine phrase of a modern novelist) ‘we are all very fine people,’ which is a very vulgar error indeed, and more mischievous than Jack-o’-Lanthorn and more deadly than the Cockatrice.

ON GOSSIP

Any and every kind of tittle-tattle goes by the name of gossip, no matter whether the subject is the price of cauliflowers, or the foreign policy of Chile, or--darkening to scandal--the weather. In this place, I would limit gossip to that discussion of other people’s characters and affairs which is so well known to us, and to every other society. And I would call it scandal and have done with it, only scandal is a dog with a very bad name, while gossip still capers and frisks, unchecked though not encouraged. There is also this distinction: we--that is, you and I--may condescend to gossip: it is the others who talk scandal.

Now this personal kind of gossip is everywhere condemned and is everywhere an unfailing recreation. It began with the wild gestures and uncouth jabbering of our remote ancestors, squatting in their caves; perhaps it will end only when the last fire is quenched. Wise men, priests, philosophers, and prophets have thundered against it, but their very imprecations only floated about as flotsam and jetsam on the vast ocean of gossip; their very names have come down to us only as a whispered rumour. The stream of talk flows on, and as yet no denunciations have dammed it up. Gossip is an endless game without rules; a thing untouched by changing fashions and varying modes of thought; one of the few everlasting diversions of humanity. Men, who have had more say in public if less in private, have always been prompt to accuse women of devoting too much of their time and energy to this dubious sport. Gossip, they have declared, is woman’s greatest pastime. But here at least our feminists, who have spluttered over so many imaginary wrongs, have passed by one undoubted grievance, for the truth is, men are as much given to gossiping as women. Man’s talk may sound more important because it involves wider interests, yet a good deal of it is nothing more nor less than gossip.

Now it seems to me that in this perpetual chatter about other people, which we all hasten to denounce, but which gives all of us pleasure at some time or other, our delight springs, broadly speaking, from two main sources, one of which is good and the other bad. And according to which predominates gossip may be described as profitable or hurtful to those people concerned in it.

The good side of gossip arises out of that eager, seemingly insatiable curiosity which distinguishes men from the brutes and civilised men from savages. Much of our idlest chatter is secretly leavened by this curiosity, which is in its purest form a noble thing. For what is the pursuit of knowledge but the play of a splendid but entirely irrational inquisitiveness? Most of the higher branches of knowledge, metaphysics, pure mathematics, and so on, serve no practical purpose; sober philosophers and studious mathematicians are in reality the wildest of fellows, for ever pursuing a laborious quest into the absolute Unknown. A great deal of this fine curiosity goes to the making of gossip, which is something more than a casual exchange of news. When we talk over the Smiths and the Browns, not only do we record events, but we examine motives and estimate character, and in a roundabout way we exchange ideas. The greatest historian can do little more; his subject is of more importance, that is all. The difference between Mrs. Jones giving the real reason why the Johnsons left the town so suddenly, and Professor Jones, writing the _Life and Times of Cardinal Richelieu_, is one of degree only; both are undertaking the same kind of work, and probably both are stirred by the same motives. We are all historians without knowing it.

Our gossip and scandal is a grub, which in a hundred years’ time, with the advent of the historian, will become a chrysalis; and in four or five hundred years’ time, the hard shell will be burst open, and there will be seen the winged splendour of epic poetry or romantic drama. Have not all the subjects of history and epic poetry once been nothing more than eager talk in the court or the kitchen? ‘Have you heard the latest?’--the cry went: then followed the pretty little scandal of Helen, wife of Menelaus, and the Troy affair; or perhaps a full account of that queer business of Prince Hamlet at the Court of Denmark; or the whole story of those strange doings at Verona, in which Montague’s son, young Romeo, cut such a figure. The names and stories that were whispered in ante-rooms and bawled out in taverns, centuries ago, will yet provoke future historians, fire poets and romancers yet unborn, and will yet move unknown generations to wild laughter and tears, to anger and pity. How many noble studies have arisen out of this eternal curiosity of men! How many lovely things have flowered from this common soil of Gossip!