Books: Robert Falconer

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'What! Would you put them all down then?'

'God forbid. But I would, if I could, make them all useless,'

'How could you do that?'

'I would merely enlighten the hearts of childless people as to their
privileges.'

'Which are?'

'To be fathers and mothers to the fatherless and motherless.'

'I have often wondered why more of them did not adopt children. Why
don't they?'

'For various reasons which a real love to child nature would blow to
the winds--all comprised in this, that such a child would not be
their own child. As if ever a child could be their own! That a
child is God's is of rather more consequence than whether it is born
of this or that couple. Their hearts would surely be glad when they
went into heaven to have the angels of the little ones that always
behold the face of their Father coming round them, though they were
not exactly their father and mother.'

'I don't know what the passage you refer to means.'

'Neither do I. But it must mean something, if He said it. Are you a
clergyman?'

'No. I am only a poor teacher of mathematics and poetry, shown up
the back stairs into the nurseries of great houses.'

'A grand chance, if I may use the word.'

'I do try to wake a little enthusiasm in the sons and
daughters--without much success, I fear.'

'Will you come and see me?' he said.

'With much pleasure. But, as I have given you an answer, you owe me
one.'

'I do.'

'Have you adopted a child?'

'No.'

'Then you have some of your own?'

'No.'

'Then, excuse me, but why the warmth of your remarks on those who--'

'I think I shall be able to satisfy you on that point, if we draw to
each other. Meantime I must leave you. Could you come to-morrow
evening?'

'With pleasure.'

We arranged the hour and parted. I saw him walk into a low
public-house, and went home.

At the time appointed, I rang the bell, and was led by an elderly
woman up the stair, and shown into a large room on the
first-floor--poorly furnished, and with many signs of
bachelor-carelessness. Mr. Falconer rose from an old hair-covered
sofa to meet me as I entered. I will first tell my reader something
of his personal appearance.

He was considerably above six feet in height, square-shouldered,
remarkably long in the arms, and his hands were uncommonly large and
powerful. His head was large, and covered with dark wavy hair,
lightly streaked with gray. His broad forehead projected over
deep-sunk eyes, that shone like black fire. His features,
especially his Roman nose, were large, and finely, though not
delicately, modelled. His nostrils were remarkably large and
flexile, with a tendency to slight motion: I found on further
acquaintance that when he was excited, they expanded in a wild
equine manner. The expression of his mouth was of tender power,
crossed with humour. He kept his lips a little compressed, which
gave a certain sternness to his countenance: but when this sternness
dissolved in a smile, it was something enchanting. He was plainly,
rather shabbily clothed. No one could have guessed at his
profession or social position. He came forward and received me
cordially. After a little indifferent talk, he asked me if I had
any other engagement for the evening.

'I never have any engagements,' I answered--'at least, of a social
kind. I am burd alane. I know next to nobody.'

'Then perhaps you would not mind going out with me for a stroll?'

'I shall be most happy,' I answered.

There was something about the man I found exceedingly attractive; I
had very few friends; and there was besides something odd, almost
romantic, in this beginning of an intercourse: I would see what
would come of it.

'Then we'll have some supper first,' said Mr. Falconer, and rang the
bell.

While we ate our chops--

'I dare say you think it strange,' my host said, 'that without the
least claim on your acquaintance, I should have asked you to come
and see me, Mr.--'

He stopped, smiling.

'My name is Gordon--Archie Gordon,' I said.

'Well, then, Mr. Gordon, I confess I have a design upon you. But
you will remember that you addressed me first.'

'You spoke first,' I said.

'Did I?'

'I did not say you spoke to me, but you spoke.--I should not have
ventured to make the remark I did make, if I had not heard your
voice first. What design have you on me?'

'That will appear in due course. Now take a glass of wine, and
we'll set out.'

We soon found ourselves in Holborn, and my companion led the way
towards the City. The evening was sultry and close.

'Nothing excites me move,' said Mr. Falconer, 'than a walk in the
twilight through a crowded street. Do you find it affect you so?'

'I cannot speak as strongly as you do,' I replied. 'But I perfectly
understand what you mean. Why is it, do you think?'

'Partly, I fancy, because it is like the primordial chaos, a
concentrated tumult of undetermined possibilities. The germs of
infinite adventure and result are floating around you like a
snow-storm. You do not know what may arise in a moment and colour
all your future. Out of this mass may suddenly start something
marvellous, or, it may be, something you have been looking for for
years.'

