Part 17 (1/2)
”And shall we always be singing?” I persisted.
”Yes, you will be so happy, you will always want to sing.”
”Shan't I ever get tired?”
”No, you will never get tired, and you will never get sleepy or hungry or thirsty.”
”And does it go on like that for ever?”
”Yes, for ever and ever.”
”Will it go on for a million years?”
”Yes, a million years, and then another million years, and then another million years after that. There will never be any end to it.”
I can remember to this day the agony of those nights, when I would lie awake, thinking of this endless heaven, from which there seemed to be no possible escape. For the other place was equally eternal, or I might have been tempted to seek refuge there.
We grown-up folk, our brains dulled by the slowly acquired habit of not thinking, do wrong to torture children with these awful themes.
Eternity, Heaven, h.e.l.l are meaningless words to us. We repeat them, as we gabble our prayers, telling our smug, self-satisfied selves that we are miserable sinners. But to the child, the ”intelligent stranger” in the land, seeking to know, they are fearful realities. If you doubt me, Reader, stand by yourself, beneath the stars, one night, and SOLVE this thought, Eternity. Your next address shall be the County Lunatic Asylum.
My actively inclined French friend held cheerier views than are common of man's life beyond the grave. His belief was that we were destined to constant change, to everlasting work. We were to pa.s.s through the older planets, to labour in the greater suns.
But for such advanced career a more capable being was needed. No one of us was sufficient, he argued, to be granted a future existence all to himself. His idea was that two or three or four of us, according to our intrinsic value, would be combined to make a new and more important individuality, fitted for a higher existence. Man, he pointed out, was already a collection of the beasts. ”You and I,” he would say, tapping first my chest and then his own, ”we have them all here--the ape, the tiger, the pig, the motherly hen, the gamec.o.c.k, the good ant; we are all, rolled into one. So the man of the future, he will be made up of many men--the courage of one, the wisdom of another, the kindliness of a third.”
”Take a City man,” he would continue, ”say the Lord Mayor; add to him a poet, say Swinburne; mix them with a religious enthusiast, say General Booth. There you will have the man fit for the higher life.”
Garibaldi and Bismarck, he held, should make a very fine mixture, correcting one another; if needful, extract of Ibsen might be added, as seasoning. He thought that Irish politicians would mix admirably with Scotch divines; that Oxford Dons would go well with lady novelists. He was convinced that Count Tolstoi, a few Gaiety Johnnies (we called them ”mashers” in those days), together with a humourist--he was kind enough to suggest myself--would produce something very choice. Queen Elizabeth, he fancied, was probably being reserved to go--let us hope in the long distant future--with Ouida. It sounds a whimsical theory, set down here in my words, not his; but the old fellow was so much in earnest that few of us ever thought to laugh as he talked. Indeed, there were moments on starry nights, as walking home from the office, we would pause on Waterloo Bridge to enjoy the witchery of the long line of the Embankment lights, when I could almost believe, as I listened to him, in the not impossibility of his dreams.
Even as regards this world, it would often be a gain, one thinks, and no loss, if some half-dozen of us were rolled together, or boiled down, or whatever the process necessary might be, and something made out of us in that way.
Have not you, my fair Reader, sometimes thought to yourself what a delightful husband Tom this, plus Harry that, plus d.i.c.k the other, would make? Tom is always so cheerful and good-tempered, yet you feel that in the serious moments of life he would be lacking. A delightful hubby when you felt merry, yes; but you would not go to him for comfort and strength in your troubles, now would you? No, in your hour of sorrow, how good it would be to have near you grave, earnest Harry. He is a ”good sort,” Harry. Perhaps, after all, he is the best of the three--solid, staunch, and true. What a pity he is just a trifle commonplace and unambitious. Your friends, not knowing his sterling hidden qualities, would hardly envy you; and a husband that no other girl envies you--well, that would hardly be satisfactory, would it?
d.i.c.k, on the other hand, is clever and brilliant. He will make his way; there will come a day, you are convinced, when a woman will be proud to bear his name. If only he were not so self-centred, if only he were more sympathetic.
But a combination of the three, or rather of the best qualities of the three--Tom's good temper, Harry's tender strength, d.i.c.k's brilliant masterfulness: that is the man who would be worthy of you.
The woman David Copperfield wanted was Agnes and Dora rolled into one.
He had to take them one after the other, which was not so nice. And did he really love Agnes, Mr. d.i.c.kens; or merely feel he ought to? Forgive me, but I am doubtful concerning that second marriage of Copperfield's.
