Kitabı oku: «The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy», sayfa 4

And with that I stopped the cab and got out for I wanted a breath of air.

1911

THE BLACK GODMOTHER

Sitting out on the lawn at tea with our friend and his retriever, we had been discussing those massacres of the helpless which had of late occurred, and wondering that they should have been committed by the soldiery of so civilised a State, when, in a momentary pause of our astonishment, our friend, who had been listening in silence, crumpling the drooping soft ear of his dog, looked up and said, “The cause of atrocities is generally the violence of Fear. Panic’s at the back of most crimes and follies.”

Knowing that his philosophical statements were always the result of concrete instance, and that he would not tell us what that instance was if we asked him – such being his nature – we were careful not to agree.

He gave us a look out of those eyes of his, so like the eyes of a mild eagle, and said abruptly: “What do you say to this, then?.. I was out in the dog-days last year with this fellow of mine, looking for Osmunda, and stayed some days in a village – never mind the name. Coming back one evening from my tramp, I saw some boys stoning a mealy-coloured dog. I went up and told the young devils to stop it. They only looked at me in the injured way boys do, and one of them called out, ‘It’s mad, guv’nor!’ I told them to clear off, and they took to their heels. The dog followed me. It was a young, leggy, mild looking mongrel, cross – I should say – between a brown retriever and an Irish terrier. There was froth about its lips, and its eyes were watery; it looked indeed as if it might be in distemper. I was afraid of infection for this fellow of mine, and whenever it came too close shooed it away, till at last it slunk off altogether. Well, about nine o’clock, when I was settling down to write by the open window of my sitting-room – still daylight, and very quiet and warm – there began that most maddening sound, the barking of an unhappy dog. I could do nothing with that continual ‘Yap yap!’ going on, and it was too hot to shut the window; so I went out to see if I could stop it. The men were all at the pub, and the women just finished with their gossip; there was no sound at all but the continual barking of this dog, somewhere away out in the fields. I travelled by ear across three meadows, till I came on a hay-stack by a pool of water. There was the dog sure enough – the same mealy-coloured mongrel, tied to a stake, yapping, and making frantic little runs on a bit of rusty chain; whirling round and round the stake, then standing quite still, and shivering. I went up and spoke to it, but it backed into the hay-stack, and there it stayed shrinking away from me, with its tongue hanging out. It had been heavily struck by something on the head; the cheek was cut, one eye half-closed, and an ear badly swollen. I tried to get hold of it, but the poor thing was beside itself with fear. It snapped and flew round so that I had to give it up, and sit down with this fellow here beside me, to try and quiet it – a strange dog, you know, will generally form his estimate of you from the way it sees you treat another dog. I had to sit there quite half an hour before it would let me go up to it, pull the stake out, and lead it away. The poor beast, though it was so feeble from the blows it had received, was still half-frantic, and I didn’t dare to touch it; and all the time I took good care that this fellow here didn’t come too near. Then came the question what was to be done. There was no vet, of course, and I’d no place to put it except my sitting-room, which didn’t belong to me. But, looking at its battered head, and its half-mad eyes, I thought: ‘No trusting you with these bumpkins; you’ll have to come in here for the night!’ Well, I got it in, and heaped two or three of those hairy little red rugs landladies are so fond of, up in a corner; and got it on to them, and put down my bread and milk. But it wouldn’t eat – its sense of proportion was all gone, fairly destroyed by terror. It lay there moaning, and every now and then it raised its head with a ‘yap’ of sheer fright, dreadful to hear, and bit the air, as if its enemies were on it again; and this fellow of mine lay in the opposite corner, with his head on his paw, watching it. I sat up for a long time with that poor beast, sick enough, and wondering how it had come to be stoned and kicked and battered into this state; and next day I made it my business to find out.”

