CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXXVI A Somewhat Improbable Story
Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can
get for a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun,
the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles.
You can get them for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing,
which I am not allowed to mention in this paper, and of which
the lowest price is a penny halfpenny. But the general principle
will be at once apparent. In the street behind me, for instance,
you can now get a ride on an electric tram for a halfpenny.
To be on an electric tram is to be on a flying castle in a fairy tale.
You can get quite a large number of brightly coloured sweets for
a halfpenny. Also you can get the chance of reading this article
for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other and irrelevant matter.
But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array
of valuable things you can get at a halfpenny each you
should do as I was doing last night. I was gluing my nose
against the glass of a very small and dimly lit toy shop
in one of the greyest and leanest of the streets of Battersea.
But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as a
child once said to me) with all the colours God ever made.
Those toys of the poor were like the children who buy them;
they were all dirty; but they were all bright. For my part,
I think brightness more important than cleanliness; since
the first is of the soul, and the second of the body. You
must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion
in the modern world.
. . . . .
As I looked at that palace of pigmy wonders, at small green omnibuses,
at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red
Noah's arks, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance.
That lit shop-window became like the brilliantly lit
stage when one is watching some highly coloured comedy.
I forgot the grey houses and the grimy people behind me as one
forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowds at a theatre.
It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass were small,
not because they were toys, but because they were objects far away.
The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green Bayswater omnibus,
passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to Bayswater.
The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he was blue
with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved against
passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming
and only man is black. The red Noah's ark was really the enormous
ship of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea,
red in the first morning of hope.
Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction,
such brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the
face of one's own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles
or moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the
slowness of their growth and the suddenness of their termination.
The return to real thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man.
Very often indeed (in my case) it is bumping into a man.
But in any case the awakening is always emphatic and,
generally speaking, it is always complete. Now, in this case,
I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness
that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop;
but in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final.
There was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told
me that I had strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I
had already done some odd thing. I felt as if I had worked
a miracle or committed a sin. It was as if I had at any rate,
stepped across some border in the soul.
To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop
and tried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old
and broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half
his face, hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial.
Yet though he was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering
in his eyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling
asleep in a not unkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers,
but when I put down the money he did not at first seem to see it;
then he blinked at it feebly, and then he pushed it feebly away.
"No, no," he said vaguely. "I never have. I never have.
We are rather old-fashioned here."
"Not taking money," I replied, "seems to me more like an uncommonly
new fashion than an old one."
"I never have," said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose;
"I've always given presents. I'm too old to stop."
"Good heavens!" I said. "What can you mean? Why, you might
be Father Christmas."
"I am Father Christmas," he said apologetically, and blew
his nose again.
The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside.
At any rate, I could see nothing against the darkness but the shining
shop-window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street;
I might have strayed into some new and sunless world.
But something had cut the chords of common sense, and I could
not feel even surprise except sleepily. Something made me say,
"You look ill, Father Christmas."
"I am dying," he said.
I did not speak, and it was he who spoke again.
"All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it.
They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent
sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators.
They say that I give people superstitions and make them too visionary;
they say I give people sausages and make them too coarse.
They say my heavenly parts are too heavenly; they say my earthly
parts are too earthly; I don't know what they want, I'm sure.
How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly things
too earthly? How can one be too good, or too jolly?
I don't understand. But I understand one thing well enough.
These modern people are living and I am dead."
"You may be dead," I replied. "You ought to know.
But as for what they are doing, do not call it living."
. . . . .
A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected
to be unbroken. But it had not fallen for more than a few
seconds when, in the utter stillness, I distinctly heard
a very rapid step coming nearer and nearer along the street.
The next moment a figure flung itself into the shop and stood
framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tilted back
as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons,
a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat.
He had large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor;
he had a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the
shop and the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and
uttered the exclamation of a man utterly staggered.
"Good lord!" he cried out; "it can't be you! It isn't you!
I came to ask where your grave was."
