Windfalls

So far from being representative of the English, they are violently unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take an average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust the sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted with egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and monosyllables, nudging each other’s knees perhaps to attract attention without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy mean between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the overbearing note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk of our affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without desiring to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without wishing to be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we have achieved that social ease which consists in the adjustment of a reasonable confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of others.

ON A FINE DAY

It’s just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren’s story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say, “It’s just like summer,” and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I’ve listened to them for half an hour and they’ve talked about nothing else.

In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only one theme: It’s just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never to forget the listening world.

In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer. There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along the turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football match, I fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the cheerful outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens and the fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard in many lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam (the leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in the vide world. “Yes, I’ve been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the ‘Oly Land,” he says. “I don’t care if I never see the ‘Oly Land again. Anybody can have the ‘Oly Land as far as I’m concerned. This is good enough for me – that is, if there’s a place for a chap that wants to get married to live in.”

Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. “Well, this is all right, ain’t it, mother?”

“Yes,” says the old lady, “it’s just like summer.”

“And to think,” continues the voice, “that there was a thick layer o’ snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn’t wonder if there’s more to come yet. To-morrow’s the first day o’ spring according to the calendar, and it stands to reason summer ain’t really come yet, you know, though it do seem like it, don’t it?”

“Yes, it’s just like summer,” repeats the old lady tranquilly.

There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are here. Weather in town is only an incident – a pleasurable incident or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella, whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour.

But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven. It is politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual diversion. You study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and watch the change of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the mood of the public. When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a fine day, or has been a cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a conventional civility. It is the formal opening of the discussion of weighty matters. It involves the prospects of potatoes and the sowing of onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of weather on the poultry and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that there is a moment of his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or indifferent to it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens to the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and secular interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a stem Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the chapel in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don’t hold wi’ work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. “I don’t hold wi’ work on Sundays,” he would repeat inflexibly.

And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward. It is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants hens. If the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an unerring instinct to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin of feathers. The hard frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes when everybody else’s escaped, and it was her hive that brought the “Isle of Wight” into our midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds that the last was a visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a death in the family – true, it was only a second cousin, but it was “in the family” – and had neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive. And of course they died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow Walsh has no patience with people who fly in the face of Providence in this way.

But of all Poor Miss Tonks’ afflictions the weather is the most unremittingly malevolent. It is either “smarty hot” or “smarty cold.” If it isn’t giving her a touch of “brownchitis,” or “a blowy feeling all up the back,” or making her feel “blubbed all over,” it is dripping through her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke, or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary life. I think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the hill-side like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even smiles, but his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the bottom he is a terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country woman no end of work, and makes her life a burden.

But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy. When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that “it is a bit better to-day.” This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays to the weather. And we translate it for her into “Yes, it’s just like summer.”

In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most part the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees are white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees which fill the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note of an aerial violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of his double bass to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way from blossom to blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is as full of the gossip of summer as the peacock butterfly that comes flitting back across the orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old Benjy, who saluted me over the hedge just now with the remark that he didn’t recall the like of this for a matter o’ seventy year. Yes, seventy year if ‘twas a day.

Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy years ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks about anything in the memory of this generation. “I be nearer a ‘underd,” he says, “than seventy,” by which I think he means that he is eighty-six. He longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see no reason why he shouldn’t live to do it, for he is an active old boy, still does a good day’s gardening and has come up the lane on this hot day at a nimble speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to have made his coffin and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from any morbid yearning for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding him off, just as the rest of us “touch wood” lest evil befall. “It’s just like summer,” he says.

“I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty…”

ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO

I see that Mr Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to women very seriously on the subject of smoking. “Would you like to see your mother smoke?” asked Mr Hicks of the Queen’s Hall audience he was addressing, and Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed feelings on this subject, and in order to find out what I really think I will write about it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby. I do not want to see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby. But neither do I want to see father doing so. If father is smoking when he nurses the baby he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs out his smoke. Do not let us drag in the baby.

The real point is in Mr Hicks’ question. Would your respect or your affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because he smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of taste which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is wasteful and unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the habit regardless of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that women must not smoke because the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that men may. He would no more say this than he would say that it is right for men to live in stuffy rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right for men to get drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of drunkenness there is no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel that it is more tragic in the case of the woman, but it is equally disgusting in both sexes.

What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men is vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women not smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom been otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle, for example, had been in Mr Hicks’ audience he would have answered the question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their pipes together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and eternity, and no one who has read his letters will doubt his love for her. There are no such letters from son to mother in all literature. And of course Mr Hicks knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be surprised to know that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of some women who smoke, and that he will be as cordial with them as with those who do not smoke.

And yet… Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of a bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to smoke. And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these now not infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I had been smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If smoking is an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the case of women as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women smoking outdoors while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an irrational fellow, said I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I replied. We are all irrational fellows. If we were brought to the judgment seat of pure reason how few of us would escape the cells.

Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke was a flag – the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got perplexed again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women – this universal claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous fact of the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag. Yet when I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it myself), flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I rejoice, I felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I came to the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too – not perhaps because they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer perceptions and traditions.

But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men, why should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their case, while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are smoking at this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in defending the propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally reprobating the conduct of the young women who are smoking in front of you, not because they are smoking, but because (like you) they are smoking in public. How do you reconcile such confusions of mind?

At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns of a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the habit. And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend differential smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position was surrendered no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in public then women could smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars then women could smoke pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women smoking pipes on the top of buses, I realised that I had not yet found a path out of the absurd bog in which I had become mentally involved.

Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young women rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was wafted with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown their cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy, languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man’s tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt the woman’s scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and wear rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity. The mind revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and be-ringed. Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks. But Disraeli was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of belated tale from the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men universally revolts against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking myself why a habit, which custom had made tolerable in the case of women, became grotesque and offensive if imagined in connection with men, I saw a way out of my puzzle. I dismissed the view that the difference of sex accounted for the different emotions awakened. It was the habit itself which was objectionable. Familiarity with it in the case of women had dulled our perceptions to the reality. It was only when we conceived the habit in an unusual connection – imagined men going about with painted and powdered faces, with rings in their ears and heavy scents on their clothes – that its essential vulgarity and uncleanness were freshly and intensely presented to the mind.

And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit in the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in the case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption of the habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against tobacco and not much to be said for it – except, of course, that we like it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to the men as well as to the women.

Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no promise. After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I, alas, am long past forty…

DOWN TOWN

Through the grey mists that hang over the water in the late autumn afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It rises from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold precipitous cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly, central peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race. As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters and between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another shadow emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass. It is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open Atlantic.

Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition. It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift transformation takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows like stars in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the topmost height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The first daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as the foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is of something slight and fanciful, of’ towering proportions but infinitely fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale from the “Arabian Nights.”

It is “down town.” It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the architectural glories of “up town” New York, the great hotels stand like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you are summoned.

But it is in “down town,” on the tip of the tongue that is put out to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the eye – Salzburg, Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis – but it is the appeal of nature supplemented by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind, that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous, and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the Atlantic. “Down town” stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the advance agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant that bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway to the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more’ lofty than the cross of St Paul’s Cathedral – square towers, honeycombed with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying up in lifts – called “elevators” for short – clicking at typewriters, performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns at the threshold of the giant.

For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which he rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon is Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure in the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high priest a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange than anything pictured by Hogarth – in the street a jostling mass of human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the street little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob below. It is the outside market of Mammon.

You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological “fault.” And at the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another “local” train to the top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.

And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be large churches, St Paul’s and Trinity, curiously like our own City churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind’s eye the vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.

And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic sea.

And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike anything else the world has to offer – the power of immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one – one in a certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to adventure.