Our friend paused, scanned us a little angrily, and then went on: “It had made its first appearance, it seems, following a bicyclist. There are men, you know – save the mark – who, when their beasts get ill or too expensive, jump on their bicycles and take them for a quick run, taking care never to look behind them. When they get back home they say: ‘Hallo! where’s Fido?’ Fido is nowhere, and there’s an end! Well, this poor puppy gave up just as it got to our village; and, roaming shout in search of water, attached itself to a farm labourer. The man with excellent intentions – as he told me himself – tried to take hold of it, but too abruptly, so that it was startled, and snapped at him. Whereon he kicked it for a dangerous cur, and it went drifting back toward the village, and fell in with the boys coming home from school. It thought, no doubt, that they were going to kick it too, and nipped one of them who took it by the collar. Thereupon they hullabalooed and stoned it down the road to where I found them. Then I put in my little bit of torture, and drove it away, through fear of infection to my own dog. After that it seems to have fallen in with a man who told me: ‘Well, you see, he came sneakin’ round my house, with the children playin’, and snapped at them when they went to stroke him, so that they came running in to their mother, an’ she’ called to me in a fine takin’ about a mad dog. I ran out with a shovel and gave ‘im one, and drove him out. I’m sorry if he wasn’t mad, he looked it right enough; you can’t be too careful with strange dogs.’ Its next acquaintance was an old stone-breaker, a very decent sort. ‘Well! you see,’ the old man explained to me, ‘the dog came smellin’ round my stones, an’ it wouldn’ come near, an’ it wouldn’ go away; it was all froth and blood about the jaw, and its eyes glared green at me. I thought to meself, bein’ the dog-days – I don’t like the look o’ you, you look funny! So I took a stone, an’ got it here, just on the ear; an’ it fell over. And I thought to meself: Well, you’ve got to finish it, or it’ll go bitin’ somebody, for sure! But when I come to it with my hammer, the dog it got up – an’ you know how it is when there’s somethin’ you’ve ‘alf killed, and you feel sorry, and yet you feel you must finish it, an’ you hit at it blind, you hit at it agen an’ agen. The poor thing, it wriggled and snapped, an’ I was terrified it’d bite me, an’ some’ow it got away.”’ Again our friend paused, and this time we dared not look at him.

“The next hospitality it was shown,” he went on presently, “was by a farmer, who, seeing it all bloody, drove it off, thinking it had been digging up a lamb that he’d just buried. The poor homeless beast came sneaking back, so he told his men to get rid of it. Well, they got hold of it somehow – there was a hole in its neck that looked as if they’d used a pitchfork – and, mortally afraid of its biting them, but not liking, as they told me, to drown it, for fear the owner might come on them, they got a stake and a chain, and fastened it up, and left it in the water by the hay-stack where I found it. I had some conversation with that farmer. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘but who was to know? I couldn’t have my sheep worried. The brute had blood on his muzzle. These curs do a lot of harm when they’ve once been blooded. You can’t run risks.”’ Our friend cut viciously at a dandelion with his stick. “Run risks!” he broke out suddenly: “That was it from beginning to end of that poor beast’s sufferings, fear! From that fellow on the bicycle, afraid of the worry and expense, as soon as it showed signs of distemper, to myself and the man with the pitch fork – not one of us, I daresay, would have gone out of our way to do it – a harm. But we felt fear, and so by the law of self-preservation, or what ever you like – it all began, till there the poor thing was, with a battered head and a hole in its neck, ravenous with hunger, and too distraught even to lap my bread and milk. Yes, and there’s something uncanny about a suffering animal – we sat watching it, and again we were afraid, looking at its eyes and the way it bit the air. Fear! It’s the black godmother of all damnable things!”

Our friend bent down, crumpling and crumpling at his dog’s ears. We, too, gazed at the ground, thinking of, that poor lost puppy, and the horrible inevitability of all that happens, seeing men are what they are; thinking of all the foul doings in the world, whose black godmother is Fear.

“And what became of the poor dog?” one of us asked at last.

“When,” said our friend slowly, “I’d had my fill of watching, I covered it with a rug, took this fellow away with me, and went to bed. There was nothing else to do. At dawn I was awakened by three dreadful cries – not like a dog’s at all. I hurried down. There was the poor beast – wriggled out from under the rug-stretched on its side, dead. This fellow of mine had followed me in, and he went and sat down by the body. When I spoke to him he just looked round, and wagged his tail along the ground, but would not come away; and there he sat till it was buried, very interested, but not sorry at all.”