"I'm not dead yet, Mr. Dickens," said the old gentleman, with a
feeble smile; "but I'm dying," he hastened to add reassuringly.
"But, dash it all, you were dying in my time," said Mr. Charles Dickens
with animation; "and you don't look a day older."
"I've felt like this for a long time," said Father Christmas.
Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door
into the darkness.
"Dick," he roared at the top of his voice; "he's still alive."
. . . . .
Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more
full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning his
flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne.
He carried his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face
had even a look of arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted
by his eyes, which were literally as humble as a dog's. His sword
made a great clatter, as if the shop were too small for it.
"Indeed," said Sir Richard Steele, "'tis a most prodigious matter,
for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley
and his Christmas Day."
My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker.
It seemed to be filled with newcomers.
"It hath ever been understood," said a burly man, who carried
his head humorously and obstinately a little on one side--I think
he was Ben Jonson--"It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo,
under our King James and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty
customs were fallen sick, and like to pass from the world.
This grey beard most surely was no lustier when I knew him than now."
And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood,
say in some mixed Norman French, "But I saw the man dying."
"I have felt like this a long time," said Father Christmas,
in his feeble way again.
Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.
"Since when?" he asked. "Since you were born?"
"Yes," said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair.
"I have been always dying."
Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling
a mob to rise.
"I understand it now," he cried, "you will never die."
My friend and I, in fooling about Flanders, fell into a fixed
affection for the town of Mechlin or Malines. Our rest there
was so restful that we almost felt it as a home, and hardly
strayed out of it.
We sat day after day in the market-place, under little trees
growing in wooden tubs, and looked up at the noble converging lines
of the Cathedral tower, from which the three riders from Ghent,
in the poem, heard the bell which told them they were not too late.
But we took as much pleasure in the people, in the little boys
with open, flat Flemish faces and fur collars round their necks,
making them look like burgomasters; or the women, whose prim,
oval faces, hair strained tightly off the temples, and mouths
at once hard, meek, and humorous, exactly reproduced the late
mediaeval faces in Memling and Van Eyck.
But one afternoon, as it happened, my friend rose from under his
little tree, and pointing to a sort of toy train that was puffing smoke
in one corner of the clear square, suggested that we should go by it.
We got into the little train, which was meant really to take
the peasants and their vegetables to and fro from their fields
beyond the town, and the official came round to give us tickets.
We asked him what place we should get to if we paid fivepence.
The Belgians are not a romantic people, and he asked us (with a
lamentable mixture of Flemish coarseness and French rationalism)
where we wanted to go.
We explained that we wanted to go to fairyland, and the only
question was whether we could get there for fivepence.
At last, after a great deal of international misunderstanding
(for he spoke French in the Flemish and we in the English manner),
he told us that fivepence would take us to a place which I
have never seen written down, but which when spoken sounded
like the word "Waterloo" pronounced by an intoxicated patriot;
I think it was Waerlowe.
We clasped our hands and said it was the place we had been seeking
from boyhood, and when we had got there we descended with promptitude.
For a moment I had a horrible fear that it really was the field
of Waterloo; but I was comforted by remembering that it was
in quite a different part of Belgium. It was a cross-roads,
with one cottage at the corner, a perspective of tall trees like
Hobbema's "Avenue," and beyond only the infinite flat chess-board
of the little fields. It was the scene of peace and prosperity;
but I must confess that my friend's first action was to ask
the man when there would be another train back to Mechlin.
The man stated that there would be a train back in exactly one hour.
We walked up the avenue, and when we were nearly half an hour's
walk away it began to rain.
. . . . .
We arrived back at the cross-roads sodden and dripping, and,
finding the train waiting, climbed into it with some relief.
The officer on this train could speak nothing but Flemish,
but he understood the name Mechlin, and indicated that when we came
to Mechlin Station he would put us down, which, after the right
interval of time, he did.
