The island

I have to tell her one day of the Empire, the power, the stretch of it, the count in millions of miles, in millions of souls; the largest empires, living or dead, mostly but parishes beside hers and mine. In mere size, Russia, even, beaten by an eighth, the Grand Republic beaten all but three times over, the late Darius the Great beaten five times clear—more than forty Germanys, more than fifty Spains! Our own Mother Island but a dot in a waste beside it, Victoria’s Island but a dot on the dot, the parasite of a midge. With this, the figures for commerce, the figures for sails on all the seas that wash the ball, the figures for wealth—a round nine thousand millions sterling, if we were sold up to-morrow, and, for all the bad years since ‘seventy-five, a steady hundred and eighty millions added year by year to the hoard—our swelling liver almost putrid with the gorge of gold.

Victoria is delighted; wants to measure Pitcairn with her sash—is stopped; becomes light of heart, effusive; carolleth; offers to take me to the Cave on the ledge, for a treat—the Cave of the Great Scrape, I have always called it—pays me a sort of reverence, as one who has come from the sun of this colossal system—is stopped again. Then, after purring foolishly over the totals, like a great happy kitten that has got all the thread in the world for a ball, asks to have them unravelled in measured inventory. Is told something about Australia, about Canada, about the Indies. Seems to see it all with ever-dilating pupils, as a child before a pageant of pantomime. Sees it in procession of countless tribes, armies, emblemed industries, brother peoples, subject kings; warriors coated in mail, in crimson, or only in the black of their own skins; priests bearing every symbol, from the notched stick to the cross; mechanics, from them that smooth with the flint hatchet to them that smooth with the Whitworth plane; Nature’s experiments with the type, from the bushman to the man from Mayfair. At this, and long before the procession closes, shows signs of worshipping me again, as a sort of deputy lord of India and the other dependencies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. But I turn away.

For modesty forbids, not to speak of the fear of detection. All the lords of India are not so plump; and I sometimes wonder what the lordship means. I am a lord of India, it is true, but so is Snip there, in his sweating-shop, and Swart carrying the sandwich-board, ‘lords of human kind,’ as it was once put; but let us keep within bounds. I think of the lordship whenever I meet Swart, whenever I take stock of all the figures that make the huge stain of shabbiness upon our moving crowds. A lord of India, too, the man in threadbare who turns out every morning from Kentish Town or Somers, or other of the circumjacent wastes, to look for a job in the City, plodding steadily forward for the hundredth time, with fifteen shillings a week as the goal of hope. Clean shaven this lord, got up for ‘respectable appearance,’ down to his last ha’penny, in shining boots, inked for the cracks and patches, and shining coat; everything shining about him, but the hard and hopeless face. He is certainly of the Imperial breed—no one can deny him that—a lord of India, an heir to the ages of struggle and victory on battle plains dotting our fifth of the globe.

But Swart is the best example, and Victoria is easily stimulated to the entreaty that I will tell of him all I know. It is worth telling, in good faith.

‘I first met Swart in Regent Street, a little while before I came out here. He was sandwiched between two boards of “India in London,” and there was something so spiritually picturesque in the ruin of him, from his baggy hat to his mere suggestion of a boot, that it drew me to his side. I was drawn by curiosity rather than by pity, as a naturalist who might want to see how the wood-louse lives.’

‘Where is Regent Street? and what is a sandwich-man?’ said Victoria as I began the tale.

‘We must reserve all that for the footnotes. If I am to keep on moving, you must let me get under way.’

‘Well, we struck up acquaintance, Swart and I. Did I say that he was tallish, thin, bent, and grizzled, and foul? I want to get all that over as soon as may be. Sixty, or thereabouts, I should say, as to age; a not unkindly face, and not unhandsome, but for its furrows and puckers of mean cares—a good face spoiled.’

‘I wish I knew what a sandwich-man is,’ she murmured; ‘but it does not signify. Please go on.’

‘We struck up acquaintance, and I used to walk with him up and down his beat—he in the gutter, I on the kerb. He had been a soldier, and had helped to win India back for England at the storming of Lucknow. He was quite proud of the whole achievement, and of his share in it. “They was nigh slipping clean away, sir,” he would say of his Indian fellow-subjects. “You cannot think how nigh they was; but we just cotched ’em by the tail.” It was pleasant to see Swart proud of anything; it did so much to improve his air. At such moments, he seemed almost a man. They were but sun-rifts in a black sky, of course. Sometimes the policeman would threaten to run him in, for trespassing on the kerb with the edge of his board. This would tend to drive him wide of the gutter; then, his foreman would come by, and growl an oath at him for not walking straight in his furrow, and threaten him with the sack.’