The same moment, a fierce flash of lightning, like a blue
sword-blade a thousand times shattered, quivered and palpitated
about us, leaving a thick darkness on the sense. I heard my
companion give a suppressed cry, and saw him run up against a heavy
drayman who was on the edge of the path, guiding his horses with his
long whip. He begged the man's pardon, put his hand to his head,
and murmured, 'I shall know him now.' I was afraid for a moment
that the lightning had struck him, but he assured me there was
nothing amiss. He looked a little excited and confused, however.

I should have forgotten the incident, had he not told me
afterwards--when I had come to know him intimately--that in the
moment of that lightning flash, he had had a strange experience: he
had seen the form of his father, as he had seen him that Sunday
afternoon, in the midst of the surrounding light. He was as certain
of the truth of the presentation as if a gradual revival of memory
had brought with it the clear conviction of its own accuracy. His
explanation of the phenomenon was, that, in some cases, all that
prevents a vivid conception from assuming objectivity, is the
self-assertion of external objects. The gradual approach of
darkness cannot surprise and isolate the phantasm; but the
suddenness of the lightning could and did, obliterating everything
without, and leaving that over which it had no power standing alone,
and therefore visible.

'But,' I ventured to ask, 'whence the minuteness of detail,
surpassing, you say, all that your memory could supply?'

'That I think was a quickening of the memory by the realism of the
presentation. Excited by the vision, it caught at its own past, as
it were, and suddenly recalled that which it had forgotten. In the
rapidity of all pure mental action, this at once took its part in
the apparent objectivity.'

To return to the narrative of my first evening in Falconer's
company.

It was strange how insensible the street population was to the
grandeur of the storm. While the thunder was billowing and
bellowing over and around us--

'A hundred pins for one ha'penny,' bawled a man from the gutter,
with the importance of a Cagliostro.

'Evening Star! Telegrauwff!' roared an ear-splitting urchin in my
very face. I gave him a shove off the pavement.

'Ah! don't do that,' said Falconer. 'It only widens the crack
between him and his fellows--not much, but a little.'

'You are right,' I said. 'I won't do it again.'

The same moment we heard a tumult in a neighbouring street. A crowd
was execrating a policeman, who had taken a woman into custody, and
was treating her with unnecessary rudeness. Falconer looked on for
a few moments.

'Come, policeman!' he said at length, in a tone of expostulation.
'You're rather rough, are you not? She's a woman, you know.'

'Hold your blasted humbug,' answered the man, an exceptional
specimen of the force at that time at all events, and shook the
tattered wretch, as if he would shake her out of her rags.

Falconer gently parted the crowd, and stood beside the two.

'I will help you,' he said, 'to take her to the station, if you
like, but you must not treat her that way.'

'I don't want your help,' said the policeman; 'I know you, and all
the damned lot of you.'

'Then I shall be compelled to give you a lesson,' said Falconer.

The man's only answer was a shake that made the woman cry out.

'I shall get into trouble if you get off,' said Falconer to her.
'Will you promise me, on your word, to go with me to the station, if
I rid you of the fellow?'

'I will, I will,' said the woman.

'Then, look out,' said Falconer to the policeman; 'for I'm going to
give you that lesson.'

The officer let the woman go, took his baton, and made a blow at
Falconer. In another moment--I could hardly see how--he lay in the
street.

'Now, my poor woman, come along,' said Falconer.

She obeyed, crying gently. Two other policemen came up.

'Do you want to give that woman in charge, Mr. Falconer?' asked one
of them.

'I give that man in charge,' cried his late antagonist, who had just
scrambled to his feet. 'Assaulting the police in discharge of their
duty.'

'Very well,' said the other. 'But you're in the wrong box, and that
you'll find. You had better come along to the station, sir.'

'Keep that fellow from getting hold of the woman--you two, and we'll
go together,' said Falconer.

Bewildered with the rapid sequence of events, I was following in the
crowd. Falconer looked about till he saw me, and gave me a nod
which meant come along. Before we reached Bow Street. however, the
offending policeman, who had been walking a little behind in
conversation with one of the others, advanced to Falconer, touched
his hat, and said something, to which Falconer replied.

