Chapter V (2)

“Ah, sir, wisdom was ever deluding me, for I’m not more than half done—like a poor potato. First, of course, there’s the things you don’t know; then there’s the things you do know but can’t understand; then there’s the things you do understand but which don’t matter. Saving your presence, sir, there’s a heap of understanding to be done before you’re anything but a fool.”

“He is not a fool who is happy; mortal pleasures decline as the bubble of knowledge grows; that’s the long of it, and it’s the short of it too.”

Simon was silent, adding up the buttons on the scholar’s tidy coat. He counted five of them, they shone like gold and looked—oh, very well they looked.

“I was happy once,” then he said. “Ah, and I remember I was happy twice, yes, and three times I was happy in this world. I was not happy since....”

“Yes, since what?” the scholar asked him: but the old man was dumb.

“Tell me, Simon, what made you happy.”

“I was happy, sir, when I first dwelled in the wood and made with my own hands a house of boards. Why—you’d not believe—but it had a chimney then, and was no ways draughty then, and was not creaky then, nor damp then; a good fine house with a door and a half door, birds about it, magpies and tits and fine boy blackbirds! A lake with a score of mallards on it! And for conies and cushats you could take your oath of a meal any day in the week, and twice a day, any day. But ’tis falling with age and weather now, I see it go; the rain wears it, the moss rots it, the wind shatters it. The lake’s as dry as a hen’s foot, and the forest changes. What was bushes is timber now, and what was timber is ashes; the forest has spread around me and the birds have left me and gone to the border. As for conies, there’s no contriving with those foxes and weasels so cunning at them; not the trace of a tail, sir, nothing but snakes and snails now. I was happy when I built that house; that’s what I was; I was then.”

“Ah, so, indeed. And the other times—the second time?”

“Why, that was the time I washed my feet in the lake and I saw....”

“What, man Simon, what did you see?”

Simon passed his hand across his brow. “I see ... ah, well, I saw it. I saw something ... but I forget.”

“Ah, you have forgotten your happiness,” said the scholar in a soft voice: “Yes, yes.” He went on speaking to himself: “Death is a naked Ethiope with flaming hair. I don’t want to live for ever, but I want to live.”

He took off his coat and gave it to Simon, who thanked him and put it on. It seemed a very heavy coat.

“Maybe,” the old man mumbled, “I’ll get a lift on the way.”

“May it be so. And good-bye to you,” said the scholar, “’Tis as fine a day as ever came out of Eden.”

They parted so, and old Simon had not been gone an hour when the scholar gave a great shout and followed after him frantic, but he could not come up with him, for Simon had gone up in a lift to heaven—a lift with cushions in it, and a bright young girl guiding the lift, dressed like a lad, but with a sad stern voice.

Several people got into the lift, the most of them old ladies, but no children, so Simon got in too and sat on a cushion of yellow velvet. And he was near sleeping when the lift stopped of a sudden and a lady who was taken sick got out. “Drugs and lounge!” the girl called out, “Second to the right and keep straight on. Going up?”

But though there was a crowd of young people waiting nobody else got in. They slid on again, higher and much higher. Simon dropped into sleep until the girl stopped at the fourth floor: “Refreshments,” she said, “and Ladies’ Cloak Room!” All the passengers got out except Simon: he sat still until they came to the floor of heaven. There he got out, and the girl waved her hand to him and said “Good-bye.” A few people got in the lift. “Going down?” she cried. Then she slammed the door and it sank into a hole and Simon never laid an eye on it or her from that day for ever.

Now it was very pleasant where he found himself, very pleasant indeed and in no ways different from the fine parts of the earth. He went onwards and the first place he did come to was a farmhouse with a kitchen door. He knocked and it was opened. It was a large kitchen; it had a cracked stone floor and white rafters above it with hooks on them and shearing irons and a saddle. And there was a smoking hearth and an open oven with bright charred wood burning in it, a dairy shelf beyond with pans of cream, a bed of bracken for a dog in the corner by the pump, and a pet sheep wandering about. It had the number 100 painted on its fleece and a loud bell was tinkling round its neck. There was a fine young girl stood smiling at him; the plait of her hair was thick as a rope of onions and as shining with the glint in it. Simon said to her: “I’ve been a-walking, and I seem to have got a bit dampified like, just a touch o’ damp in the knees of my breeches, that’s all.”

The girl pointed to the fire and he went and dried himself. Then he asked the girl if she would give him a true direction, and so she gave him a true direction and on he went. And he had not gone far when he saw a place just like the old forest he had come from, but all was delightful and sunny, and there was the house he had once built, as beautiful and new, with the shining varnish on the door, a pool beyond, faggots and logs in the yard, and inside the white shelves were loaded with good food, the fire burning with a sweet smell, and a bed of rest in the ingle. Soon he was slaking his hunger; then he hung up his coat on a peg of iron, and creeping into the bed he went into the long sleep in his old happy way of sleeping.

