The Man and His Newspaper
At a little station, which I decline to specify, somewhere between
Oxford and Guildford, I missed a connection or miscalculated a route
in such manner that I was left stranded for rather more than an hour.
I adore waiting at railway stations, but this was not a very
sumptuous specimen. There was nothing on the platform except a chocolate
automatic machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies but produced no
corresponding chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few remaining
copies of a cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire.
It does not matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say
the same thing.
Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as I
strolled out of the station and up the country road. It opened with
the striking phrase that the Radicals were setting class against class.
It went on to remark that nothing had contributed more to make our
Empire happy and enviable, to create that obvious list of glories
which you can supply for yourself, the prosperity of all classes
in our great cities, our populous and growing villages, the success
of our rule in Ireland, etc., etc., than the sound Anglo-Saxon
readiness of all classes in the State "to work heartily hand-in-hand."
It was this alone, the paper assured me, that had saved us from
the horrors of the French Revolution. "It is easy for the Radicals,"
it went on very solemnly, "to make jokes about the dukes.
Very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given to the poor one half
of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and truly Christian
patience that are given to them by the great landlords of this country.
We are very sure that the English people, with their sturdy
common sense, will prefer to be in the hands of English gentlemen
rather than in the miry claws of Socialistic buccaneers."
Just when I had reached this point I nearly ran into a man.
Despite the populousness and growth of our villages, he appeared
to be the only man for miles, but the road up which I had wandered
turned and narrowed with equal abruptness, and I nearly knocked him
off the gate on which he was leaning. I pulled up to apologize,
and since he seemed ready for society, and even pathetically
pleased with it, I tossed the Daily Wire over a hedge and fell
into speech with him. He wore a wreck of respectable clothes,
and his face had that plebeian refinement which one sees in small
tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades.
Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt
and tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy
that he symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood.
There was a fixed look in his face which told that he was one
of those who in keeping body and soul together have difficulties
not only with the body, but also with the soul.
He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent
of those streets from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly
all his life in this countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs
of it in that formless, tail-foremost way in which the poor
gossip about their great neighbours. Names kept coming and going
in the narrative like charms or spells, unaccompanied by any
biographical explanation. In particular the name of somebody called
Sir Joseph multiplied itself with the omnipresence of a deity.
I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landowner of the district;
and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began to form
a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph.
He was spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child
might speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate,
but by no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own
bed and board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that,
with a caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not
appear that Sir Joseph was popular, but he was "a household word."
He was not so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence.
The particular man to whom I spoke said he had "been in trouble,"
and that Sir Joseph had been "pretty hard on him."
And under that grey and silver cloudland, with a background of those
frost-bitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me
a tale which, true or false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet.
He had slowly built up in the village a small business as
a photographer, and he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges,
whom he loved with passion. "I'm the sort that 'ad better marry,"
he said; and for all his frail figure I knew what he meant.
But Sir Joseph, and especially Sir Joseph's wife, did not want
a photographer in the village; it made the girls vain, or perhaps they
disliked this particular photographer. He worked and worked until
he had just enough to marry on honestly; and almost on the eve of his
wedding the lease expired, and Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory.
He refused to renew the lease; and the man went wildly elsewhere.
But Sir Joseph was ubiquitous; and the whole of that place was
barred against him. In all that country he could not find a shed
to which to bring home his bride. The man appealed and explained;
but he was disliked as a demagogue, as well as a photographer.
Then it was as if a black cloud came across the winter sky;
for I knew what was coming. I forget even in what words he told
of Nature maddened and set free. But I still see, as in a photograph,
the grey muscles of the winter trees standing out like tight ropes,
as if all Nature were on the rack.
"She 'ad to go away," he said.
"Wouldn't her parents," I began, and hesitated on the word "forgive."
"Oh, her people forgave her," he said. "But Her Ladyship..."
"Her Ladyship made the sun and moon and stars," I said, impatiently.
"So of course she can come between a mother and the child of her body."
"Well, it does seem a bit 'ard ..." he began with a break in his voice.
"But, good Lord, man," I cried, "it isn't a matter of hardness!
It's a matter of impious and indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph
knew the passions he was playing with, he did you a wrong for which
in many Christian countries he would have a knife in him."
The man continued to look across the frozen fields with a frown.
He certainly told his tale with real resentment, whether it
was true or false, or only exaggerated. He was certainly sullen
and injured; but he did not seem to think of any avenue of escape.
At last he said:
"Well, it's a bad world; let's 'ope there's a better one."
"Amen," I said. "But when I think of Sir Joseph, I understand
how men have hoped there was a worse one."
Then we were silent for a long time and felt the cold of the day
crawling up, and at last I said, abruptly:
"The other day at a Budget meeting, I heard."
He took his elbows off the stile and seemed to change from
head to foot like a man coming out of sleep with a yawn.
He said in a totally new voice, louder but much more careless,
"Ah yes, sir,... this 'ere Budget ... the Radicals are doing
a lot of 'arm."
I listened intently, and he went on. He said with a sort of careful
precision, "Settin' class against class; that's what I call it.
Why, what's made our Empire except the readiness of all classes
to work 'eartily 'and-in-'and."
He walked a little up and down the lane and stamped with the cold.
Then he said, "What I say is, what else kept us from the 'errors
of the French Revolution?"
My memory is good, and I waited in tense eagerness for the phrase
that came next. "They may laugh at Dukes; I'd like to see them 'alf
as kind and Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are.
Let me tell you, sir," he said, facing round at me with the final air
of one launching a paradox. "The English people 'ave some common sense,
and they'd rather be in the 'ands of gentlemen than in the claws
of a lot of Socialist thieves."
I had an indescribable sense that I ought to applaud, as if I
were a public meeting. The insane separation in the man's soul
between his experience and his ready-made theory was but a type
of what covers a quarter of England. As he turned away,
I saw the Daily Wire sticking out of his shabby pocket.
He bade me farewell in quite a blaze of catchwords, and went
stumping up the road. I saw his figure grow smaller and smaller
in the great green landscape; even as the Free Man has grown smaller
and smaller in the English countryside.
