Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet Part 56

"I know that my life is not likely to be a long one; that immediate removal to a southern, if possible to a tropical climate, is considered the only means of preserving it. For the former I care little; _non est tanti vivere_. And, indeed, the latter, even if it would succeed, is impossible.

Crossthwaite will live and thrive by the labour of his hands; while, for such a helpless invalid as I to travel, would be to dissipate the little capital which Mackaye has left me.

"The day will come, when society will find it profitable, as well as just, to put the means of preserving life by travel within the reach of the poorest. But individuals must always begin by setting the examples, which the state too slowly, though surely (for the world is G.o.d's world after all), will learn to copy. All is arranged for you. Crossthwaite, you know, would have sailed ere now, had it not been for your fever. Next week you start with him for Texas, No; make no objections. All expenses are defrayed--no matter by whom."

"By you! By you! Who else?"

"Do you think that I monopolize the generosity of England? Do you think warm hearts beat only in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of working men? But, if it were I, would not that be only another reason for submitting? You must go. You will have, for the next three years, such an allowance as will support you in comfort, whether you choose to remain stationary, or, as I hope, to travel southward into Mexico. Your pa.s.sage-money is already paid."

Why should I attempt to describe my feelings? I gasped for breath, and looked stupidly at her for a minute or two.--The second darling hope of my life within my reach, just as the first had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from me! At last I found words.

"No, no, n.o.ble lady! Do not tempt me! Who am I, the slave of impulse, useless, worn out in mind and body, that you should waste such generosity upon me? I do not refuse from the honest pride of independence; I have not man enough left in me even for that. But will you, of all people, ask me to desert the starving suffering thousands, to whom my heart, my honour are engaged; to give up the purpose of my life, and pamper my fancy in a luxurious paradise, while they are slaving here?"

"What? Cannot G.o.d find champions for them when you are gone? Has he not found them already? Believe me, that Tenth of April, which you fancied the death-day of liberty, has awakened a spirit in high as well as in low life, which children yet unborn will bless."

"Oh, do not mistake me! Have I not confessed my own weakness? But if I have one healthy nerve left in me, soul or body, it will retain its strength only as long as it thrills with devotion to the people's cause. If I live, I must live among them, for them. If I die, I must die at my post. I could not rest, except in labour. I dare not fly, like Jonah, from the call of G.o.d. In the deepest shade of the virgin forests, on the loneliest peak of the Cordilleras, He would find me out; and I should hear His still small voice reproving me, as it reproved the fugitive patriot-seer of old--What doest thou here, Elijah?"

I was excited, and spoke, I am afraid, after my custom, somewhat too magniloquently. But she answered only with a quiet smile:

"So you are a Chartist still?"

"If by a Chartist you mean one who fancies that a change in mere political circ.u.mstances will bring about a millennium, I am no longer one. That dream is gone--with others. But if to be a Chartist is to love my brothers with every faculty of my soul--to wish to live and die struggling for their rights, endeavouring to make them, not electors merely, but fit to be electors, senators, kings, and priests to G.o.d and to His Christ--if that be the Chartism of the future, then am I sevenfold a Chartist, and ready to confess it before men, though I were thrust forth from every door in England."

She was silent a moment.

"'The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.'

Surely the old English spirit has cast its madness, and begins to speak once more as it spoke in Naseby fights and Smithfield fires!"

"And yet you would quench it in me amid the enervating climate of the tropics."

"Need it be quenched there? Was it quenched in Drake, in Hawkins, in the conquerors of Hindostan? Weakness, like strength, is from within, of the spirit, and not of sunshine. I would send you thither, that you may gain new strength, new knowledge to carry out your dream and mine. Do not refuse me the honour of preserving you. Do not forbid me to employ my wealth in the only way which reconciles my conscience to the possession of it. I have saved many a woman already; and this one thing remained--the highest of all my hopes and longings--that G.o.d would allow me, ere I die, to save a man.