Our friend was silent, looking angrily at something in the distance.

And we, too, were silent, seeing in spirit that vigil of early morning: The thin, lifeless, sandy-coloured body, stretched on those red mats; and this black creature – now lying at our feet – propped on its haunches like the dog in “The Death of Procris,” patient, curious, ungrieved, staring down at it with his bright, interested eyes.

1912.

CONCERNING LIFE, Part 2

QUALITY

I knew him from the days of my extreme youth, because he made my father’s boots; inhabiting with his elder brother two little shops let into one, in a small by-street-now no more, but then most fashionably placed in the West End.

That tenement had a certain quiet distinction; there was no sign upon its face that he made for any of the Royal Family – merely his own German name of Gessler Brothers; and in the window a few pairs of boots. I remember that it always troubled me to account for those unvarying boots in the window, for he made only what was ordered, reaching nothing down, and it seemed so inconceivable that what he made could ever have failed to fit. Had he bought them to put there? That, too, seemed inconceivable. He would never have tolerated in his house leather on which he had not worked himself. Besides, they were too beautiful – the pair of pumps, so inexpressibly slim, the patent leathers with cloth tops, making water come into one’s mouth, the tall brown riding boots with marvellous sooty glow, as if, though new, they had been worn a hundred years. Those pairs could only have been made by one who saw before him the Soul of Boot – so truly were they prototypes incarnating the very spirit of all foot-gear. These thoughts, of course, came to me later, though even when I was promoted to him, at the age of perhaps fourteen, some inkling haunted me of the dignity of himself and brother. For to make boots – such boots as he made – seemed to me then, and still seems to me, mysterious and wonderful.

I remember well my shy remark, one day, while stretching out to him my youthful foot:

“Isn’t it awfully hard to do, Mr. Gessler?”

And his answer, given with a sudden smile from out of the sardonic redness of his beard: “Id is an Ardt!”

Himself, he was a little as if made from leather, with his yellow crinkly face, and crinkly reddish hair and beard; and neat folds slanting down his cheeks to the corners of his mouth, and his guttural and one-toned voice; for leather is a sardonic substance, and stiff and slow of purpose. And that was the character of his face, save that his eyes, which were grey-blue, had in them the simple gravity of one secretly possessed by the Ideal. His elder brother was so very like him – though watery, paler in every way, with a great industry – that sometimes in early days I was not quite sure of him until the interview was over. Then I knew that it was he, if the words, “I will ask my brudder,” had not been spoken; and that, if they had, it was his elder brother.

When one grew old and wild and ran up bills, one somehow never ran them up with Gessler Brothers. It would not have seemed becoming to go in there and stretch out one’s foot to that blue iron-spectacled glance, owing him for more than – say – two pairs, just the comfortable reassurance that one was still his client.

For it was not possible to go to him very often – his boots lasted terribly, having something beyond the temporary – some, as it were, essence of boot stitched into them.

One went in, not as into most shops, in the mood of: “Please serve me, and let me go!” but restfully, as one enters a church; and, sitting on the single wooden chair, waited – for there was never anybody there. Soon, over the top edge of that sort of well – rather dark, and smelling soothingly of leather – which formed the shop, there would be seen his face, or that of his elder brother, peering down. A guttural sound, and the tip-tap of bast slippers beating the narrow wooden stairs, and he would stand before one without coat, a little bent, in leather apron, with sleeves turned back, blinking – as if awakened from some dream of boots, or like an owl surprised in daylight and annoyed at this interruption.

And I would say: “How do you do, Mr. Gessler? Could you make me a pair of Russia leather boots?”

Without a word he would leave me, retiring whence he came, or into the other portion of the shop, and I would, continue to rest in the wooden chair, inhaling the incense of his trade. Soon he would come back, holding in his thin, veined hand a piece of gold-brown leather. With eyes fixed on it, he would remark: “What a beaudiful biece!” When I, too, had admired it, he would speak again. “When do you wand dem?” And I would answer: “Oh! As soon as you conveniently can.” And he would say: “To-morrow fordnighd?” Or if he were his elder brother: “I will ask my brudder!”