Come, strictly between ourselves, Mr. d.i.c.kens, was not David, good human soul! now and again a wee bit bored by the immaculate Agnes? She made him an excellent wife, I am sure. SHE never ordered oysters by the barrel, unopened. It would, on any day, have been safe to ask Traddles home to dinner; in fact, Sophie and the whole rose-garden might have accompanied him, Agnes would have been equal to the occasion. The dinner would have been perfectly cooked and served, and Agnes' sweet smile would have pervaded the meal. But AFTER the dinner, when David and Traddles sat smoking alone, while from the drawing-room drifted down the notes of high-cla.s.s, elevating music, played by the saintly Agnes, did they never, glancing covertly towards the empty chair between them, see the laughing, curl-framed face of a very foolish little woman--one of those foolish little women that a wise man thanks G.o.d for making--and wish, in spite of all, that it were flesh and blood, not shadow?
Oh, you foolish wise folk, who would remodel human nature! Cannot you see how great is the work given unto childish hands? Think you that in well-ordered housekeeping and high-cla.s.s conversation lies the whole making of a man? Foolish Dora, fas.h.i.+oned by clever old magician Nature, who knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about those oysters nor the underdone mutton, little woman. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us; and, now and then, when a windfall comes our way, we will dine together at a moderate-priced restaurant where these things are managed even better.
Your work, Dear, is to teach us gentleness and kindliness. Lay your curls here, child. It is from such as you that we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folk sneer at you; foolish wise folk would pull up the useless lilies, the needless roses, from the garden, would plant in their places only serviceable wholesome cabbage. But the Gardener knowing better, plants the silly short-lived flowers; foolish wise folk, asking for what purpose.
As for Agnes, Mr. d.i.c.kens, do you know what she always makes me think of? You will not mind my saying?--the woman one reads about. Frankly, I don't believe in her. I do not refer to Agnes in particular, but the woman of whom she is a type, the faultless woman we read of. Women have many faults, but, thank G.o.d, they have one redeeming virtue--they are none of them faultless.
But the heroine of fiction! oh, a terrible dragon of virtue is she. May heaven preserve us poor men, undeserving though we be, from a life with the heroine of fiction. She is all soul, and heart, and intellect, with never a bit of human nature to catch hold of her by. Her beauty, it appals one, it is so painfully indescribable. Whence comes she, whither goes she, why do we never meet her like? Of women I know a goodish few, and I look among them for her prototype; but I find it not. They are charming, they are beautiful, all these women that I know. It would not be right for me to tell you, Ladies, the esteem and veneration with which I regard you all. You yourselves, blus.h.i.+ng, would be the first to cheek my ardour. But yet, dear Ladies, seen even through my eyes, you come not near the ladies that I read about. You are not--if I may be permitted an expressive vulgarism--in the same street with them. Your beauty I can look upon, and retain my reason--for whatever value that may be to me. Your conversation, I admit, is clever and brilliant in the extreme; your knowledge vast and various; your culture quite Bostonian; yet you do not--I hardly know how to express it--you do not s.h.i.+ne with the sixteen full-moon-power of the heroine of fiction. You do not--and I thank you for it--impress me with the idea that you are the only women on earth. You, even you, possess tempers of your own. I am inclined to think you take an interest in your clothes. I would not be sure, even, that you do not mingle a little of ”your own hair” (you know what I mean) with the hair of your head. There is in your temperament a vein of vanity, a suggestion of selfishness, a spice of laziness. I have known you a trifle unreasonable, a little inconsiderate, slightly exacting.
Unlike the heroine of fiction, you have a certain number of human appet.i.tes and instincts; a few human follies, perhaps, a human fault, or shall we say two? In short, dear Ladies, you also, even as we men, are the children of Adam and Eve. Tell me, if you know, where I may meet with this supernatural sister of yours, this woman that one reads about.
She never keeps any one waiting while she does her back hair, she is never indignant with everybody else in the house because she cannot find her own boots, she never scolds the servants, she is never cross with the children, she never slams the door, she is never jealous of her younger sister, she never lingers at the gate with any cousin but the right one.
Dear me, where DO they keep them, these women that one reads about? I suppose where they keep the pretty girl of Art. You have seen her, have you not, Reader, the pretty girl in the picture? She leaps the six-barred gate with a yard and a half to spare, turning round in her saddle the while to make some smiling remark to the comic man behind, who, of course, is standing on his head in the ditch. She floats gracefully off Dieppe on stormy mornings. Her baigneuse--generally of chiffon and old point lace--has not lost a curve. The older ladies, bathing round her, look wet. Their dress clings damply to their limbs.