'Remember, I have my eye upon you,' was all I heard, however, as he
left the crowd and rejoined me. We turned and walked eastward
again.

The storm kept on intermittently, but the streets were rather more
crowded than usual notwithstanding.

'Look at that man in the woollen jacket,' said Falconer. 'What a
beautiful outline of face! There must be something noble in that
man.'

'I did not see him,' I answered, 'I was taken up with a woman's
face, like that of a beautiful corpse. It's eyes were bright.
There was gin in its brain.'

The streets swarmed with human faces gleaming past. It was a night
of ghosts.

There stood a man who had lost one arm, earnestly pumping
bilge-music out of an accordion with the other, holding it to his
body with the stump. There was a woman, pale with hunger and gin,
three match-boxes in one extended hand, and the other holding a baby
to her breast. As we looked, the poor baby let go its hold, turned
its little head, and smiled a wan, shrivelled, old-fashioned smile
in our faces.

Another happy baby, you see, Mr. Gordon,' said Falconer. 'A child,
fresh from God, finds its heaven where no one else would. The devil
could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot
drive the Paradise out of a woman.'

'What can be done for them?' I said, and at the moment, my eye fell
upon a row of little children, from two to five years of age, seated
upon the curb-stone.

They were chattering fast, and apparently carrying on some game, as
happy as if they had been in the fields.

'Wouldn't you like to take all those little grubby things, and put
them in a great tub and wash them clean?' I said.

'They'd fight like spiders,' rejoined Falconer.

'They're not fighting now.'

'Then don't make them. It would be all useless. The probability is
that you would only change the forms of the various evils, and
possibly for worse. You would buy all that man's glue-lizards, and
that man's three-foot rules, and that man's dog-collars and chains,
at three times their value, that they might get more drink than
usual, and do nothing at all for their living to-morrow.--What a
happy London you would make if you were Sultan Haroun!' he added,
laughing. 'You would put an end to poverty altogether, would you
not?'

I did not reply at once.

'But I beg your pardon,' he resumed; 'I am very rude.'

'Not at all,' I returned. 'I was only thinking how to answer you.
They would be no worse after all than those who inherit property
and lead idle lives.'

'True; but they would be no better. Would you be content that your
quondam poor should be no better off than the rich? What would be
gained thereby? Is there no truth in the words "Blessed are the
poor"? A deeper truth than most Christians dare to see.--Did you
ever observe that there is not one word about the vices of the poor
in the Bible--from beginning to end?'

'But they have their vices.'

'Indubitably. I am only stating a fact. The Bible is full enough
of the vices of the rich. I make no comment.'

'But don't you care for their sufferings?'

'They are of secondary importance quite. But if you had been as
much amongst them as I, perhaps you would be of my opinion, that the
poor are not, cannot possibly feel so wretched as they seem to us.
They live in a climate, as it were, which is their own, by natural
law comply with it, and find it not altogether unfriendly. The
Laplander will prefer his wastes to the rich fields of England, not
merely from ignorance, but for the sake of certain blessings amongst
which he has been born and brought up. The blessedness of life
depends far more on its interest than upon its comfort. The need of
exertion and the doubt of success, renders life much more
interesting to the poor than it is to those who, unblessed with
anxiety for the bread that perisheth, waste their poor hearts about
rank and reputation.'

'I thought such anxiety was represented as an evil in the New
Testament.'

'Yes. But it is a still greater evil to lose it in any other way
than by faith in God. You would remove the anxiety by destroying its
cause: God would remove it by lifting them above it, by teaching
them to trust in him, and thus making them partakers of the divine
nature. Poverty is a blessing when it makes a man look up.'

'But you cannot say it does so always.'

'I cannot determine when, where, and how much; but I am sure it
does. And I am confident that to free those hearts from it by any
deed of yours would be to do them the greatest injury you could.
Probably their want of foresight would prove the natural remedy,
speedily reducing them to their former condition--not however
without serious loss.'

'But will not this theory prove at last an anæsthetic rather than an
anodyne? I mean that, although you may adopt it at first for refuge
from the misery the sight of their condition occasions you, there is
surely a danger of its rendering you at last indifferent to it.'