Then I would murmur: “Thank you! Good-morning, Mr. Gessler.” “Goot-morning!” he would reply, still looking at the leather in his hand. And as I moved to the door, I would hear the tip-tap of his bast slippers restoring him, up the stairs, to his dream of boots. But if it were some new kind of foot-gear that he had not yet made me, then indeed he would observe ceremony – divesting me of my boot and holding it long in his hand, looking at it with eyes at once critical and loving, as if recalling the glow with which he had created it, and rebuking the way in which one had disorganized this masterpiece. Then, placing my foot on a piece of paper, he would two or three times tickle the outer edges with a pencil and pass his nervous fingers over my toes, feeling himself into the heart of my requirements.

I cannot forget that day on which I had occasion to say to him; “Mr. Gessler, that last pair of town walking-boots creaked, you know.”

He looked at me for a time without replying, as if expecting me to withdraw or qualify the statement, then said:

“Id shouldn’d ‘ave greaked.”

“It did, I’m afraid.”

“You goddem wed before dey found demselves?”

“I don’t think so.”

At that he lowered his eyes, as if hunting for memory of those boots, and I felt sorry I had mentioned this grave thing.

“Zend dem back!” he said; “I will look at dem.”

A feeling of compassion for my creaking boots surged up in me, so well could I imagine the sorrowful long curiosity of regard which he would bend on them.

“Zome boods,” he said slowly, “are bad from birdt. If I can do noding wid dem, I dake dem off your bill.”

Once (once only) I went absent-mindedly into his shop in a pair of boots bought in an emergency at some large firm’s. He took my order without showing me any leather, and I could feel his eyes penetrating the inferior integument of my foot. At last he said:

“Dose are nod my boods.”

The tone was not one of anger, nor of sorrow, not even of contempt, but there was in it something quiet that froze the blood. He put his hand down and pressed a finger on the place where the left boot, endeavouring to be fashionable, was not quite comfortable.

“Id ‘urds you dere,”, he said. “Dose big virms ‘ave no self-respect. Drash!” And then, as if something had given way within him, he spoke long and bitterly. It was the only time I ever heard him discuss the conditions and hardships of his trade.

“Dey get id all,” he said, “dey get id by adverdisement, nod by work. Dey dake it away from us, who lofe our boods. Id gomes to this – bresently I haf no work. Every year id gets less you will see.” And looking at his lined face I saw things I had never noticed before, bitter things and bitter struggle – and what a lot of grey hairs there seemed suddenly in his red beard!

As best I could, I explained the circumstances of the purchase of those ill-omened boots. But his face and voice made so deep impression that during the next few minutes I ordered many pairs. Nemesis fell! They lasted more terribly than ever. And I was not able conscientiously to go to him for nearly two years.

When at last I went I was surprised to find that outside one of the two little windows of his shop another name was painted, also that of a bootmaker-making, of course, for the Royal Family. The old familiar boots, no longer in dignified isolation, were huddled in the single window. Inside, the now contracted well of the one little shop was more scented and darker than ever. And it was longer than usual, too, before a face peered down, and the tip-tap of the bast slippers began. At last he stood before me, and, gazing through those rusty iron spectacles, said:

“Mr. – , isn’d it?”

“Ah! Mr. Gessler,” I stammered, “but your boots are really too good, you know! See, these are quite decent still!” And I stretched out to him my foot. He looked at it.

“Yes,” he said, “beople do nod wand good hoods, id seems.”

To get away from his reproachful eyes and voice I hastily remarked: “What have you done to your shop?”

He answered quietly: “Id was too exbensif. Do you wand some boods?”

I ordered three pairs, though I had only wanted two, and quickly left. I had, I do not know quite what feeling of being part, in his mind, of a conspiracy against him; or not perhaps so much against him as against his idea of boot. One does not, I suppose, care to feel like that; for it was again many months before my next visit to his shop, paid, I remember, with the feeling: “Oh! well, I can’t leave the old boy – so here goes! Perhaps it’ll be his elder brother!”

