Robert Falconer by George MacDonald (reading fiction TXT) 📕

me! The scent of the hayfields came on the hardly-moving air. It was a strange morning-a new day of unknown history-in whose young light the very streets were transformed, looking clear and clean, and wondrously transparent in perspective, with unknown shadows lying in unexpected nooks, with projection and recess, line and bend, as I had never seen them before. The light was coming as if for the first time since the city sprang into being-as if a thousand years had rolled over it in darkness and lamplight, and now, now, after the prayers and longings of ages, the sun of God was ascending the awful east, and the spirit-voice had gone forth: 'Arise, shine, for thy light is come.'

It was a well-behaved, proper London through which I walked home. Here and there, it is true, a debauched-looking man, with pale face, and red sleepy eyes, or a weary, withered girl, like a half-moon in the daylight, straggled somewhither. But they looked strange to the London of the morning. They were not of it. Alas for those who creep to their dens, like the wild beasts when the sun arises, because the light has shaken them out of the world. All the horrid phantasms of the Valley of the Shadow of Death that had risen from the pit with the vaporous night had sunk to escape the arrows of the sun, once more into its bottomless depth. If any horrid deed was doing now, how much more horrid in the awful still light of this first hour of a summer morn! How many evil passions now lay sunk under the holy waves of sleep! How many heartaches were gnawing only in dreams, to wake with the brain, and gnaw in earnest again! And over all brooded the love of the Lord Christ, who is Lord over all blessed for ever, and shall yet cast death and hell into the lake of fire-the holy purifying Fate.

I got through my sole engagement-a very dreary one, for surely never were there stupider young people in the whole region of rank than those to whom duty and necessity sent me on the Wednesday mornings of that London season-even with some enjoyment. For the lessons Falconer had been giving me clung to me and grew on me until I said thus to myself: 'Am I to believe only for the poor, and not for the rich? Am I not to bear with conceit even, hard as it is to teach? for is not this conceit itself the measure as the consequence of incapacity and ignorance? They cannot help being born stupid, any more than some of those children in St. Giles's can help being born preternaturally, unhealthily clever. I am going with my friend this evening: that hope is enough to make me strong for one day at least.' So I set myself to my task, and that morning wiled the first gleam of intelligent delight out of the eyes of one poor little washed-out ladyship. I could have kissed her from positive thankfulness.

The day did wear over. The evening did come. I was with my friend-for friend I could call him none the less and all the more that I worshipped him.

'I have business in Westminster,' he said, 'and then on the other side of the water.'

'I am more and more astonished at your knowledge of London, Mr. Falconer,' I said. 'You must have a great faculty for places.'

'I think rather the contrary,' he answered. 'But there is no end to the growth of a faculty, if one only uses it-especially when his whole nature is interested in its efficiency, and makes demands upon it. The will applies to the intellect; the intellect communicates its necessities to the brain; the brain bestirs itself, and grows more active; the eyes lend their aid; the memory tries not to be behind; and at length you have a man gifted in localities.'

'How is it that people generally can live in such quiet ignorance of the regions that surround them, and the kind of humanity so near them?' I said after a pause.

'It does seem strange. It is as if a man should not know who were in his own house. Would-be civilization has for the very centre of its citadel, for the citizens of its innermost city, for the heart around which the gay and fashionable, the learned, the artistic, the virtuous, the religious are gathered, a people some of whom are barbarous, some cruel, many miserable, many unhappy, save for brief moments not of hope, but of defiance, distilled in the alembic of the brain from gin: what better life could steam up from such a Phlegethon! Look there: "Cream of the Valley!" As if the mocking serpent must with sweet words of Paradise deepen the horrors of the hellish compound, to which so many of our brothers and sisters made in the image of God, fly as to their only Saviour from the misery of feeling alive.'

'How is it that the civilized people of London do not make a simultaneous inroad upon the haunts of the demons and drive them out?'

'It is a mercy they do not. They would only do infinite mischief. The best notion civilization seems to have is-not to drive out the demons, but to drive out the possessed; to take from them the poor refuges they have, and crowd them into deeper and more fetid hells-to make room for what?-more and more temples in which Mammon may be worshipped. The good people on the other hand invade them with foolish tracts, that lie against God; or give their money to build churches, where there is as yet no people that will go to them. Why, the other day, a young clergyman bored me, and would have been boring me till now, I think, if I would have let him, to part with a block of my houses, where I know every man, woman, and child, and keep them in comparative comfort and cleanliness and decency, to say no more, that he might pull them down and build a church upon the site-not quite five minutes' walk from the church where he now officiates.'

