Robert Falconer

CHAPTER VIII. MY OWN ACQUAINTANCE

It was after this that my own acquaintance with Falconer commenced. I had just come out of one of the theatres in the neighbourhood of the Strand, unable to endure any longer the dreary combination of false magnanimity and real meanness, imported from Paris in the shape of a melodrama, for the delectation of the London public. I had turned northwards, and was walking up one of the streets near Covent Garden, when my attention was attracted to a woman who came out of a gin-shop, carrying a baby. She went to the kennel, and bent her head over, ill with the poisonous stuff she had been drinking. And while the woman stood in this degrading posture, the poor, white, wasted baby was looking over her shoulder with the smile of a seraph, perfectly unconscious of the hell around her.

‘Children will see things as God sees them,’ murmured a voice beside me.

I turned and saw a tall man with whose form I had already become a little familiar, although I knew nothing of him, standing almost at my elbow, with his eyes fixed on the woman and the child, and a strange smile of tenderness about his mouth, as if he were blessing the little creature in his heart.

He too saw the wonder of the show, typical of so much in the world, indeed of the world itself—the seemingly vile upholding and ministering to the life of the pure, the gracious, the fearless. Aware from his tone more than from his pronunciation that he was a fellow-countryman, I ventured to speak to him, and in a home-dialect.

‘It’s a wonnerfu’ sicht. It’s the cake o’ Ezekiel ower again.’

He looked at me sharply, thought a moment, and said,

‘You were going my way when you stopped. I will walk with you, if you will.’

‘But what’s to be done about it?’ I said.

‘About what?’ he returned.

‘About the child there,’ I answered.

‘Oh! she is its mother,’ he replied, walking on.

‘What difference does that make?’ I said.

‘All the difference in the world. If God has given her that child, what right have you or I to interfere?’

‘But I verily believe from the look of the child she gives it gin.’

‘God saves the world by the new blood, the children. To take her child from her, would be to do what you could to damn her.’

‘It doesn’t look much like salvation there.’

‘You mustn’t interfere with God’s thousand years any more than his one day.’

‘Are you sure she is the mother?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I would not have left the child with her otherwise.’

‘What would you have done with it? Got it into some orphan asylum?—or the Foundling perhaps?’

‘Never,’ he answered. ‘All those societies are wretched inventions for escape from the right way. There ought not to be an orphan asylum in the kingdom.’

‘What! Would you put them all down then?’

‘God forbid. But I would, if I could, make them all useless.’

‘How could you do that?’

‘I would merely enlighten the hearts of childless people as to their privileges.’

‘Which are?’

‘To be fathers and mothers to the fatherless and motherless.’

‘I have often wondered why more of them did not adopt children. Why don’t they?’

‘For various reasons which a real love to child nature would blow to the winds—all comprised in this, that such a child would not be their own child. As if ever a child could be their own! That a child is God’s is of rather more consequence than whether it is born of this or that couple. Their hearts would surely be glad when they went into heaven to have the angels of the little ones that always behold the face of their Father coming round them, though they were not exactly their father and mother.’

‘I don’t know what the passage you refer to means.’

‘Neither do I. But it must mean something, if He said it. Are you a clergyman?’

‘No. I am only a poor teacher of mathematics and poetry, shown up the back stairs into the nurseries of great houses.’

‘A grand chance, if I may use the word.’

‘I do try to wake a little enthusiasm in the sons and daughters—without much success, I fear.’

‘Will you come and see me?’ he said.

‘With much pleasure. But, as I have given you an answer, you owe me one.’

‘I do.’

‘Have you adopted a child?’

‘No.’

‘Then you have some of your own?’

‘No.’

‘Then, excuse me, but why the warmth of your remarks on those who—’

‘I think I shall be able to satisfy you on that point, if we draw to each other. Meantime I must leave you. Could you come to-morrow evening?’

‘With pleasure.’

We arranged the hour and parted. I saw him walk into a low public-house, and went home.

At the time appointed, I rang the bell, and was led by an elderly woman up the stair, and shown into a large room on the first-floor—poorly furnished, and with many signs of bachelor-carelessness. Mr. Falconer rose from an old hair-covered sofa to meet me as I entered. I will first tell my reader something of his personal appearance.

He was considerably above six feet in height, square-shouldered, remarkably long in the arms, and his hands were uncommonly large and powerful. His head was large, and covered with dark wavy hair, lightly streaked with gray. His broad forehead projected over deep-sunk eyes, that shone like black fire. His features, especially his Roman nose, were large, and finely, though not delicately, modelled. His nostrils were remarkably large and flexile, with a tendency to slight motion: I found on further acquaintance that when he was excited, they expanded in a wild equine manner. The expression of his mouth was of tender power, crossed with humour. He kept his lips a little compressed, which gave a certain sternness to his countenance: but when this sternness dissolved in a smile, it was something enchanting. He was plainly, rather shabbily clothed. No one could have guessed at his profession or social position. He came forward and received me cordially. After a little indifferent talk, he asked me if I had any other engagement for the evening.