For his elder brother, I knew, had not character enough to reproach me, even dumbly.

And, to my relief, in the shop there did appear to be his elder brother, handling a piece of leather.

“Well, Mr. Gessler,” I said, “how are you?”

He came close, and peered at me.

“I am breddy well,” he said slowly “but my elder brudder is dead.”

And I saw that it was indeed himself – but how aged and wan! And never before had I heard him mention his brother. Much shocked; I murmured: “Oh! I am sorry!”

“Yes,” he answered, “he was a good man, he made a good bood; but he is dead.” And he touched the top of his head, where the hair had suddenly gone as thin as it had been on that of his poor brother, to indicate, I suppose, the cause of death. “He could nod ged over losing de oder shop. Do you wand any hoods?” And he held up the leather in his hand: “Id’s a beaudiful biece.”

I ordered several pairs. It was very long before they came – but they were better than ever. One simply could not wear them out. And soon after that I went abroad.

It was over a year before I was again in London. And the first shop I went to was my old friend’s. I had left a man of sixty, I came back to one of seventy-five, pinched and worn and tremulous, who genuinely, this time, did not at first know me.

“Oh! Mr. Gessler,” I said, sick at heart; “how splendid your boots are! See, I’ve been wearing this pair nearly all the time I’ve been abroad; and they’re not half worn out, are they?”

He looked long at my boots – a pair of Russia leather, and his face seemed to regain steadiness. Putting his hand on my instep, he said:

“Do dey vid you here? I ‘ad drouble wid dat bair, I remember.”

I assured him that they had fitted beautifully.

“Do you wand any boods?” he said. “I can make dem quickly; id is a slack dime.”

I answered: “Please, please! I want boots all round – every kind!”

“I will make a vresh model. Your food must be bigger.” And with utter slowness, he traced round my foot, and felt my toes, only once looking up to say:

“Did I dell you my brudder was dead?”

To watch him was painful, so feeble had he grown; I was glad to get away.

I had given those boots up, when one evening they came. Opening the parcel, I set the four pairs out in a row. Then one by one I tried them on. There was no doubt about it. In shape and fit, in finish and quality of leather, they were the best he had ever made me. And in the mouth of one of the Town walking-boots I found his bill.

The amount was the same as usual, but it gave me quite a shock. He had never before sent it in till quarter day. I flew down-stairs, and wrote a cheque, and posted it at once with my own hand.

A week later, passing the little street, I thought I would go in and tell him how splendidly the new boots fitted. But when I came to where his shop had been, his name was gone. Still there, in the window, were the slim pumps, the patent leathers with cloth tops, the sooty riding boots.

I went in, very much disturbed. In the two little shops – again made into one – was a young man with an English face.

“Mr. Gessler in?” I said.

He gave me a strange, ingratiating look.

“No, sir,” he said, “no. But we can attend to anything with pleasure. We’ve taken the shop over. You’ve seen our name, no doubt, next door. We make for some very good people.”

“Yes, Yes,” I said; “but Mr. Gessler?”

“Oh!” he answered; “dead.”

“Dead! But I only received these boots from him last Wednesday week.”

“Ah!” he said; “a shockin’ go. Poor old man starved ‘imself.”

“Good God!”

“Slow starvation, the doctor called it! You see he went to work in such a way! Would keep the shop on; wouldn’t have a soul touch his boots except himself. When he got an order, it took him such a time. People won’t wait. He lost everybody. And there he’d sit, goin’ on and on – I will say that for him not a man in London made a better boot! But look at the competition! He never advertised! Would ‘ave the best leather, too, and do it all ‘imself. Well, there it is. What could you expect with his ideas?”

“But starvation – !”

“That may be a bit flowery, as the sayin’ is – but I know myself he was sittin’ over his boots day and night, to the very last. You see I used to watch him. Never gave ‘imself time to eat; never had a penny in the house. All went in rent and leather. How he lived so long I don’t know. He regular let his fire go out. He was a character. But he made good boots.”

“Yes,” I said, “he made good boots.”

And I turned and went out quickly, for I did not want that youth to know that I could hardly see.

1911