But all this time the scholar was following after him, searching under the sun, and from here to there, calling out high and low, and questioning the travelling people: had they seen a simple man, an old man who had been but three times happy?—but not a one had seen him. He was cut to the heart with anxiety, with remorse, and with sorrow, for in a secret pocket of the coat he had given to Simon he had left—unbeknown, but he remembered it now—a wallet of sowskin, full of his own black sins, and nothing to distinguish them in any way from any other man’s. It was a dark load upon his soul that the poor man might be punished with an everlasting punishment for having such a tangle of wickedness on him and he unable to explain it. An old man like that, who had been happy but the three times! He enquired upon his right hand, and upon his left hand he enquired, but not a walking creature had seen him and the scholar was mad vexed with shame. Well, he went on, and on he went, but he did not get a lift on the way. He went howling and whistling like a man who would frighten all the wild creatures down into the earth, and at last he came by a back way to the borders of heaven. There he was, all of a day behind the man he was pursuing, in a great wilderness of trees. It began to rain, a soft meandering fall that you would hardly notice for rain, but the birds gave over their whistling and a strong silence grew everywhere, hushing things. His footfall as he stumbled through briars and the wild gardens of the wood seemed to thump the whole earth, and he could hear all the small noises like the tick of a beetle and the gasping of worms. In a grove of raspberry canes he stood like a stock with the wonder of that stillness. Clouds did not move, he could but feel the rain that he could not see. Each leaf hung stiff as if it was frozen, though it was summer. Not a living thing was to be seen, and the things that were not living were not more dead than those that lived but were so secret still. He picked a few berries from the canes, and from every bush as he pulled and shook it a butterfly or a moth dropped or fluttered away, quiet and most ghostly. “An old bit of a man”—he kept repeating in his mind—“with three bits of joy, an old bit of a man.”

Suddenly a turtle dove with clatter enough for a goose came to a tree beside him and spoke to him! A young dove, and it crooed on the tree branch, croo, croo, croo, and after each cadence it heaved the air into its lungs again with a tiny sob. Well, it would be no good telling what the bird said to the scholar, for none would believe it, they could not; but speak it did. After that the scholar tramped on, and on again, until he heard voices close ahead from a group of frisky boys who were chasing a small bird that could hardly fly. As the scholar came up with them one of the boys dashed out with his cap and fell upon the fledgling and thrust it in his pocket.

Now, by God, that scholar was angry, for a thing he liked was the notes of birds tossed from bush to bush like aery bubbles, and he wrangled with the boy until the little lad took the crumpled bird out of his pocket and flung it saucily in the air as you would fling a stone. Down dropped the bird into a gulley as if it was shot, and the boys fled off. The scholar peered into the gulley, but he could not see the young finch, not a feather of it. Then he jumped into the gulley and stood quiet, listening to hear it cheep, for sure a wing would be broken, or a foot. But nothing could he see, nothing, though he could hear hundreds of grasshoppers leaping among the dead leaves with a noise like pattering rain. So he turned away, but as he shifted his foot he saw beneath it the shattered bird: he had jumped upon it himself and destroyed it. He could not pick it up, it was bloody; he leaned over it, sighing: “Poor bird, poor bird, and is this your road to heaven? Or do you never share the heaven that you make?” There was a little noise then added to the leaping of the grasshoppers—it was the patter of tears he was shedding from himself. Well, when the scholar heard that he gave a good shout of laughter, and he was soon contented, forgetting the bird. He was for sitting down awhile but the thought of the old man Simon, with that sinful wallet—a rare budget of his own mad joys—urged him on till he came by the end of the wood, the rain ceasing, and beyond him the harmony of a flock roaming and bleating. Every ewe of the flock had numbers painted on it, that ran all the way up to ninety and nine.

Soon he came to the farmhouse and the kitchen and the odd sheep and a kind girl with a knot of hair as thick as a twist of bread. He told her the thing that was upon his conscience.

“Help me to come up with him, for I’m a day to the bad, and what shall I do? I gave him a coat, an old coat, and all my sins were hidden in it, but I’d forgotten them. He was an old quavering man with but three spells of happiness in the earthly world.” He begged her to direct him to the man Simon. The smiling girl gave him a good direction, the joyful scholar hurried out and on, and in a score of minutes he was peeping in the fine hut, with his hand on the latch of the half door, and Simon snoring in bed, a quiet decent snore.

“Simon!” he calls, but he didn’t wake. He shook him, but he didn’t budge. There was the coat hanging down from the iron peg, so he went to it and searched it and took out the wallet. But when he opened it—a black sowskin wallet it was, very strong with good straps—his sins were all escaped from it, not one little sin left in the least chink of the wallet, it was empty as a drum. The scholar knew something was wrong, for it was full once, and quite full.

