The Master Craftsman

The old house proved to be even older than it looked. ‘It was built,’ said the present owner, ‘by the first of the Wapping Burnikels. I don’t know where he came from; but he was already a man of substance when he built this house. That was in the time of James the Second. It was close by here—at a low riverside tavern—that Judge Jeffreys hid himself, and it was our ancestor who discovered him and gave him up to justice. At least, so they say.’

Within, it was the house of a solid and substantial merchant, who understood the arts of comfort. The Hall was wainscoted with a dark polished oak relieved by a line of gold along the top, and lit by a broad window on the stairs; it contained no other furniture than a tall old clock ticking gravely, and the large model of a boat under a glass case. The staircase was broad and stately: such a staircase as is impossible in a narrow London house, where the unhappy tenants have to climb up and down a ladder. Robert Burnikel opened the door of the room on the left. ‘Come in here,’ he said, ‘till tea is ready. We can talk at our ease in here. This is my own room.’ He looked around with some pride, not so much in the old-world beauty of the room, in which anyone might have taken pride, as in the things which belonged to, and proclaimed, his own studies. It would be difficult indeed to find anywhere a more beautiful room. The walls were of panelled cedar, dark and polished; over the mantel was a mass of carved wood, grapes in bunches, vine-leaves, scrolls, branches, heads of Cupids, all apparently thrown together upon the wall, but there was method in the mass; the fruit and the leaves formed a frame round a shield on which were blazoned—or and gules and azure, in proper heraldic colours, a coat-of-arms.

‘Why,’ I cried, ‘those are my arms! I thought they were granted to the Judge as the first “Armiger” of the family. He had them already, then. This is very curious. We were a family of gentlefolk.’

‘As if that matters!’ said the representative of the race. ‘There’s always been that Thing belonging to us.’

‘The man who built this house may have been a pretender, but I doubt it. People did not assume arms so readily in those days. It was a kind of robbery.’

‘Oh! the arms are ours fast enough, if we want them. I’ve got an old seal upstairs with the first boat-builder’s arms on it.’

‘Where did he come from? Do you know?’

‘I don’t know. That’s his portrait, perhaps. And perhaps it isn’t. Why inquire about the dead? We are only concerned with the living.’

On one side of the mantel hung a portrait in oils of a dead and gone Burnikel. He wore white lace ruffles, a white lace neckcloth, a colossal wig, and he had the smooth, fat cheek and double chin of his generation, which was a bibulous, armchair-loving generation.

‘I believe,’ Robert repeated, ‘that this is the man who came here first, but it is not certain. It may be his son or his grandson. Did you think really that your family began with the Judge, Sir George?’

‘Well, I never heard much about his predecessors, except that story of the lost diamonds.’

‘Now you see. The first man of whom we know anything builds this fine house, lines it with cedar and rosewood, and oak wainscoting; adorns it with wood-carving——’

‘That overmantel work might belong to a later time,’ I interrupted. ‘It looks like Grinling Gibbons, though. He may have done it—or perhaps one of his scholars.’

‘And had a coat-of-arms. He was a gentleman, I suppose, if you care about that fact. I don’t. Gentleman or not, he did not despise the craft of boat-builder.’

‘Yes, I do care about that fact. Gentility is a real thing, whatever you may think. I am very glad indeed to recover this long-lost ancestor.’

On the other side of the mantel was a large oval mirror. Its duty, which it discharged faithfully, was to catch the light, and so to relieve the room of some of the shadows which lay about in the corners, shifting from place to place as the day went on, until the evening fell, when the candles were reflected in the polished walls, and the room was ghostly to those who ever thought upon the dead and gone. One side of the room, however, was completely spoiled as regards the original intention of him who clothed it with cedar by the introduction of a bookcase covering the whole wall, and fitted with books. There was a central table littered with papers, and a smaller table with a row of books. And there were only two chairs, both of them wooden chairs with arms—the students’ chair. The books, one might observe, had the external appearance of having been read and well used; the bindings being cracked or creased and robbed of their pristine shininess. I looked at them. Heavens! What a serious library of solid reading! Herbert Spencer, Mill, Hallam, Freeman, Stubbs, Hamilton, Spinoza, Bagehot, Seeley, Lecky, and a crowd of others for history; Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Wallace, and more for science; rows of books on the institutions of the country and on the questions of the day.

‘These are my books.’ Robert pointed to them with undisguised pride. ‘I don’t believe there’s a better collection this side of the Tower. I collected them all myself. You see, my people were never given much to books. My father in the evening smoked his pipe. His father smoked his pipe in the evening. The girls of the family did their sewing all the time. They didn’t want to read. All the books we had stood in two shelves in a cupboard. They were chiefly devotional books. “Meditations among the Tombs,” “Sermons,” “Reflections for the Serious,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and such-like—mighty useful to me. So I had to collect my own books. And, mind you, no rubbish among them all—no silly novels and poetry and stuff—all good and useful books. And, what’s more, I’ve read them every one, and I know them all.’