We got down, under a steady downpour, evidently on the edge of Mechlin,
though the features could not easily be recognised through the grey
screen of the rain. I do not generally agree with those who find rain
depressing. A shower-bath is not depressing; it is rather startling.
And if it is exciting when a man throws a pail of water over you,
why should it not also be exciting when the gods throw many pails?
But on this soaking afternoon, whether it was the dull sky-line
of the Netherlands or the fact that we were returning home without
any adventure, I really did think things a trifle dreary.
As soon as we could creep under the shelter of a street
we turned into a little cafe, kept by one woman. She was incredibly
old, and she spoke no French. There we drank black coffee and what
was called "cognac fine." "Cognac fine" were the only two French
words used in the establishment, and they were not true. At least,
the fineness (perhaps by its very ethereal delicacy) escaped me.
After a little my friend, who was more restless than I,
got up and went out, to see if the rain had stopped and if we
could at once stroll back to our hotel by the station.
I sat finishing my coffee in a colourless mood, and listening
to the unremitting rain.
. . . . .
Suddenly the door burst open, and my friend appeared, transfigured
and frantic.
"Get up!" he cried, waving his hands wildly. "Get up! We're in the
wrong town! We're not in Mechlin at all. Mechlin is ten miles,
twenty miles off--God knows what! We're somewhere near Antwerp."
"What!" I cried, leaping from my seat, and sending the furniture flying.
"Then all is well, after all! Poetry only hid her face
for an instant behind a cloud. Positively for a moment I
was feeling depressed because we were in the right town.
But if we are in the wrong town--why, we have our adventure after all!
If we are in the wrong town, we are in the right place."
I rushed out into the rain, and my friend followed me somewhat
more grimly. We discovered we were in a town called Lierre,
which seemed to consist chiefly of bankrupt pastry cooks,
who sold lemonade.
"This is the peak of our whole poetic progress!" I cried
enthusiastically. "We must do something, something sacramental
and commemorative! We cannot sacrifice an ox, and it would be
a bore to build a temple. Let us write a poem."
With but slight encouragement, I took out an old envelope
and one of those pencils that turn bright violet in water.
There was plenty of water about, and the violet ran down
the paper, symbolising the rich purple of that romantic hour.
I began, choosing the form of an old French ballade;
it is the easiest because it is the most restricted--
"Can Man to Mount Olympus rise,
And fancy Primrose Hill the scene?
Can a man walk in Paradise
And think he is in Turnham Green?
And could I take you for Malines,
Not knowing the nobler thing you were?
O Pearl of all the plain, and queen,
The lovely city of Lierre.
"Through memory's mist in glimmering guise
Shall shine your streets of sloppy sheen.
And wet shall grow my dreaming eyes,
To think how wet my boots have been
Now if I die or shoot a Dean----"
Here I broke off to ask my friend whether he thought it
expressed a more wild calamity to shoot a Dean or to be a Dean.
But he only turned up his coat collar, and I felt that for him
the muse had folded her wings. I rewrote--
"Now if I die a Rural Dean,
Or rob a bank I do not care,
Or turn a Tory. I have seen
The lovely city of Lierre."
"The next line," I resumed, warming to it; but my friend interrupted me.
"The next line," he said somewhat harshly, "will be a railway line.
We can get back to Mechlin from here, I find, though we
have to change twice. I dare say I should think this jolly
romantic but for the weather. Adventure is the champagne
of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.
Here is the station."
. . . . .
We did not speak again until we had left Lierre, in its sacred
cloud of rain, and were coming to Mechlin, under a clearer sky,
that even made one think of stars. Then I leant forward and said
to my friend in a low voice--"I have found out everything.
We have come to the wrong star."
He stared his query, and I went on eagerly: "That is what makes life
at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world.
When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it
was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness,
tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true
happiness is that we don't fit. We come from somewhere else.
We have lost our way."
He silently nodded, staring out of the window, but whether I had impressed
or only fatigued him I could not tell. "This," I added, "is suggested
in the last verse of a fine poem you have grossly neglected--
"'Happy is he and more than wise
Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
The world through all the grey disguise
Of sleep and custom in between.
