Windfalls

ON KEYHOLE MORALS

My neighbour at the breakfast table complained that he had had a bad night. What with the gale and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of the timbers of the ship and the pair in the next cabin – especially the pair in the next cabin… How they talked! It was two o’clock before they sank into silence. And such revelations! He couldn’t help overhearing them. He was alone in his cabin, and what was he to do? He couldn’t talk to himself to let them know they were being overheard. And he didn’t sing. And he hadn’t a cough. And, in short, there was nothing for it but to overhear. And the things he heard – well… And with a gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he left it to me to imagine the worst. I suggested that he might cure the trouble by telling the steward to give the couple a hint that the next cabin was occupied. He received the idea as a possible way out of a painful and delicate situation. Strange, he said, it had not occurred to him.

Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man. It would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper, and there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are not to be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper enough when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not our public hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only indicates the kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We want the world’s good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company manners as we put on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching him in the act. The true estimate of your character (and mine) depends on what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole behind us. It depends, not on whether you are chivalrous to some one else’s wife in public, but whether you are chivalrous to your own wife in private. The eminent judge who, checking himself in a torrent of abuse of his partner at whist, contritely observed, “I beg your pardon, madam; I thought you were my wife,” did not improve matters. He only lifted the curtain of a rather shabby private cabin. He white-washed himself publicly out of his dirty private pail.

Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the quiet and undisturbed presence of other people’s open letters? Perhaps you have accidentally put on your son’s jacket and discovered the pockets bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental concern is awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own son. It is natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing and weighty reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that all those respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard young John’s step approaching. You know that this very reasonable display of paternal interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying of which you would be ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is miles off – perhaps down in the city, perhaps far away in the country. You are left alone with his letters and your own sense of decency. You can read the letters in perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you can share them. Not a soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled to know those secrets, and young John may be benefited by your knowing them. What do you do in these circumstances? The answer will provide you with a fairly reliable tape measure for your own spiritual contents.

There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next Cabin. We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of “Le Diable Boiteux,” Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one house to another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside, with very surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the guise of a very civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and offered to do the same for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and lift with magic and inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the mysteries and privacies of my neighbours’ lives, I hope I should have the decency to thank him and send him away. The amusement would be purchased at too high a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm, but it would do me a lot of harm. For, after all, the important thing is not that we should be able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the whole world in the face, but that we should be able to look ourselves in the face. And it is our private standard of conduct and not our public standard of conduct which gives or denies us that privilege. We are merely counterfeit coin if our respect for the Eleventh Commandment only applies to being found out by other people. It is being found out by ourselves that ought to hurt us.

It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass a tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never committed a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or forged a cheque. But these things are not evidence of good character. They may only mean that I never had enough honest indignation to commit a murder, nor enough courage to break into a house. They may only mean that I never needed to forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may only mean that I am afraid of the police. Respect for the law is a testimonial that will not go far in the Valley of Jehosophat. The question that will be asked of me there is not whether I picked my neighbour’s lock, but whether I put my ear to his keyhole; not whether I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but whether I read his letters when his back was turned – in short, not whether I had respect for the law, but whether I had respect for myself and the sanctities that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is what went on in my private cabin which will probably be my undoing.

FLEET STREET NO MORE

To-day I am among the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a lifetime and am a person at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that is told, a rumour on the wind; a memory of far-off things and battles long ago. At this hour I fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm. There is the thunder of machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above, the click-click-click of the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of bells for messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with “stories” or without “stories,” leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering whether they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don’t, night editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop window, sub-editors breasting the torrent of “flimsies” that flows in from the ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I hear the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear the murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a policeman must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the Strand submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his glory departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could stop Sir Gorgius Midas’ Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety. His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as a field-marshal’s baton.

And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make a pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers. Even “J. B.,” who has never been known to pass a policeman without a gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free, independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand, but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting, or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in the shop windows, or turn into the “pictures” or go home to tea. He can light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.

And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four – in the afternoon when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide of the day’s life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work, and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings of the world’s happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries come thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and rattle through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. “I see it arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago.” I have worn its paving stones as industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as one who had the run of the estate and the freeman’s right. I have known its habitues as familiarly as if they had belonged to my own household, and its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have drunk the solemn toast with the White-friars o’ Friday nights, and taken counsel with the lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and cloistered calm in the hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders and millions of words on this, that, and the other, wise words and foolish words, and words without any particular quality at all, except that they filled up space, and have had many friendships and fought many battles, winning some and losing others, and have seen the generations go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows who scan a little severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so gaily to the enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its service also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts – a street of memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and peopling its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a phantom too.

Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like the Chambered Nautilus, I

I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape at its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no more. No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual footsteps. No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had always “gone out to supper, sir,” or been called to the news-room or sent on an errand. No more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous clock that ticked so much faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will come down from above like snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters, but I shall not hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure. Time, that has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the future stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can wander till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I tend my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how the apples ripen.

And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys, bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water, took a sponge and washed out his ears.

ON WAKING UP

When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always – given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep – a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and full of promise.

But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor’s habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it – the same as the lowliest peasant in his land. “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,” but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.

But perhaps he doesn’t wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has “murdered Sleep,” and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and shouting “Muffins,” in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.

All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put eating first, “for,” said he, “there is no other pleasure that comes three times a day and lasts an hour each time.” But sleep lasts eight hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. “All equal are within the church’s gate,” said George Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert’s parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply wonderful.