‘I never have any engagements,’ I answered—‘at least, of a social kind. I am burd alane. I know next to nobody.’

‘Then perhaps you would not mind going out with me for a stroll?’

‘I shall be most happy,’ I answered.

There was something about the man I found exceedingly attractive; I had very few friends; and there was besides something odd, almost romantic, in this beginning of an intercourse: I would see what would come of it.

‘Then we’ll have some supper first,’ said Mr. Falconer, and rang the bell.

While we ate our chops—

‘I dare say you think it strange,’ my host said, ‘that without the least claim on your acquaintance, I should have asked you to come and see me, Mr.—’

He stopped, smiling.

‘My name is Gordon—Archie Gordon,’ I said.

‘Well, then, Mr. Gordon, I confess I have a design upon you. But you will remember that you addressed me first.’

‘You spoke first,’ I said.

‘Did I?’

‘I did not say you spoke to me, but you spoke.—I should not have ventured to make the remark I did make, if I had not heard your voice first. What design have you on me?’

‘That will appear in due course. Now take a glass of wine, and we’ll set out.’

We soon found ourselves in Holborn, and my companion led the way towards the City. The evening was sultry and close.

‘Nothing excites me more,’ said Mr. Falconer, ‘than a walk in the twilight through a crowded street. Do you find it affect you so?’

‘I cannot speak as strongly as you do,’ I replied. ‘But I perfectly understand what you mean. Why is it, do you think?’

‘Partly, I fancy, because it is like the primordial chaos, a concentrated tumult of undetermined possibilities. The germs of infinite adventure and result are floating around you like a snow-storm. You do not know what may arise in a moment and colour all your future. Out of this mass may suddenly start something marvellous, or, it may be, something you have been looking for for years.’

The same moment, a fierce flash of lightning, like a blue sword-blade a thousand times shattered, quivered and palpitated about us, leaving a thick darkness on the sense. I heard my companion give a suppressed cry, and saw him run up against a heavy drayman who was on the edge of the path, guiding his horses with his long whip. He begged the man’s pardon, put his hand to his head, and murmured, ‘I shall know him now.’ I was afraid for a moment that the lightning had struck him, but he assured me there was nothing amiss. He looked a little excited and confused, however.

I should have forgotten the incident, had he not told me afterwards—when I had come to know him intimately—that in the moment of that lightning flash, he had had a strange experience: he had seen the form of his father, as he had seen him that Sunday afternoon, in the midst of the surrounding light. He was as certain of the truth of the presentation as if a gradual revival of memory had brought with it the clear conviction of its own accuracy. His explanation of the phenomenon was, that, in some cases, all that prevents a vivid conception from assuming objectivity, is the self-assertion of external objects. The gradual approach of darkness cannot surprise and isolate the phantasm; but the suddenness of the lightning could and did, obliterating everything without, and leaving that over which it had no power standing alone, and therefore visible.

‘But,’ I ventured to ask, ‘whence the minuteness of detail, surpassing, you say, all that your memory could supply?’

‘That I think was a quickening of the memory by the realism of the presentation. Excited by the vision, it caught at its own past, as it were, and suddenly recalled that which it had forgotten. In the rapidity of all pure mental action, this at once took its part in the apparent objectivity.’

To return to the narrative of my first evening in Falconer’s company.

It was strange how insensible the street population was to the grandeur of the storm. While the thunder was billowing and bellowing over and around us—

‘A hundred pins for one ha’penny,’ bawled a man from the gutter, with the importance of a Cagliostro.

‘Evening Star! Telegrauwff!’ roared an ear-splitting urchin in my very face. I gave him a shove off the pavement.

‘Ah! don’t do that,’ said Falconer. ‘It only widens the crack between him and his fellows—not much, but a little.’

‘You are right,’ I said. ‘I won’t do it again.’

The same moment we heard a tumult in a neighbouring street. A crowd was execrating a policeman, who had taken a woman into custody, and was treating her with unnecessary rudeness. Falconer looked on for a few moments.

‘Come, policeman!’ he said at length, in a tone of expostulation. ‘You’re rather rough, are you not? She’s a woman, you know.’

‘Hold your blasted humbug,’ answered the man, an exceptional specimen of the force at that time at all events, and shook the tattered wretch, as if he would shake her out of her rags.

Falconer gently parted the crowd, and stood beside the two.