Yes; we may pass the heavenly screen,
But shall we know when we are there?
Who know not what these dead stones mean,
The lovely city of Lierre.'"
Here the train stopped abruptly. And from Mechlin church steeple
we heard the half-chime: and Joris broke silence with "No bally
HORS D'OEUVRES for me: I shall get on to something solid at once."
L'Envoy
Prince, wide your Empire spreads, I ween,
Yet happier is that moistened Mayor,
Who drinks her cognac far from fine,
The lovely city of Lierre.
Once upon a time, it seems centuries ago, I was prevailed on to take
a small part in one of those historical processions or pageants
which happened to be fashionable in or about the year 1909.
And since I tend, like all who are growing old, to re-enter
the remote past as a paradise or playground, I disinter a memory
which may serve to stand among those memories of small but strange
incidents with which I have sometimes filled this column.
The thing has really some of the dark qualities of a detective-story;
though I suppose that Sherlock Holmes himself could hardly unravel
it now, when the scent is so old and cold and most of the actors,
doubtless, long dead.
This old pageant included a series of figures from the eighteenth century,
and I was told that I was just like Dr. Johnson. Seeing that Dr. Johnson
was heavily seamed with small-pox, had a waistcoat all over gravy,
snorted and rolled as he walked, and was probably the ugliest man
in London, I mention this identification as a fact and not as a vaunt.
I had nothing to do with the arrangement; and such fleeting suggestions
as I made were not taken so seriously as they might have been.
I requested that a row of posts be erected across the lawn, so that I
might touch all of them but one, and then go back and touch that.
Failing this, I felt that the least they could do was to have
twenty-five cups of tea stationed at regular intervals along
the course, each held by a Mrs. Thrale in full costume.
My best constructive suggestion was the most harshly rejected of all.
In front of me in the procession walked the great Bishop Berkeley,
the man who turned the tables on the early materialists by maintaining
that matter itself possibly does not exist. Dr. Johnson,
you will remember, did not like such bottomless fancies as Berkeley's,
and kicked a stone with his foot, saying, "I refute him so!"
Now (as I pointed out) kicking a stone would not make the metaphysical
quarrel quite clear; besides, it would hurt. But how picturesque
and perfect it would be if I moved across the ground in the symbolic
attitude of kicking Bishop Berkeley! How complete an allegoric group;
the great transcendentalist walking with his head among the stars,
but behind him the avenging realist pede claudo, with uplifted foot.
But I must not take up space with these forgotten frivolities;
we old men grow too garrulous in talking of the distant past.
This story scarcely concerns me either in my real or my
assumed character. Suffice it to say that the procession took place
at night in a large garden and by torchlight (so remote is the date),
that the garden was crowded with Puritans, monks, and men-at-arms,
and especially with early Celtic saints smoking pipes,
and with elegant Renaissance gentlemen talking Cockney.
Suffice it to say, or rather it is needless to say, that I got lost.
I wandered away into some dim corner of that dim shrubbery,
where there was nothing to do except tumbling over tent ropes,
and I began almost to feel like my prototype, and to share his
horror of solitude and hatred of a country life.
In this detachment and dilemma I saw another man in a white wig
advancing across this forsaken stretch of lawn; a tall, lean man,
who stooped in his long black robes like a stooping eagle.
When I thought he would pass me, he stopped before my face,
and said, "Dr. Johnson, I think. I am Paley."
"Sir," I said, "you used to guide men to the beginnings of Christianity.
If you can guide me now to wherever this infernal thing begins you
will perform a yet higher and harder function."
His costume and style were so perfect that for the instant I really
thought he was a ghost. He took no notice of my flippancy, but,
turning his black-robed back on me, led me through verdurous glooms
and winding mossy ways, until we came out into the glare of gaslight
and laughing men in masquerade, and I could easily laugh at myself.