“Well, now,” thought he, scratching his head and searching his mind, “did I make a mistake of it? Would they be by chance in the very coat that is on me now, for I’ve not another coat to my name?” He gave it a good strong search, in the patch pockets and the inside pockets and in the purse on his belt, but there was not the scrap of a tail of a sin of any sort, good or bad, in that coat, and all he found was a few cachous against the roughening of his voice.

“Did I make another mistake of it,” he says again, “and put those solemn sins in the fob of my fancy waistcoat? Where are they?” he shouts out.

Simon lifted his head out of sleeping for a moment. “It was that girl with the hair,” Simon said. “She took them from the wallet—they are not allowed in this place—and threw them in the pigwash.”

With that he was asleep again, snoring his decent snore.

“Glory be to God,” said the scholar, “am I not a great fool to have come to heaven looking for my sins!”

He took the empty wallet and tiptoed back to the world, and if he is not with the saints yet, it is with the saints he will be one day—barring he gets another budget of sins in his eager joy. And _that_ I wouldn’t deny him.

_The Tiger_

The tiger was coming at last; the almost fabulous beast, the subject of so much conjecture for so many months, was at the docks twenty miles away. Yak Pedersen had gone to fetch it, and Barnabe Woolf’s Menagerie was about to complete its unrivalled collection by the addition of a full-grown Indian tiger of indescribable ferocity, newly trapped in the forest and now for the first time exhibited, and so on, and so on. All of which, as it happened, was true. On the previous day Pedersen the Dane and some helpers had taken a brand new four-horse exhibition waggon, painted and carved with extremely legendary tigers lapped in blood—even the bars were gilded—to convey this unmatchable beast to its new masters. The show had had to wait a long time for a tiger, but it had got a beauty at last, a terror indeed by all accounts, though it is not to be imagined that everything recorded of it by Barnabe Woolf was truth and nothing but truth. Showmen do not work in that way.

Yak Pedersen was the tamer and menagerie manager, a tall, blonde, angular man about thirty-five, of dissolute and savage blood himself, with the very ample kind of moustache that bald men often develop; yes, bald, intemperate, lewd, and an interminable smoker of Cuban cigarettes, which seemed constantly to threaten a conflagration in that moustache. Marie the Cossack hated him, but Yak loved her with a fierce deep passion. Nobody knew why she was called Marie the Cossack. She came from Canning Town—everybody knew that, and her proper name was Fascota, Mrs. Fascota, wife of Jimmy Fascota, who was the architect and carpenter and builder of the show. Jimmy was not much to look at, so little in fact that you couldn’t help wondering what it was Marie had seen in him when she could have had the King of Poland, as you might say, almost for the asking. But still Jimmy was the boss ganger of the show, and even that young gentleman in frock coat and silk hat who paraded the platform entrance to the arena and rhodomontadoed you into it, often against your will, by the seductive recital of the seven ghastly wonders of the world, all certainly to be seen, to be seen inside, waiting to be seen, must be seen, roll up—even he was subject to the commands of Jimmy Fascota when the time came to dismantle and pack up the show, although the transfer of his activities involved him temporarily in a change, a horrid change, of attire and language. Marie was not a lady, but she was not for Pedersen anyway. She swore like a factory foreman, or a young soldier, and when she got tipsy she was full of freedoms. By the power of God she was beautiful, and by the same gracious power she was virtuous. Her husband knew it; he knew all about master Pedersen’s passion, too, and it did not even interest him. Marie did feats in the lion cages, whipping poor decrepit beasts, desiccated by captivity, through a hoop or over a stick of wood and other kindergarten disportings; but there you are, people must live, and Marie lived that way. Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.

“God Almighty!” he would groan, “she is not good for me, this Marie. What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.”

So you see the man really loved her.

When Pedersen returned from the docks the car with its captive was dragged to a vacant place in the arena, and the wooden front panel was let down from the bars. The marvellous tiger was revealed. It sprung into a crouching attitude as the light surprised the appalling beauty of its smooth fox-coloured coat, its ebony stripes, and snowy pads and belly. The Dane, who was slightly drunk, uttered a yell and struck the bars of the cage with his whip. The tiger did not blench, but all the malice and ferocity in the world seemed to congregate in its eyes and impress with a pride and ruthless grandeur the colossal brutality of its face. It did not move its body, but its tail gradually stiffened out behind it as stealthily as fire moves in the forest undergrowth, and the hair along the ridge of its back rose in fearful spikes. There was the slightest possible distension of the lips, and it fixed its marvellous baleful gaze upon Pedersen. The show people were hushed into silence, and even Pedersen was startled. He showered a few howls and curses at the tiger, who never ceased to fix him with eyes that had something of contempt in them and something of a horrible presage. Pedersen was thrusting a sharp spike through the bars when a figure stepped from the crowd. It was an old negro, a hunchback with a white beard, dressed in a red fez cap, long tunic of buff cotton, and blue trousers. He laid both his hands on the spike and shook his head deprecatingly, smiling all the while. He said nothing, but there was nothing he could say—he was dumb.

