First and Last (21 page)

The great dead are first forgotten in their physical habit; we lose the nature of their voices, we forget their sympathies and their affections. Bit by bit all that they intended to be eternal slips back into the common thing around. A blurred image, growing fainter and fainter, lingers. At last the person vanishes, and in its place some public raising material things--a monument, a tomb, an ornament, or weapon of enduring metal--is all that remains.

If it were possible for the spring of appetite and quest to be dried up in man, such a spectacle would dry up that spring.

It is not possible, for it is providentially in the nature of man to cherish these illusions of an immortal memory and of a life bestowed upon the shade or the mere name of his living greatness. Those various forms of fame which are young men's goals, and to which the eager creative power of early manhood so properly directs itself, seem each in turn or each for its varying temperament to promise the desired reward; and one imagines that his love, another that his discoveries, another that his victories in the field or his conspicuous acts of courage will remain permanently with his fellows long after he has left their feast.

As though to give some substance to the flattering cheat, there is one kind of fame which men have been permitted to attain, and which does give them a sort of fixed tenure--if not for ever, yet for generations upon generations--in the human city. This sort of fame is the fame of the great poets. There is nothing more enduring. It has for some who were most blessed outlasted, you may say, all material things which they handled or they knew--all fabrics, all instruments, all habitations. It is comparable in its endurance to the years, and a man reads the "Song of Roland" and can still look on that same unchanged Cleft of Roncesvalles, or a man reads the Iliad and can look to-day westward from the shores to Tenedos. But wait a moment. Are they indeed blessed in this, the great poets? Ronsard debated it. He decided that they were, and put into the mouth of the muses the great lines:----

  Mais un tel accident n'arrive point a l'âme,
  Qui sans matière vist immortelle là haut.

  Vela saigement dit, Ceux dont la fantaisie
  Sera religieuse et devote envers Dieu
  Tousjours acheveront quelque grand poésie,
  Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu.

But the matter is still undecided.

On the field of Malplaquet, that battlefield, I met a man.

He was pointed out to me as a man who drove travellers to Bavai. His name was Mr. The Duke, and he was very poor.

If he comes across these lines (which is exceedingly unlikely) I offer him my apologies. Anyhow, I can write about him freely, for he is not rich, and, what is more, the laws of his country permit the telling of the truth about our fellow-men, even when they are rich.

Mr. The Duke was of some years, and his colour was that of cedar wood. I met him in his farmyard, and I said to him:

"Is it you, sir, that drive travellers to Bavai?"

"No," said he.

Accustomed by many years of travel to this type of response, I continued:

"How much do you charge?"

"Two francs fifty," said he.

"I will give you three francs," I said, and when I had said this he shook his head and replied:

"You fall at an evil moment; I was about to milk the cows." Having said this he went to harness the horse.

When the horse was harnessed to his little cart (it was an extremely small horse, full of little bones and white in colour, with one eye stronger than the other) he gave it to his little daughter to hold, and himself sat down to table, proposing a meal.

"It is but humble fare," he said, "for we are poor."

This sounded familiar to me; I had both read and heard it before. The meal was of bread and butter, pasty and beer, for Malplaquet is a country of beer and not of wine.

As he sat at table the old man pointed out to me that contraband across the Belgian frontier, which is close by, was no longer profitable.

"The Fraud," he said, "is no longer a living for anyone."

Upon that frontier contraband is called "The Fraud"; it holds an honourable place as a career.

"The Fraud," he continued, "has gone long ago; it has burst. It is no longer to be pursued. There is not even any duty upon apples.... But there is a duty upon pears. Had I a son I would not put him into The Fraud.... Sometimes there is just a chance here and there.... One can pick up an occasion. But take it all in all (and here he wagged his head solemnly) there is nothing in it any more."

I said that I had no experience of contraband professionally, but that I knew a very honest man who lived by it in the country of Andorra, and that according to my morals a man had a perfect right to run the risk and take his chance, for there was no contract between him and the power he was trying to get round. This announcement pleased the old gentleman, but it did not grip his mind. He was of your practical sort. He was almost a Pragmatist. Abstractions wearied him. He put no faith in the reality of ideas. I think he was a Nominalist like Abelard: and whatever excuse you may make for him, Abelard was a Nominalist right enough, for it was the intellectual thing to be at the time, though St. Bernard utterly confuted him in arguments of enormous length and incalculable boredom.

The old man, then, I say, would have nothing to do with first principles, and he reasserted his position that, in the concrete, in the existent world, The Fraud no longer paid.

This said for the sixth or seventh time, he drank some brandy to put heart into him and climbed up into his little cart, I by his side. He hit the white horse with a stick, making at the same time an extraordinary shrill noise with his mouth, like a siren, and the horse began to slop and sludge very dolefully towards Bavai.

"This horse," said Mr. The Duke, "is a wonderfully good horse. He goes like the wind. He is of Arab extraction, and comes from Africa."

With these words he gave the horse another huge blow with his stick, and once more emitted his piercing cry. The horse went neither faster nor slower than before, and seemed very indifferent to the whole performance.

"He is from Africa," said Mr. The Duke again, meditatively. "Do you know Africa?"

Africa with the French populace means Algiers. I answered that I knew it, and that in particular I knew the road southward from Constantine. At this he looked very pleased, and said:

"I was a soldier in Africa. I deserted seven times."

To this I made no answer. I did not know how he wanted me to take it, so I waited until he should speak again, which he soon did, and said:

"The last time I deserted I was free for a year and a half. I used to conduct beasts; that was my trade. When they caught me I was to have been shot. I was saved by the tears of a woman!"

Having said this the old man pulled out a very small pipe and filled it with exceedingly black tobacco. He lit it, then he began talking again rather more excitedly.