It was a blowing, moon-lit night. The gaslights flickered and wavered in the gusts of wind. It was cold, very cold for the season. Even Falconer buttoned his coat over his chest. He got a few paces in advance of me sometimes, when I saw him towering black and tall and somewhat gaunt, like a walking shadow. The wind increased in violence. It was a north-easter, laden with dust, and a sense of frozen Siberian steppes. We had to stoop and head it at the corners of streets. Not many people were out, and those who were, seemed to be hurrying home. A few little provision-shops, and a few inferior butchers' stalls were still open. Their great jets of gas, which looked as if they must poison the meat, were flaming fierce and horizontal, roaring like fiery flags, and anon dying into a blue hiss. Discordant singing, more like the howling of wild beasts, came from the corner houses, which blazed like the gates of hell. Their doors were ever on the swing, and the hot odours of death rushed out, and the cold blast of life rushed in. We paused a little before one of them-over the door, upon the sign, was in very deed the name Death. There were ragged women within who took their half-dead babies from their bare, cold, cheerless bosoms, and gave them of the poison of which they themselves drank renewed despair in the name of comfort. They say that most of the gin consumed in London is drunk by women. And the little clay-coloured baby-faces made a grimace or two, and sank to sleep on the thin tawny breasts of the mothers, who having gathered courage from the essence of despair, faced the scowling night once more, and with bare necks and hopeless hearts went-whither? Where do they all go when the gin-hells close their yawning jaws? Where do they lie down at night? They vanish like unlawfully risen corpses in the graves of cellars and garrets, in the charnel-vaults of pestiferously-crowded lodging-houses, in the prisons of police-stations, under dry arches, within hoardings; or they make vain attempts to rest the night out upon door-steps or curbstones. All their life long man denies them the one right in the soil which yet is so much theirs, that once that life is over, he can no longer deny it-the right of room to lie down. Space itself is not allowed to be theirs by any right of existence: the voice of the night-guardian commanding them to move on, is as the howling of a death-hound hunting them out of the air into their graves.

In St. James's we came upon a group around the gates of a great house. Visitors were coming and going, and it was a show to be had for nothing by those who had nothing to pay. Oh! the children with clothes too ragged to hold pockets for their chilled hands, that stared at the childless duchess descending from her lordly carriage! Oh! the wan faces, once lovely as theirs, it may be, that gazed meagre and pinched and hungry on the young maidens in rose-colour and blue, tripping lightly through the avenue of their eager eyes-not yet too envious of unattainable felicity to gaze with admiring sympathy on those who seemed to them the angels, the goddesses of their kind. 'O God!' I thought, but dared not speak, 'and thou couldst make all these girls so lovely! Thou couldst give them all the gracious garments of rose and blue and white if thou wouldst! Why should these not be like those? They are hungry even, and wan and torn. These too are thy children. There is wealth enough in thy mines and in thy green fields, room enough in thy starry spaces, O God!' But a voice-the echo of Falconer's teaching, awoke in my heart-'Because I would have these more blessed than those, and those more blessed with them, for they are all my children.'

By the Mall we came into Whitehall, and so to Westminster Bridge. Falconer had changed his mind, and would cross at once. The present bridge was not then finished, and the old bridge alongside of it was still in use for pedestrians. We went upon it to reach the other side. Its centre rose high above the other, for the line of the new bridge ran like a chord across the arc of the old. Through chance gaps in the boarding between, we looked down on the new portion which was as yet used by carriages alone. The moon had, throughout the evening, alternately shone in brilliance from amidst a lake of blue sky, and been overwhelmed in billowy heaps of wind-tormented clouds. As we stood on the apex of the bridge, looking at the night, the dark river, and the mass of human effort about us, the clouds gathered and closed and tumbled upon her in crowded layers. The wind howled through the arches beneath, swept along the boarded fences, and whistled in their holes. The gas-lights blew hither and thither, and were perplexed to live at all.

We were standing at a spot where some shorter pieces had been used in the hoarding; and, although I could not see over them, Falconer, whose