“Let him alone, Yak; let the tiger alone, Yak!” cried Barnabe Woolf. “What is this feller?”

Pedersen with some reluctance turned from the cage and said: “He is come with the animal.”

“So?” said Barnabe. “Vell, he can go. Ve do not vant any black feller.”

“He cannot speak—no tongue—it is gone,” Yak replied.

“No tongue! Vot, have they cut him out?”

“I should think it,” said the tamer. “There was two of them, a white keeper, but that man fell off the ship one night and they do not see him any more. This chap he feed it and look after it. No information of him, dumb you see, and a foreigner; don’t understand. He have no letters, no money, no name, nowheres to go. Dumb, you see, he has nothing, nothing but a flote. The captain said to take him away with us. Give a job to him, he is a proposition.”

“Vot is he got you say?”

“Flote.” Pedersen imitated with his fingers and lips the actions of a flute-player.

“O ya, a vloot! Vell, ve don’t want no vloots now; ve feeds our own tigers, don’t ve, Yak?” And Mr. Woolf, oily but hearty—and well he might be so for he was beautifully rotund, hair like satin, extravagantly clothed, and rich with jewellery—surveyed first with a contemplative grin, and then compassionately, the figure of the old negro, who stood unsmiling with his hands crossed humbly before him. Mr. Woolf was usually perspiring, and usually being addressed by perspiring workmen, upon whom he bellowed orders and such anathemas as reduced each recipient to the importance of a potato, and gave him the aspect of a consumptive sheep. But to-day Mr. Woolf was affable and calm. He took his cigar from his mouth and poured a flood of rich grey air from his lips. “O ya, look after him a day, or a couple of days.” At that one of the boys began to lead the hunchback away as if he were a horse. “Come on, Pompoon,” he cried, and thenceforward the unknown negro was called by that name.

Throughout the day the tiger was the sensation of the show, and the record of its ferocity attached to the cage received thrilling confirmation whenever Pedersen appeared before the bars. The sublime concentration of hatred was so intense that children screamed, women shuddered, and even men held their breath in awe. At the end of the day the beasts were fed. Great hacks of bloody flesh were forked into the bottoms of the cages, the hungry victims pouncing and snarling in ecstasy. But no sooner were they served than the front panel of each cage was swung up, and the inmate in the seclusion of his den slaked his appetite and slept. When the public had departed the lights were put out and the doors of the arena closed. Outside in the darkness only its great rounded oblong shape could be discerned, built high of painted wood, roofed with striped canvas, and adorned with flags. Beyond this matchbox coliseum was a row of caravans, tents, naphtha flares, and buckets of fire on which suppers were cooking. Groups of the show people sat or lounged about, talking, cackling with laughter, and even singing. No one observed the figure of Pompoon as he passed silently on the grass. The outcast, doubly chained to his solitariness by the misfortune of dumbness and strange nationality, was hungry. He had not tasted food that day. He could not understand it any more than he could understand the speech of these people. In the end caravan, nearest the arena, he heard a woman quietly singing. He drew a shining metal flute from his breast, but stood silently until the singer ceased. Then he repeated the tune very accurately and sweetly on his flute. Marie the Cossack came to the door in her green silk tights and high black boots with gilded fringes; her black velvet doublet had plenty of gilded buttons upon it. She was a big, finely moulded woman, her dark and splendid features were burned healthily by the sun. In each of her ears two gold discs tinkled and gleamed as she moved. Pompoon opened his mouth very widely and supplicatingly; he put his hand upon his stomach and rolled his eyes so dreadfully that Mrs. Fascota sent her little daughter Sophy down to him with a basin of soup and potatoes. Sophy was partly undressed, in bare feet and red petticoat. She stood gnawing the bone of a chicken, and grinning at the black man as he swallowed and dribbled as best he could without a spoon. She cried out: “Here, he’s going to eat the bloody basin and all, mum!” Her mother cheerfully ordered her to “give him those fraggiments, then!” The child did so, pausing now and again to laugh at the satisfied roll of the old man’s eyes. Later on Jimmy Fascota found him a couple of sacks, and Pompoon slept upon them beneath their caravan. The last thing the old man saw was Pedersen, carrying a naphtha flare, unlocking a small door leading into the arena, and closing it with a slam after he had entered. Soon the light went out.