"It is a terrible thing and an unhappy thing none the less," he went on, "that a man should be taken out to be shot and should be saved by the tears of a woman." Then he added, "Of what use are wars? How foolish it is that men should kill each other! If there were a war I would not fight. Would you?"

I said I thought I would; but whether I should like to or not would depend upon the war.

He was eager to contradict and to tell me that war was wrong and stupid. Having behind him the logical training of fifteen Christian centuries he was in no way muddle-headed upon the matter. He saw very well that his doctrine meant that it was wrong to have a country, and wrong to love it, and that patriotism was all bosh, and that no ideal was worth physical pain or trouble. To such conclusions had he come at the end of his life.

The white horse meanwhile slouched; Bavai grew somewhat nearer as we sat in silence after his last sentence. He was turning many things over in his mind. He veered off on to political economy.

"When the rich man at the Manufactory here, the place where they sell phosphates for the land, when he stands beer to all the workmen and to the countryside, I always say, 'Fools! All this will be put on to the cost of the phosphates; they will cost you more!'"

Mr. The Duke did not accept John Stuart Mill's proposition upon the cost of production nor the general theories of Ricardo upon which Mill's propositions were based. In his opinion rent was a factor in the cost of production, for he told me that butter had gone up because the price of land was rising near the towns. In what he next said I found out that he was not a Collectivist, for he said a man should own enough to live upon, but he said that this was impossible if rich people were allowed to live. I asked him what the politics of the countryside were and how people voted. He said:

"The politicians trick the people. They are a heap of worthlessness."

I asked him if he voted, and he said "yes." He said there was only one way to vote, but I did not understand what this meant.

Had time served I should have asked him further questions--upon the nature of the soul, its ultimate fate, the origin of man and his destiny, whether mortal or immortal; the proper constitution of the State, the choice of the legislator, the prince, and the magistrate; the function of art, whether it is subsidiary or primary in human life; the family; marriage. Upon the State he had already informed me, and also upon the institution of property, and upon his view of armies. Upon all those other things he would equally have given me a clear reply, for he was a man that knew his own mind, and that is more than most people can say.

But we were now in Bavai, and I had no time to discover more. We drank together before we parted, and I was very pleased to see the honest look in his face. With more leisure and born to greater opportunities he would have been talked about, this Man of Malplaquet. He had come to his odd conclusions as the funny people do in Scandinavia and in Russia, and among the rich intellectuals and usurers in London and Berlin; but he was a jollier man than they are, for he could drive a horse and lie about it, and he could also milk a cow. As we parted he used a phrase that wounded me, and which I had only heard once before in my life. He said:

"We shall never see each other again!"

Another man had once said this thing to me before. This man was a farmer in the Northumbrian hills, who walked with me a little way in the days when I was going over Carter Fell to find the Scots people, many, many years ago. He also said: "We shall never meet again!"

A youth of no more than twenty-three years entered a first-class carriage at the famous station of Swindon in the county of Wiltshire, proposing to travel to the uttermost parts of the West and to enjoy a comfortable loneliness while he ruminated upon all things human and divine; when he was sufficiently annoyed to discover that in the further corner of the carriage was sitting an old gentleman of benevolent appearance, or at any rate a gentleman of benevolent appearance who appeared in his youthful eyes to be old.

For though the old gentleman was, as a fact, but sixty, yet his virile beard had long gone white and the fringes of hair attaching to his ostrich egg of a head confirmed his venerable appearance.

When the train had started the young man proceeded in no very good temper and with great solemnity to fill a pipe. He turned to his senior, who was watching him in a very paternal and happy manner, and said formally:

"I hope you do not mind my smoking, sir?"

"Not at all," said the old boy; "it is a habit I have long grown accustomed to in others."

The young man bowed in a somewhat absurd fashion and felt for his matches. He discovered to his no small mortification that he had none. He was so used to his pipe after a meal that he really could not forgo it. He came off his perch by at least three steps and asked the old man very gently whether he had any matches.

The older man produced a box and at the same time brought out with it a little notebook and a playing card which happened to be in his pocket. The young man took the matches and lit his pipe, surveying the old man the while with a more complacent eye.

"It is very kind of you, sir," he said a little less stiffly. He handed back the matches, wrapped his rug round his legs, sat down in his place, and knowing that one should prolong the conversation for a moment or two after a favour, said: "I see that you play cards."

"I do," said the old man simply; "would you like a game?"

"I don't mind," said the young man, who had always heard that it was unmanly and ridiculous to refuse a game of cards in a railway carriage.

The elder man laughed merrily in his strong beard as he saw his junior begin to spread somewhat awkwardly a copy of a newspaper upon his knees. "I'll show you a trick worth two of that," he said, and taking one of the first-class cushions, which alone of railway cushions are movable from its place, he came over to the corner opposite the young man and made a table of the cushion between them. "Now," said he genially, "what's it to be?"

"Well," said the young man like one who expounds new mysteries, "do you know piquet?"

"Oh, yes," said his companion with another happy little laugh of contentment with the world. "I'll take you on. What shall it be?"

"Pennies if you like," said the young man nonchalantly.

"Very well, and double for the Rubicon."

"How do you mean?" said the young man, puzzled.

"You will see," said the old man, and they began to play.

The game was singularly absorbing. At first the young man won a few pounds; then he lost rather heavily, then he won again, but not quite enough to recoup. Then in the fourth game he won, so that he was a little ahead, and meanwhile the old man chatted merrily during the discarding or the shuffling: during the shuffling especially. He looked out towards the downs with something of a sigh at one moment, and said:

"It's a happy world."

"Yes," answered the younger man with the proper lugubriousness of youth, "but it all comes to an end."