'Am I indifferent? But you do not know me yet. Pardon my egotism.
There may be such danger. Every truth has its own danger or
shadow. Assuredly I would have no less labour spent upon them. But
there can be no true labour done, save in as far as we are
fellow-labourers with God. We must work with him, not against him.
Every one who works without believing that God is doing the best,
the absolute good for them, is, must be, more or less, thwarting
God. He would take the poor out of God's hands. For others, as for
ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand
anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that which
is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its
relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred. But through all
this darkness about the poor, at least I can see wonderful veins and
fields of light, and with the help of this partial vision, I trust
for the rest. The only and the greatest thing man is capable of is
Trust in God.'

'What then is a man to do for the poor? How is he to work with
God?' I asked.

'He must be a man amongst them--a man breathing the air of a higher
life, and therefore in all natural ways fulfilling his endless human
relations to them. Whatever you do for them, let your own being,
that is you in relation to them, be the background, that so you may
be a link between them and God, or rather I should say, between them
and the knowledge of God.'

While Falconer spoke, his face grew grander and grander, till at
last it absolutely shone. I felt that I walked with a man whose
faith was his genius.

'Of one thing I am pretty sure,' he resumed, 'that the same recipe
Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work:
"Do the thing that lies next you." That is all our business.
Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be
partakers of the divine patience. How long it took to make the
cradle! and we fret that the baby Humanity is not reading Euclid and
Plato, even that it is not understanding the Gospel of St. John! If
there is one thing evident in the world's history, it is that God
hasteneth not. All haste implies weakness. Time is as cheap as
space and matter. What they call the church militant is only at
drill yet, and a good many of the officers too not out of the
awkward squad. I am sure I, for a private, am not. In the drill a
man has to conquer himself, and move with the rest by individual
attention to his own duty: to what mighty battlefields the recruit
may yet be led, he does not know. Meantime he has nearly enough to
do with his goose-step, while there is plenty of single combat,
skirmish, and light cavalry work generally, to get him ready for
whatever is to follow. I beg your pardon: I am preaching.'

'Eloquently,' I answered.

Of some of the places into which Falconer led me that night I will
attempt no description--places blazing with lights and mirrors,
crowded with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full
of the saddest of all sights, the uninteresting faces of commonplace
women.

'There is a passion,' I said, as we came out of one of these
dreadful places, 'that lingers about the heart like the odour of
violets, like a glimmering twilight on the borders of moonrise; and
there is a passion that wraps itself in the vapours of patchouli and
coffins, and streams from the eyes like gaslight from a tavern. And
yet the line is ill to draw between them. It is very dreadful.
These are women.'

'They are in God's hands,' answered Falconer. 'He hasn't done with
them yet. Shall it take less time to make a woman than to make a
world? Is not the woman the greater? She may have her ages of
chaos, her centuries of crawling slime, yet rise a woman at last.'

'How much alike all those women were!'

'A family likeness, alas! which always strikes you first.'

'Some of them looked quite modest.'

'There are great differences. I do not know anything more touching
than to see how a woman will sometimes wrap around her the last
remnants of a soiled and ragged modesty. It has moved me almost to
tears to see such a one hanging her head in shame during the singing
of a detestable song. That poor thing's shame was precious in the
eyes of the Master, surely.'

'Could nothing be done for her?'

'I contrived to let her know where she would find a friend if she
wanted to be good: that is all you can do in such cases. If the
horrors of their life do not drive them out at such an open door,
you can do nothing else, I fear--for the time.'

'Where are you going now, may I ask?'

'Into the city--on business,' he added with a smile.

'There will be nobody there so late.'

'Nobody! One would think you were the beadle of a city church, Mr.
Gordon.'

We came into a very narrow, dirty street. I do not know where it
is. A slatternly woman advanced from an open door, and said,

'Mr. Falconer.'

He looked at her for a moment.

'Why, Sarah, have you come to this already?' he said.

'Never mind me, sir. It's no more than you told me to expect. You
knowed him better than I did. Leastways I'm an honest woman.'

'Stick to that, Sarah; and be good-tempered.'

'I'll have a try anyhow, sir. But there's a poor cretur a dyin'
up-stairs; and I'm afeard it'll go hard with her, for she throwed a
Bible out o' window this very morning, sir.'

'Would she like to see me? I'm afraid not.'

'She's got Lilywhite, what's a sort of a reader, readin' that same
Bible to her now.'

'There can be no great harm in just looking in,' he said, turning to
me.

'I shall be happy to follow you--anywhere,' I returned.