I have longed to find some n.o.ble soul, as Carlyle says, fallen down by the wayside, and lift it up, and heal its wounds, and teach it the secret of its heavenly birthright, and consecrate it to its King in heaven. I have longed to find a man of the people, whom I could train to be the poet of the people."

"Me, at least, you have saved, have taught, have trained! Oh that your care had been bestowed on some more worthy object!"

"Let me, at least, then, perfect my own work. You do not--it is a sign of your humility that you do not--appreciate the value of this rest. You underrate at once your own powers, and the shock which they have received."

"If I must go, then, why so far? Why put you to so great expense? If you must be generous, send me to some place nearer home--to Italy, to the coast of Devon, or the Isle of Wight, where invalids like me are said to find all the advantages which are so often, perhaps too hastily, sought in foreign lands."

"No," she said, smiling; "you are my servant now, by the laws of chivalry, and you must fulfil my quest. I have long hoped for a tropic poet; one who should leave the routine imagery of European civilization, its meagre scenery, and physically decrepit races, for the grandeur, the luxuriance, the infinite and strongly-marked variety of tropic nature, the paradisiac beauty and simplicity of tropic humanity. I am tired of the old images; of the barren alternations between Italy and the Highlands. I had once dreamt of going to the tropics myself; but my work lay elsewhere. Go for me, and for the people. See if you cannot help to infuse some new blood into the aged veins of English literature; see if you cannot, by observing man in his mere simple and primeval state, bring home fresh conceptions of beauty, fresh spiritual and physical laws of his existence, that you may realize them here at home--(how, I see as yet but dimly; but He who teaches the facts will surely teach their application)--in the cottages, in the play-grounds, the reading-rooms, the churches of working men."

"But I know so little--I have seen so little!"

"That very fact, I flatter myself, gives you an especial vocation for my scheme. Your ignorance of cultivated English scenery, and of Italian art, will enable you to approach with a more reverend, simple, and unprejudiced eye the primeval forms of beauty--G.o.d's work, not man's. Sin you will see there, and anarchy, and tyranny, but I do not send you to look for society, but for nature. I do not send you to become a barbarian settler, but to bring home to the realms of civilization those ideas of physical perfection, which as yet, alas! barbarism, rather than civilization, has preserved. Do not despise your old love for the beautiful. Do not fancy that because you have let it become an idol and a tyrant, it was not therefore the gift of G.o.d. Cherish it, develop it to the last; steep your whole soul in beauty; watch it in its most vast and complex harmonies, and not less in its most faint and fragmentary traces. Only, hitherto you have blindly worshipped it; now you must learn to comprehend, to master, to embody it; to show it forth to men as the sacrament of Heaven, the finger-mark of G.o.d!"

Who could resist such pleading from those lips? I at least could not.

CHAPTER XLI.

FREEDOM, EQUALITY, AND BROTHERHOOD.

Before the same Father, the same King, crucified for all alike, we had partaken of the same bread and wine, we had prayed for the same spirit.

Side by side, around the chair on which I lay propped up with pillows, coughing my span of life away, had knelt the high-born countess, the cultivated philosopher, the repentant rebel, the wild Irish girl, her slavish and exclusive creed exchanged for one more free and all-embracing; and that no extremest type of human condition might be wanting, the reclaimed Magdalene was there--two pale worn girls from Eleanor's asylum, in whom I recognized the needlewomen to whom Mackaye had taken me, on a memorable night, seven years before. Thus--and how better?--had G.o.d rewarded their loving care of that poor dying fellow-slave.

Yes--we had knelt together: and I had felt that we were one--that there was a bond between us, real, eternal, independent of ourselves, knit not by man, but G.o.d; and the peace of G.o.d, which pa.s.ses understanding, came over me like the clear sunshine after weary rain.

One by one they shook me by the hand, and quitted the room; and Eleanor and I were left alone.

"See!" she said, "Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood are come; but not as you expected."

Blissful, repentant tears blinded my eyes, as I replied, not to her, but to Him who spoke by her--

"Lord! not as I will, but as thou wilt!"

