Part 3 (1/2)
But for the vigilance of Vestries, gra.s.s would reconcile everything. When the first heat of the summer was over, a few nights of rain altered all the colour of the world. It had been the brown and russet of drought--very beautiful in landscape, but lifeless; it became a translucent, profound, and eager green. The citizen does not spend attention on it.
Why, then, is his vestry so alert, so apprehensive, so swift; in perception so instant, in execution so prompt, so silent in action, so punctual in destruction? The vestry keeps, as it were, a tryst with the gra.s.s. The ”sunny spots of greenery” are given just time enough to grow and be conspicuous, and the barrow is there, true to time, and the spade.
(To call that spade a spade hardly seems enough.)
For the gracious gra.s.s of the summer has not been content within enclosures. It has--or would have--cheered up and sweetened everything.
Over asphalte it could not prevail, and it has prettily yielded to asphalte, taking leave to live and let live. It has taken the little strip of ground next to the asphalte, between this and the kerb, and again the refuse of ground between the kerb and the roadway. The man of business walking to the station with a bag could have his asphalte all unbroken, and the butcher's boy in his cart was not annoyed. The gra.s.s seemed to respect everybody's views, and to take only what n.o.body wanted.
But these gay and lowly ways will not escape a vestry.
There is no wall so impregnable or so vulgar, but a summer's gra.s.s will attempt it. It will try to persuade the yellow brick, to win the purple slate, to reconcile stucco. Outside the authority of the suburbs it has put a luminous touch everywhere. The thatch of cottages has given it an opportunity. It has perched and alighted in showers and flocks. It has crept and crawled, and stolen its hour. It has made haste between the ruts of cart wheels, so they were not too frequent. It has been stealthy in a good cause, and bold out of reach. It has been the most defiant runaway, and the meekest lingerer. It has been universal, ready and potential in every place, so that the happy country--village and field alike--has been all gra.s.s, with mere exceptions.
And all this the gra.s.s does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of gra.s.s is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and completion. He proves this in his lawns. Not only does he cut the coming gra.s.s-flower off by the stalk, but he does not allow the mere leaf--the blade--to perfect itself. He will not have it a ”blade” at all; he cuts its top away as never sword or sabre was shaped. All the beauty of a blade of gra.s.s is that the organic shape has the intention of ending in a point. Surely no one at all aware of the beauty of lines ought to be ignorant of the significance and grace of manifest intention, which rules a living line from its beginning, even though the intention be towards a point while the first spring of the line is towards an opening curve. But man does not care for intention; he mows it. Nor does he care for att.i.tude; he rolls it. In a word, he proves to the gra.s.s, as plainly as deeds can do so, that it is not to his mind. The rolling, especially, seems to be a violent way of showing that the universal gra.s.s interrupted by the life of the Englishman is not as he would have it. Besides, when he wishes to deride a city, he calls it gra.s.s-grown.
But his suburbs shall not, if he can help it, be gra.s.s-grown. They shall not be like a mere Pisa. Highgate shall not so, nor Peckham.
A WOMAN IN GREY
The mothers of Professors were indulged in the practice of jumping at conclusions, and were praised for their impatience of the slow process of reason.
Professors have written of the mental habits of women as though they acc.u.mulated generation by generation upon women, and pa.s.sed over their sons. Professors take it for granted, obviously by some process other than the slow process of reason, that women derive from their mothers and grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers. This, for instance, was written lately: ”This power [it matters not what] would be about equal in the two s.e.xes but for the influence of heredity, which turns the scale in favour of the woman, as for long generations the surroundings and conditions of life of the female s.e.x have developed in her a greater degree of the power in question than circ.u.mstances have required from men.” ”Long generations” of subjection are, strangely enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the s.h.i.+fts of women to-day.
But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a slovenly indulgence. It tampers with their intelligence by fostering the ignorance of women.
And yet Shakespeare confessed the partic.i.p.ation of man and woman in their common heritage. It is Ca.s.sius who speaks:
”Have you not love enough to bear with me When that rash humour which my mother gave me Makes me forgetful?”
And Brutus who replies:
”Yes, Ca.s.sius, and from henceforth When you are over-earnest with your Brutus He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so.”
Dryden confessed it also in his praises of Anne Killigrew:
”If by traduction came thy mind, Our wonder is the less to find A soul so charming from a stock so good.
Thy father was transfused into thy blood.”
The winning of Waterloo upon the Eton playgrounds is very well; but there have been some other, and happily minor, fields that were not won--that were more or less lost. Where did this loss take place, if the gains were secured at football? This inquiry is not quite so cheerful as the other. But while the victories were once going forward in the playground, the defeats or disasters were once going forward in some other place, presumably. And this was surely the place that was not a playground, the place where the future wives of the football players were sitting still while their future husbands were playing football.
This is the train of thought that followed the grey figure of a woman on a bicycle in Oxford Street. She had an enormous and top-heavy omnibus at her back. All the things on the near side of the street--the things going her way--were going at different paces, in two streams, overtaking and being overtaken. The tributary streets shot omnibuses and carriages, cabs and carts--some to go her own way, some with an impetus that carried them curving into the other current, and other some making a straight line right across Oxford Street into the street opposite. Besides all the unequal movement, there were the stoppings. It was a delicate tangle to keep from knotting. The nerves of the mouths of horses bore the whole charge and answered it, as they do every day.
The woman in grey, quite alone, was immediately dependent on no nerves but her own, which almost made her machine sensitive. But this alertness was joined to such perfect composure as no flutter of a moment disturbed.
There was the steadiness of sleep, and a vigilance more than that of an ordinary waking.
At the same time, the woman was doing what nothing in her youth could well have prepared her for. She must have pa.s.sed a childhood unlike the ordinary girl's childhood, if her steadiness or her alertness had ever been educated, if she had been rebuked for cowardice, for the egoistic distrust of general rules, or for claims of exceptional chances. Yet here she was, trusting not only herself but a mult.i.tude of other people; taking her equal risk; giving a watchful confidence to averages--that last, perhaps, her strangest and greatest success.
No exceptions were hers, no appeals, and no forewarnings. She evidently had not in her mind a single phrase, familiar to women, made to express no confidence except in accidents, and to proclaim a prudent foresight of the less probable event. No woman could ride a bicycle along Oxford Street with any such baggage as that about her.
The woman in grey had a watchful confidence not only in a mult.i.tude of men but in a mult.i.tude of things. And it is very hard for any untrained human being to practise confidence in things in motion--things full of force, and, what is worse, of forces. Moreover, there is a supreme difficulty for a mind accustomed to search timorously for some little place of insignificant rest on any accessible point of stable equilibrium; and that is the difficulty of holding itself nimbly secure in an equilibrium that is unstable. Who can deny that women are generally used to look about for the little stationary repose just described? Whether in intellectual or in spiritual things, they do not often live without it.