I now began to understand how he had been training for the post of Home Secretary.

‘I wish I had read half as many,’ I said. ‘I assure you that I seldom feel any curiosity as to what may be inside a book.’

‘Well, if you only read what most of ’em do you are quite as well out of it. Novels! Sickening love stories—I’ve tried that kind. And poetry! Pah! Now, here on these shelves is something worth reading. These books have made me the man I am.’

‘I suppose,’ I ventured, ‘that you are not married?’

‘No, I am not. No, sir. Marriage holds a man down just where it finds him. If I were married I should be wheeling the perambulator, fidgeting about the children, insuring my life for the children, saving money for the children, running for the doctor. No. I shall marry some day—when I have succeeded. Not before.’

‘Then, you have a mother or a sister living with you?’

‘No. Father died five years ago, and there were left my mother with myself, two brothers and a sister. The business isn’t good enough for more than one. So my two brothers went off to Tasmania, and they’ve started a yard of their own, and they tell me it’s going to pay. My mother went out to see them, and I think she’ll stay. You see, mother is a determined kind of a woman; she’d always been master here, father being an easy kind of man, and she wanted to go on being master. Now, there can’t be two masters in this house. So, when she came to understand that, she concluded to go. My sister Kate went with her. Kate wanted to be master too. So it’s just as well, for family peace and quietness, that they did go away. I’m all for peace, and always shall be, but I mean to be master in my own house.’

The speech revealed things volcanic; the son of the mother, the mother of the son; the sister of the brother, the brother of the sister—all masterful, and all striving for the mastery. And the son getting the best of it. So he made a solitude, and he called it peace.

‘And you are left all alone in this great house?’

‘No. Some cousins of mine—not your cousins—mother’s cousins, live here and keep the house for me. They are a retired skipper and his daughter. The daughter does the housekeeping. She is also my secretary, and keeps the accounts of the place over the way. She’s a clever girl in her way, always right to a farthing with the accounts; and she copies things for me when I want passages copied. Can’t follow an argument, of course. No woman can.’ This is to have lived all your life at Wapping. ‘You’ll see her presently. I’ve told her, by the way, if that matters—only I want you to understand how I stand, and what sort of a man I am—that I shall marry her one of these days, when I have got on. Not before. You see, I want a wife who won’t be thinking all the time about her clothes and company and stuff. I train my own wife in my own way. It may be ten years, or twelve years, or forty, that she’ll have to wait. Of course,’ he snorted, ‘she doesn’t expect any fondling and kissing and foolishness.’

‘Poor girl!’ I did not say this. I only murmured, ‘Yes, I see, of course,’ in the usual way when one is surprised, and a coherent reply is difficult.

‘I only tell you this because I am consulting you about myself, and you ought to know everything. Otherwise, it’s a perfectly unimportant affair.’

‘Only a woman.’

‘That’s all. One must marry, some time, and it’s as well to know what you are about. Not that I’m afraid of any woman. Still, it saves trouble to get your wife into proper order before you begin.’

‘My own opinion, quite. Whether it will be my wife’s opinion or not I cannot say.’

Here was a gallant lover for you! Here was an ardent lover! Here, in the language of the last century, were flames and darts, and pains and madness of love! He was going to wait for ten or twelve or forty years, until he had achieved the object of his ambition; and there was to be no fondling, and the future wife was to be reduced to proper order!

‘And now,’ said the man of ambition abruptly, ‘about that information that you promised to get for me. That’s what we came here to talk about, not coats-of-arms and girls. Have you got it?’

‘I have been to see a man whom I know. He is a politician; he lives in politics; he thinks about nothing else. And I spent this morning with him discussing your case—much as you told me last night. I can only tell you’—I felt a little embarrassed, for obvious reasons—‘what he told me.’

‘Go on. What did he say? That a boat-builder from Wapping mustn’t dare to think of the House?’

‘Not at all. They don’t mind much what a man is by calling. What I understood last night is this: You wish to go into the House and to make your way upwards by your own abilities, alone. You will force the House to recognise you.’

‘Yes. My model is John Bright. I’ve got his speeches, and I know his history.’

‘But John Bright became in the long-run a Party man.’

‘John Bright was a power in the country as an independent member long before he went into the Cabinet. I want to be a power in the country.’

‘Well, my friend says that the time of the Independent Member is gone. The only way to get on, nowadays, is to belong to a Party from the outset. Do you know what that means? You have to fall in and obey orders; you must not advance opinions of your own unless they happen to be those of the Party; you must vote as you are told; you must advocate whatever the leaders do. When you have proved yourself a good servant—trustworthy, unscrupulous, and loyal—then, and not till then, if you fit in other respects, and if there is nobody in the way, and if you are personally liked by the Cabinet, and if there is any vacancy into which you could be pushed, then, and not till then, you might get promoted, and so rise.’

‘Oh,’ he snarled again defiantly, ‘we shall see. What next?’