‘“The sack!”’ said Victoria softly; ‘“run him in!” I am not interrupting, you know, I am only saving up.’

‘I asked Swart to let me go and see him, but he said “Not yet.” He was living in a common lodging-house, and he was not allowed to receive visitors. “If I was allowed,” he said frankly, “I shouldn’t like you to come. They really ain’t fit company for a gentleman, or, for that matter, for a common man. We had three took out of their beds last night for robberies from the person, and one for burglary and murder. What with the police coming in and out of the room, and flashing their lights on your faces, there was no getting a wink. There was sixty sleepin’ in our room, and the row woke most of us up. You may fancy what it was after that. Besides, I’m gettin’ too old to fight for my place by the kitchen fire, and I’m cold half the time. Then, if you ain’t got your fourpence every night, out you go; and I can’t tackle the Embankment no more. I want a place of my own.”’

‘You might tell me about the Embankment now,’ she said, ‘but, of course, we’ll make a note of it, if you are going to get cross.’

‘It is an open thoroughfare, the finest in London, bordered, on one side, by gardens and public palaces, on the other, by the river. The people who cannot afford to sleep as Swart sleeps are allowed to sleep there, as a favour, for it is against the law.’

‘But do you mean to say——?’

‘Yes, indeed, I do; that is just what I do mean.’

‘But how can the others go to bed, then?’

‘Well, how can you, for that matter, now you know it? You get used to such things.’

‘I would never go to bed if I lived there. Never, at least, till——?’

‘A week or two later Swart told me that his place was ready, and that I might call. He had been saving slowly for his furnishing, for, as he observed, what can you do on 1s. 3d. a day? He merely “had his eye” on a table. I let him keep his eye on it. The experiment was too interesting to be spoiled by help from me.

‘His place was in White Horse Yard. White Horse Yard, you must know, Victoria, is a London slum, one of hundreds as clearly marked on the map, and as well known, as Buckingham Palace or Grosvenor Square. The description would interest you, as a semi-savage, but to us worn children of civilisation it is too trite for pleasure or profit. Every social reformer begins by describing White Horse Yard: it is the sign of the “’prentice hand.” Swart’s place was reached by a narrow causeway, reeking with every kind of abomination, and by a staircase, dark and rotten, and swarming with vermin, as I had afterwards good reason to know. Here, at the summit, was his back garret, with his bed of shavings, and his table, made of a packing-case turned upside down. His neighbours worked at many trades, including that most ancient one of private plunder. The front garret was the home, as distinct from the place of business, of “one of them gals.” Swart could never be induced to be more explicit. On the floor below, they made lawn-tennis aprons at threepence a dozen, and army coats. They did something with rabbit-skins in the back drawing-room, for, one day, when Swart opened his window for air, we were nearly choked with a furry adulteration of the precious fluid that came in with the fog. A housebreaker who had been out of work for six months or more, owing to an injury received in a scuffle with a policeman, occupied the front kitchen, and, by general consent, he was the quietest man in the house. The back kitchen—but no, nothing of these premises below the ground level, if you please; nothing, even in distant allusion, in veiled hint; nothing about the back yard either, or about the water-butt therein! If you are going to be foolish, Victoria, I shall just leave off.’

‘I am not foolish.’

‘What are you crying about?’

‘If we let people live so, we should be afraid of God; I think we should be afraid of every thunderstorm.’

‘The lightning is very tender with us—a chimney-stack now and then; seldom the steeple of a church.’

‘It is not true. You are just saying things to me. There are missions in all the cities to look after the poor people. I have read books.’

‘Of course. There were four missions in this very circumscription of Swart’s, and one Inspector of Public Health.

‘The chief thing the missionaries preached was the sanctity of submission, or that sanctity of property which had made this dismal hole what it was. They preached it in a pair of parlours, only less dismal than Swart’s garret. Their object was to effect a change of heart as a condition precedent to the change of linen—the cart before the horse. Of the night of material ugliness around that was, on one side, the parent of all this spiritual ugliness, they seemed to have no idea. On Sunday, some of the poor people in the yard went to the preaching, dubiously, yet still hoping there might be something in it, their dim intuitions of logic being hardly strong enough to expose the mockery of its gospel of love. Others went to the drink-shops, and they were the wiser, for they found a little brightness there. There was one drink-shop to every two hundred inhabitants; and the missionaries, who were quite as dull as their hearers, never understood the reason why.