And there, you will say, was an end of the matter. I am
(you will say) naturally obtuse, cowardly, and mentally deficient.
I was, moreover, unused to pageants; I felt frightened in the dark
and took a man for a spectre whom, in the light, I could recognise
as a modern gentleman in a masquerade dress. No; far from it.
That spectral person was my first introduction to a special incident
which has never been explained and which still lays its finger
on my nerve.
I mixed with the men of the eighteenth century; and we fooled
as one does at a fancy-dress ball. There was Burke as large as life
and a great deal better looking. There was Cowper much larger
than life; he ought to have been a little man in a night-cap,
with a cat under one arm and a spaniel under the other.
As it was, he was a magnificent person, and looked more
like the Master of Ballantrae than Cowper. I persuaded him
at last to the night-cap, but never, alas, to the cat and dog.
When I came the next night Burke was still the same beautiful
improvement upon himself; Cowper was still weeping for his dog
and cat and would not be comforted; Bishop Berkeley was still waiting
to be kicked in the interests of philosophy. In short, I met all
my old friends but one. Where was Paley? I had been mystically
moved by the man's presence; I was moved more by his absence.
At last I saw advancing towards us across the twilight garden
a little man with a large book and a bright attractive face.
When he came near enough he said, in a small, clear voice, "I'm Paley."
The thing was quite natural, of course; the man was ill and had
sent a substitute. Yet somehow the contrast was a shock.
By the next night I had grown quite friendly with my four
or five colleagues; I had discovered what is called a mutual
friend with Berkeley and several points of difference with Burke.
Cowper, I think it was, who introduced me to a friend of his,
a fresh face, square and sturdy, framed in a white wig.
"This," he explained, "is my friend So-and-So. He's Paley."
I looked round at all the faces by this time fixed and familiar;
I studied them; I counted them; then I bowed to the third Paley
as one bows to necessity. So far the thing was all within
the limits of coincidence. It certainly seemed odd that this
one particular cleric should be so varying and elusive.
It was singular that Paley, alone among men, should swell and
shrink and alter like a phantom, while all else remained solid.
But the thing was explicable; two men had been ill and there
was an end of it; only I went again the next night, and a
clear-coloured elegant youth with powdered hair bounded up to me,
and told me with boyish excitement that he was Paley.
For the next twenty-four hours I remained in the mental condition
of the modern world. I mean the condition in which all natural
explanations have broken down and no supernatural explanation has
been established. My bewilderment had reached to boredom when I
found myself once more in the colour and clatter of the pageant,
and I was all the more pleased because I met an old school-fellow,
and we mutually recognised each other under our heavy clothes
and hoary wigs. We talked about all those great things for which
literature is too small and only life large enough; red-hot memories
and those gigantic details which make up the characters of men.
I heard all about the friends he had lost sight of and those he had
kept in sight; I heard about his profession, and asked at last
how he came into the pageant.
"The fact is," he said, "a friend of mine asked me, just for to-night,
to act a chap called Paley; I don't know who he was. . . ."
"No, by thunder!" I said, "nor does anyone."
This was the last blow, and the next night passed like a dream.
I scarcely noticed the slender, sprightly, and entirely new figure
which fell into the ranks in the place of Paley, so many times deceased.
What could it mean? Why was the giddy Paley unfaithful among
the faithful found? Did these perpetual changes prove the popularity
or the unpopularity of being Paley? Was it that no human being
could support being Paley for one night and live till morning?
Or was it that the gates were crowded with eager throngs of the British
public thirsting to be Paley, who could only be let in one at a time?
Or is there some ancient vendetta against Paley? Does some secret
society of Deists still assassinate any one who adopts the name?
I cannot conjecture further about this true tale of mystery;
and that for two reasons. First, the story is so true
that I have had to put a lie into it. Every word of this
narrative is veracious, except the one word Paley.
And second, because I have got to go into the next room
and dress up as Dr. Johnson.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES - XXXVI A Somewhat Improbable Story