"Yes," she continued, "Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood are here. Realize them in thine own self, and so alone thou helpest to make them realities for all. Not from without, from Charters and Republics, but from within, from the Spirit working in each; not by wrath and haste, but by patience made perfect through suffering, canst thou proclaim their good news to the groaning ma.s.ses, and deliver them, as thy Master did before thee, by the cross, and not the sword. Divine paradox!--Folly to the rich and mighty--the watchword of the weak, in whose weakness is G.o.d's strength made perfect. 'In your patience possess ye your souls, for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.' Yes--He came then, and the Babel-tyranny of Rome fell, even as the more fearful, more subtle, and more diabolic tyranny of Mammon shall fall ere long--suicidal, even now crumbling by its innate decay.

Yes--Babylon the Great--the commercial world of selfish compet.i.tion, drunken with the blood of G.o.d's people, whose merchandise is the bodies and souls of men--her doom is gone forth. And then--then--when they, the tyrants of the earth, who lived delicately with her, rejoicing in her sins, the plutocrats and bureaucrats, the money-changers and devourers of labour, are crying to the rocks to hide them, and to the hills to cover them, from the wrath of Him that sitteth on the throne--then labour shall be free at last, and the poor shall eat and be satisfied, with things that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, but which G.o.d has prepared for those who love Him. Then the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea, and mankind at last shall own their King--Him. in whom they are all redeemed into the glorious liberty of the Sons of G.o.d, and He shall reign indeed on earth, and none but His saints shall rule beside Him. And then shall this sacrament be an everlasting sign to all the nations of the world, as it has been to you this day, of freedom, equality, brotherhood, of Glory to G.o.d in the highest, and on earth peace and good-will toward men. Do you believe?"

Again I answered, not her, but Him who sent her--

"Lord, I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!"

"And now farewell. I shall not see you again before you start--and ere you return--My health has been fast declining lately."

I started--I had not dared to confess to myself how thin her features had become of late. I had tried not to hear the dry and hectic cough, or see the burning spot on either cheek--but it was too true; and with a broken voice I cried:

"Oh that I might die, and join you!"

"Not so--I trust that you have still a work to do. But if not, promise me that, whatever be the event of your voyage, you will publish, in good time, an honest history of your life; extenuating nothing, exaggerating nothing, ashamed to confess or too proclaim nothing. It may perhaps awaken some rich man to look down and take pity on the brains and hearts more n.o.ble than his own, which lie struggling in poverty and misguidance among these foul sties, which civilization rears--and calls them cities. Now, once again, farewell!"

She held out her hand--I would have fallen at her feet, but the thought of that common sacrament withheld me. I seized her hand, covered it with adoring kisses--Slowly she withdrew it, and glided from the room--

What need of more words? I obeyed her--sailed--and here I am.

Yes! I have seen the land! Like a purple fringe upon the golden sea, "while parting day dies like the dolphin," there it lay upon the fair horizon--the great young free new world! and every tree, and flower, and insect on it new!--a wonder and a joy--which I shall never see....

No,--I shall never reach the land. I felt it all along. Weaker and weaker, day by day, with bleeding lungs and failing limbs, I have travelled the ocean paths. The iron has entered too deeply into my soul....

Hark! Merry voices on deck are welcoming their future home. Laugh on, happy ones!--come out of Egypt and the house of bondage, and the waste and howling wilderness of slavery and compet.i.tion, workhouses and prisons, into a good land and large, a land flowing with milk and honey, where you will sit every one under his own vine and his own fig-tree, and look into the faces of your rosy children--and see in them a blessing and not a curse!

Oh, England! stern mother-land, when wilt thou renew thy youth?--Thou wilderness of man's making, not G.o.d's!... Is it not written, that the days shall come when the forest shall break forth into singing, and the wilderness shall blossom like the rose?

Hark! again, sweet and clear, across the still night sea, ring out the notes of Crossthwaite's bugle--the first luxury, poor fellow, he ever allowed himself; and yet not a selfish one, for music, like mercy, is twice blessed--

"It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."