‘I will help you,’ he said, ‘to take her to the station, if you like, but you must not treat her that way.’

‘I don’t want your help,’ said the policeman; ‘I know you, and all the damned lot of you.’

‘Then I shall be compelled to give you a lesson,’ said Falconer.

The man’s only answer was a shake that made the woman cry out.

‘I shall get into trouble if you get off,’ said Falconer to her. ‘Will you promise me, on your word, to go with me to the station, if I rid you of the fellow?’

‘I will, I will,’ said the woman.

‘Then, look out,’ said Falconer to the policeman; ‘for I’m going to give you that lesson.’

The officer let the woman go, took his baton, and made a blow at Falconer. In another moment—I could hardly see how—he lay in the street.

‘Now, my poor woman, come along,’ said Falconer.

She obeyed, crying gently. Two other policemen came up.

‘Do you want to give that woman in charge, Mr. Falconer?’ asked one of them.

‘I give that man in charge,’ cried his late antagonist, who had just scrambled to his feet. ‘Assaulting the police in discharge of their duty.’

‘Very well,’ said the other. ‘But you’re in the wrong box, and that you’ll find. You had better come along to the station, sir.’

‘Keep that fellow from getting hold of the woman—you two, and we’ll go together,’ said Falconer.

Bewildered with the rapid sequence of events, I was following in the crowd. Falconer looked about till he saw me, and gave me a nod which meant come along. Before we reached Bow Street, however, the offending policeman, who had been walking a little behind in conversation with one of the others, advanced to Falconer, touched his hat, and said something, to which Falconer replied.

‘Remember, I have my eye upon you,’ was all I heard, however, as he left the crowd and rejoined me. We turned and walked eastward again.

The storm kept on intermittently, but the streets were rather more crowded than usual notwithstanding.

‘Look at that man in the woollen jacket,’ said Falconer. ‘What a beautiful outline of face! There must be something noble in that man.’

‘I did not see him,’ I answered, ‘I was taken up with a woman’s face, like that of a beautiful corpse. It’s eyes were bright. There was gin in its brain.’

The streets swarmed with human faces gleaming past. It was a night of ghosts.

There stood a man who had lost one arm, earnestly pumping bilge-music out of an accordion with the other, holding it to his body with the stump. There was a woman, pale with hunger and gin, three match-boxes in one extended hand, and the other holding a baby to her breast. As we looked, the poor baby let go its hold, turned its little head, and smiled a wan, shrivelled, old-fashioned smile in our faces.

Another happy baby, you see, Mr. Gordon,’ said Falconer. ‘A child, fresh from God, finds its heaven where no one else would. The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the Paradise out of a woman.’

‘What can be done for them?’ I said, and at the moment, my eye fell upon a row of little children, from two to five years of age, seated upon the curb-stone.

They were chattering fast, and apparently carrying on some game, as happy as if they had been in the fields.

‘Wouldn’t you like to take all those little grubby things, and put them in a great tub and wash them clean?’ I said.

‘They’d fight like spiders,’ rejoined Falconer.

‘They’re not fighting now.’

‘Then don’t make them. It would be all useless. The probability is that you would only change the forms of the various evils, and possibly for worse. You would buy all that man’s glue-lizards, and that man’s three-foot rules, and that man’s dog-collars and chains, at three times their value, that they might get more drink than usual, and do nothing at all for their living to-morrow.—What a happy London you would make if you were Sultan Haroun!’ he added, laughing. ‘You would put an end to poverty altogether, would you not?’

I did not reply at once.

‘But I beg your pardon,’ he resumed; ‘I am very rude.’

‘Not at all,’ I returned. ‘I was only thinking how to answer you. They would be no worse after all than those who inherit property and lead idle lives.’

‘True; but they would be no better. Would you be content that your quondam poor should be no better off than the rich? What would be gained thereby? Is there no truth in the words “Blessed are the poor”? A deeper truth than most Christians dare to see.—Did you ever observe that there is not one word about the vices of the poor in the Bible—from beginning to end?’

‘But they have their vices.’

‘Indubitably. I am only stating a fact. The Bible is full enough of the vices of the rich. I make no comment.’

‘But don’t you care for their sufferings?’

‘They are of secondary importance quite. But if you had been as much amongst them as I, perhaps you would be of my opinion, that the poor are not, cannot possibly feel so wretched as they seem to us. They live in a climate, as it were, which is their own, by natural law comply with it, and find it not altogether unfriendly. The Laplander will prefer his wastes to the rich fields of England, not merely from ignorance, but for the sake of certain blessings amongst which he has been born and brought up. The blessedness of life depends far more on its interest than upon its comfort. The need of exertion and the doubt of success, renders life much more interesting to the poor than it is to those who, unblessed with anxiety for the bread that perisheth, waste their poor hearts about rank and reputation.’