‘You will, of course, belong to the Liberal side. All the men who want to get on enter on that side, because the others have got young men of their own. If you do not know a constituency where you think you would have a chance, the Party, supposing they approve of you as a candidate, will perhaps find you one. They’ve always got a list of boroughs where they want a good candidate. Then you must set yourself to become agreeable to the electors; you must stay there, lecture them, humour them, coax and cajole and flatter and fawn to them—my man didn’t say all this, but he meant it—above all, you must promise them everything they want. It is perfectly easy, though it does seem rather dirty work. But it has to be done, and by yourself, because it can’t be done by deputy.’

‘I shall not do it.’

‘As you please. You know that there is a Party Committee in every borough. You will have to study that Committee, and all the members. Lastly, you will have to undergo the process of heckling, which a man of your temper will, I imagine, find extremely disagreeable.’

‘I shall get in, Sir George, without any of these tricks; and I shall get in as an Independent Member. I will neither fawn to my people nor flatter them. I shall say: “Here am I, your candidate; elect me.” And I shall go in pledged to neither side.’

‘Then, my cousin, between the two you will fall to the ground.’

‘No; I shall succeed. You do not understand yet, Sir George, that you have to do with a very able man indeed.’

This kind of talk may be arrogant and offensive; but Robert Burnikel was neither. He made an arrogant assertion with a calmness which was modesty. He advanced it as one who states a scientific fact. Belief in himself was a part of the man’s nature. More than this, as you will see: he succeeded in convincing those who heard him.

‘Now for my fitness,’ he went on. ‘Listen to this. First of all, there’s nobody like me in the House at all. I am a Master Craftsman. Formerly there were hundreds of crafts all carried on in London. They made everything. There were in every craft the masters and the men. The master knew the craft as well as the men. I make what I sell. I am not a shopkeeper; I make. That is a great difference, because it helps me to understand the Labour Question—work, wages, hours, and all the rest of it. There are working men in the House: shopkeepers, manufacturers, lawyers, country gentlemen; but the Master Craftsman the House hasn’t got, and it wants him badly.’

‘Well?’

‘That is not all. This place, so secluded and cut off by the docks and its river, is a little world in itself. You can study everything in Wapping. I know the working of the whole system—parish, vestry, County Council, School Board, everything. I understand the education business, because I know my own men and their families, and what they want, and the foolishness of what they get. I understand the Poor Law business. I know all about the Church, the parish, the school, the workhouse, the parish rates. That’s practical knowledge. But that is not enough. One must understand principles. All institutions are based on principles. So I have read Herbert Spencer and Mill, and all the books that treat of practical things and what they mean. There is an ideal standard in every institution—the thing aimed at—and there is a practical level which is as near as we can get. They are sometimes very wide apart; they are kept apart by the selfishness of the men for whom the system has been devised. We must never lose sight of the ideal, and we must work steadily to bring the attainable nearer to the ideal.’

‘Go on.’ I grew more and more interested in this man—this strong man.

‘Well, I read the debates every day. Nothing interests me in the paper so much as the debates. Day after day I say to myself, when I read the rubbish that is talked there: “This is wrong; this is ignorant; this is foolish; this is mischievous; this man doesn’t understand the first facts of the case.” And so on. Because, you see, when a man has got the workings of one single parish like this firmly fixed in his mind, with the history and the meaning of every institution in it—and they are all in it—from a coroner’s jury up to a General Election, he’s got an amount of practical knowledge that covers nearly the whole field of home politics.’

‘Well, but you are as yet untried in oratory and in debate.’

‘Not at all. I went into the Blackwall Parliament at sixteen; at twenty I led the House. I can speak; not to pour out floods of slushy talk. I tell you I can speak. I have studied the art of oratory; I have read all I could find on the subject. I have also read many great speeches—Bright’s, above all. I told you just now, Sir George, that I am an able man. I now tell you that I am an eloquent man. I know that the House doesn’t want claptrap. I spoke at Poplar last winter, and I made ’em laugh and made ’em cry just as I chose, and because I wanted to try what I could do with them. That was only claptrap. I can speak better than that. And as for my voice, listen: Do, Re, Mi——’ He ran up and down the scales not only with correctness and ease, but with a flexible, rich, and musical baritone. ‘That’s good enough for anything, isn’t it? Why, as soon as I found I had a voice, I rejoiced, because I knew that for such work as I resolved, even then, to go in for, a voice is most useful. I went into the church choir in order to learn the use of it. I sing there every Sunday for practice. I didn’t want to sing in the choir; it wastes good time; but there is the practice. Nothing like singing for keeping the voice flexible.’

‘Very good—very good indeed.’

‘Well, I have told you everything. What do you think about my fitness to go into the House to-morrow, and to rise in it?’

The question was meek. The manner was aggressive. It said plainly, ‘Deny, if you dare, my fitness.’

At that moment the door was opened, and a girl’s head appeared. ‘Tea is ready,’ she said, and disappeared.

‘Let us go in to tea,’ I said; ‘and then I will answer your question.’