‘Swart read his paper meanwhile, and joined the crowd in the “pub,” when he had a penny to spare. He never missed his paper, being quite a hopeful kind of fool, and inclined to believe that the better luck was just going to begin. He had revelled in that anticipation, from Sunday to Sunday, for at least five-and-thirty years. The foreign intelligence, especially, used to cheer his soul. We were always taking something to round our Empire off; soon it would be quite trim, and then! “You may reckon we’ve got Burmah, sir,” he said to me one day, when news came of the execution of a fresh batch of dacoits. “It’s as good as ours. There’ll be fine times, I’m thinking, soon. Such a rumpus, indeed, when it’s all for their good!” He was really angry with the Burmese. He regarded their war, and all the other little wars, as only so many accidents of human perversity that tended to defer the grand opening of a vast humanitarian entertainment known as “Better times all round.” He had hoped the curtain was going to rise, when India was quieted down, in the pit. Then came the stupid interruptions from the Abyssinian and Ashantee sections of the gallery. Then the Afghan and Zulu fights at the doors. Next, “them there fellers in the Soudan.” Now, “the Burmah lot.” Swart had been waiting through all this for a curtain that never stirred.’

‘The curtain is to hide the stage when they are changing the scenery,’ she said, wandering from the subject for a moment, like the big child she was. ‘It is let down five times in most of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays. I know.’

‘Yes, you know, Vickey, and so did Swart. Swart was just the man for that kind of stage-play, being one of those profounder fools who take everything as it is offered to them, and who will very contentedly accept two deal boards and a sheet of canvas for a blossoming tree. They had told him that he, too, was a lord of India, and he believed it; and he was quite touched, as with the sense of an accession of personal dignity, when his Sovereign was made Empress as well as Queen. As he would often observe, all the people in his court were lords of India, if they only knew it, heirs to the Great Mogul—for he had a smattering of history—conquerors at Plassey, Mooltan, Moodkee, Sobraon, and the rest. All Clare Market and Collier’s Rents, and all the Minories had their share in that great heritage, yet they never gave it a thought.

‘They could not be got to see it in that way, there was the difficulty. Swart had endless arguments with them on the calm Sabbath afternoons, while they waited at the street corners, ankle deep in slush, for the opening of the houses. He would hurl his figures at their heads; totals for imports and exports, the growth in shipping, the growth in trade. There was sometimes an inert obstructive force in their stupidity against which he could not prevail. The brighter witted mocked him openly, and always led the argument back from the pageant of Empire to his own rags. The duller merely spat, but there was dissent in their expectoration; and sometimes he was obliged to fancy they spat at him. He would ask me for help in his strait, and I lent him some of the popular literature of Federation, where the right arguments are all set down.’

‘We have begun praying for Federation, every Sunday—just after the Collect. The schoolmaster is writing a Federation hymn.’

‘Try to interrupt me as little as you can, my dear. It checks the flow. Make notes, and we’ll settle it up afterwards.’ (She took off her girdle and tied a knot for ‘Federation.’)

‘But I felt less interest in Swart’s dealings with others than in his dealings with himself. That was the ever-present wonder. I found, on probing his wound of penury, that he had been waiting for relief, not for five-and-thirty years merely, but, in a sense, for five hundred. He was of a most ancient stock, as indeed are most of us, if you will but think of it; and for all the years it had flourished on this earth, in so far as the straining vision could trace it through the night of time, that stock had never escaped from its parent dunghill. And Swart’s gaze carried back very far. For a man of his class, he had a quite exceptional knowledge of family history, partly oral, partly recorded on the fly-leaf of a family Bible, which, for the purpose of our researches, I lent him the money to get out of pawn.’ (She tied another knot at ‘pawn.’)

‘The Swarts knew themselves as far back as Anne; nay, with allowances and conjectural emendations, as far back as the second Charles. Here, then, was my opportunity, unique, as far as I know, to get at a real pedigree of a Poor Stupid; how infinitely more interesting than any pedigree of the baronage, if only by reason of its rarity. I encouraged him, therefore, by every means in my power, to leave the current affairs of the Empire for a season, and to talk about the past of his own race. He was nothing loath, and, after weeks of labour, we had a family tree drawn out for him that, for hoary age, might not have been unworthy of a seventh Earl. We had sometimes to make a perilous leap from bough to bough, as in the best performances of this description, but we kept that secret to ourselves.’