‘I thought such anxiety was represented as an evil in the New Testament.’

‘Yes. But it is a still greater evil to lose it in any other way than by faith in God. You would remove the anxiety by destroying its cause: God would remove it by lifting them above it, by teaching them to trust in him, and thus making them partakers of the divine nature. Poverty is a blessing when it makes a man look up.’

‘But you cannot say it does so always.’

‘I cannot determine when, where, and how much; but I am sure it does. And I am confident that to free those hearts from it by any deed of yours would be to do them the greatest injury you could. Probably their want of foresight would prove the natural remedy, speedily reducing them to their former condition—not however without serious loss.’

‘But will not this theory prove at last an anæsthetic rather than an anodyne? I mean that, although you may adopt it at first for refuge from the misery the sight of their condition occasions you, there is surely a danger of its rendering you at last indifferent to it.’

‘Am I indifferent? But you do not know me yet. Pardon my egotism. There may be such danger. Every truth has its own danger or shadow. Assuredly I would have no less labour spent upon them. But there can be no true labour done, save in as far as we are fellow-labourers with God. We must work with him, not against him. Every one who works without believing that God is doing the best, the absolute good for them, is, must be, more or less, thwarting God. He would take the poor out of God’s hands. For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that which is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred. But through all this darkness about the poor, at least I can see wonderful veins and fields of light, and with the help of this partial vision, I trust for the rest. The only and the greatest thing man is capable of is Trust in God.’

‘What then is a man to do for the poor? How is he to work with God?’ I asked.

‘He must be a man amongst them—a man breathing the air of a higher life, and therefore in all natural ways fulfilling his endless human relations to them. Whatever you do for them, let your own being, that is you in relation to them, be the background, that so you may be a link between them and God, or rather I should say, between them and the knowledge of God.’

While Falconer spoke, his face grew grander and grander, till at last it absolutely shone. I felt that I walked with a man whose faith was his genius.

‘Of one thing I am pretty sure,’ he resumed, ‘that the same recipe Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: “Do the thing that lies next you.” That is all our business. Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the divine patience. How long it took to make the cradle! and we fret that the baby Humanity is not reading Euclid and Plato, even that it is not understanding the Gospel of St. John! If there is one thing evident in the world’s history, it is that God hasteneth not. All haste implies weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter. What they call the church militant is only at drill yet, and a good many of the officers too not out of the awkward squad. I am sure I, for a private, am not. In the drill a man has to conquer himself, and move with the rest by individual attention to his own duty: to what mighty battlefields the recruit may yet be led, he does not know. Meantime he has nearly enough to do with his goose-step, while there is plenty of single combat, skirmish, and light cavalry work generally, to get him ready for whatever is to follow. I beg your pardon: I am preaching.’

‘Eloquently,’ I answered.

Of some of the places into which Falconer led me that night I will attempt no description—places blazing with lights and mirrors, crowded with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full of the saddest of all sights, the uninteresting faces of commonplace women.

‘There is a passion,’ I said, as we came out of one of these dreadful places, ‘that lingers about the heart like the odour of violets, like a glimmering twilight on the borders of moonrise; and there is a passion that wraps itself in the vapours of patchouli and coffins, and streams from the eyes like gaslight from a tavern. And yet the line is ill to draw between them. It is very dreadful. These are women.’

‘They are in God’s hands,’ answered Falconer. ‘He hasn’t done with them yet. Shall it take less time to make a woman than to make a world? Is not the woman the greater? She may have her ages of chaos, her centuries of crawling slime, yet rise a woman at last.’

‘How much alike all those women were!’

‘A family likeness, alas! which always strikes you first.’

‘Some of them looked quite modest.’

‘There are great differences. I do not know anything more touching than to see how a woman will sometimes wrap around her the last remnants of a soiled and ragged modesty. It has moved me almost to tears to see such a one hanging her head in shame during the singing of a detestable song. That poor thing’s shame was precious in the eyes of the Master, surely.’

‘Could nothing be done for her?’

‘I contrived to let her know where she would find a friend if she wanted to be good: that is all you can do in such cases. If the horrors of their life do not drive them out at such an open door, you can do nothing else, I fear—for the time.’

‘Where are you going now, may I ask?’

‘Into the city—on business,’ he added with a smile.

‘There will be nobody there so late.’

‘Nobody! One would think you were the beadle of a city church, Mr. Gordon.’

We came into a very narrow, dirty street. I do not know where it is. A slatternly woman advanced from an open door, and said,

‘Mr. Falconer.’

He looked at her for a moment.

‘Why, Sarah, have you come to this already?’ he said.