'She's awful ill, sir; cholerer or summat,' said Sarah, as she led
the way up the creaking stair.

We half entered the room softly. Two or three women sat by the
chimney, and another by a low bed, covered with a torn patchwork
counterpane, spelling out a chapter in the Bible. We paused for a
moment to hear what she was reading. Had the book been opened by
chance, or by design? It was the story of David and Bathsheba.
Moans came from the bed, but the candle in a bottle, by which the
woman was reading, was so placed that we could not see the sufferer.

We stood still and did not interrupt the reading.

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed a coarse voice from the side of the chimney:
'the saint, you see, was no better than some of the rest of us!'

'I think he was a good deal worse just then,' said Falconer,
stepping forward.

'Gracious! there's Mr. Falconer,' said another woman, rising, and
speaking in a flattering tone.

'Then,' remarked the former speaker, 'there's a chance for old Moll
and me yet. King David was a saint, wasn't he? Ha! ha!'

'Yes, and you might be one too, if you were as sorry for your faults
as he was for his.'

'Sorry, indeed! I'll be damned if I be sorry. What have I to be
sorry for? Where's the harm in turning an honest penny? I ha' took
no man's wife, nor murdered himself neither. There's yer saints!
He was a rum 'un. Ha! ha!'

Falconer approached her, bent down and whispered something no one
could hear but herself. She gave a smothered cry, and was silent.

'Give me the book,' he said, turning towards the bed. 'I'll read you
something better than that. I'll read about some one that never did
anything wrong.'

'I don't believe there never was no sich a man,' said the previous
reader, as she handed him the book, grudgingly.

'Not Jesus Christ himself?' said Falconer.

'Oh! I didn't know as you meant him.'

'Of course I meant him. There never was another.'

'I have heard tell--p'raps it was yourself, sir--as how he didn't
come down upon us over hard after all, bless him!'

Falconer sat down on the side of the bed, and read the story of
Simon the Pharisee and the woman that was a sinner. When he ceased,
the silence that followed was broken by a sob from somewhere in the
room. The sick woman stopped her moaning, and said,

'Turn down the leaf there, please, sir. Lilywhite will read it to
me when you're gone.'

The some one sobbed again. It was a young slender girl, with a face
disfigured by the small-pox, and, save for the tearful look it wore,
poor and expressionless. Falconer said something gentle to her.

'Will he ever come again?' she sobbed.

'Who?' asked Falconer.

'Him--Jesus Christ. I've heard tell, I think, that he was to come
again some day.'

'Why do you ask?'

'Because--' she said, with a fresh burst of tears, which rendered
the words that followed unintelligible. But she recovered herself
in a few moments, and, as if finishing her sentence, put her hand up
to her poor, thin, colourless hair, and said,

'My hair ain't long enough to wipe his feet.'

'Do you know what he would say to you, my girl?' Falconer asked.

'No. What would he say to me? He would speak to me, would he?'

'He would say: Thy sins are forgiven thee.'

'Would he, though? Would he?' she cried, starting up. 'Take me to
him--take me to him. Oh! I forgot. He's dead. But he will come
again, won't he? He was crucified four times, you know, and he must
ha' come four times for that. Would they crucify him again, sir?'

'No, they wouldn't crucify him now--in England at least. They would
only laugh at him, shake their heads at what he told them, as much
as to say it wasn't true, and sneer and mock at him in some of the
newspapers.'

'Oh dear! I've been very wicked.'

'But you won't be so any more.'

'No, no, no. I won't, I won't, I won't.'

She talked hurriedly, almost wildly. The coarse old woman tapped
her forehead with her finger. Falconer took the girl's hand.

'What is your name?' he said.

'Nell.'

'What more?'

'Nothing more.'

'Well, Nelly,' said Falconer.

'How kind of you to call me Nelly!' interrupted the poor girl. 'They
always calls me Nell, just.'

'Nelly,' repeated Falconer, 'I will send a lady here to-morrow to
take you away with her, if you like, and tell you how you must do to
find Jesus.--People always find him that want to find him.'

The elderly woman with the rough voice, who had not spoken since he
whispered to her, now interposed with a kind of cowed fierceness.

'Don't go putting humbug into my child's head now, Mr.
Falconer--'ticing her away from her home. Everybody knows my Nell's
been an idiot since ever she was born. Poor child!'