Books: Robert Falconer

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'I cannot misunderstand you,' faltered Lady Georgina.

Falconer was silent. Without looking up from the floor on which her
eyes had rested all the time he spoke, Lady Georgina said at last,

'Then what is my next duty? What is the thing that lies nearest to
me?'

'That, I repeat, belongs to your every-day history. No one can
answer that question but yourself. Your next duty is just to
determine what your next duty is.--Is there nothing you neglect? Is
there nothing you know you ought not to do?--You would know your
duty, if you thought in earnest about it, and were not ambitious of
great things.'

'Ah then,' responded Lady Georgina, with an abandoning sigh, 'I
suppose it is something very commonplace, which will make life more
dreary than ever. That cannot help me.'

'It will, if it be as dreary as reading the newspapers to an old
deaf aunt. It will soon lead you to something more. Your duty will
begin to comfort you at once, but will at length open the unknown
fountain of life in your heart.'

Lady Georgina lifted up her head in despair, looked at Falconer
through eyes full of tears, and said vehemently,

'Mr. Falconer, you can have no conception how wretched a life like
mine is. And the futility of everything is embittered by the
consciousness that it is from no superiority to such things that I
do not care for them.'

'It is from superiority to such things that you do not care for
them. You were not made for such things. They cannot fill your
heart. It has whole regions with which they have no relation.'

'The very thought of music makes me feel ill. I used to be
passionately fond of it.'

'I presume you got so far in it that you asked, "Is there nothing
more?" Concluding there was nothing more, and yet needing more, you
turned from it with disappointment?'

'It is the same,' she went on hurriedly, 'with painting, modelling,
reading--whatever I have tried. I am sick of them all. They do
nothing for me.'

'How can you enjoy music, Lady Georgina, if you are not in harmony
with the heart and source of music?'

'How do you mean?'

'Until the human heart knows the divine heart, it must sigh and
complain like a petulant child, who flings his toys from him because
his mother is not at home. When his mother comes back to him he
finds his toys are good still. When we find Him in our own hearts,
we shall find him in everything, and music will be deep enough then,
Lady Georgina. It is this that the Brahmin and the Platonist seek;
it is this that the mystic and the anchorite sigh for; towards this
the teaching of the greatest of men would lead us: Lord Bacon
himself says, "Nothing can fill, much less extend the soul of man,
but God, and the contemplation of God." It is Life you want. If you
will look in your New Testament, and find out all that our Lord says
about Life, you will find the only cure for your malady. I know
what such talk looks like; but depend upon it, what I am talking
about is something very different from what you fancy it. Anyhow to
this you must come, one day or other.'

'But how am I to gain this indescribable good, which so many seek,
and so few find?'

'Those are not my words,' said Falconer emphatically. 'I should have
said--"which so few yet seek; but so many shall at length find."'

'Do not quarrel with my foolish words, but tell me how I am to find
it; for I suppose there must be something in what so many good
people assert.'

'You thought I could give you help?'

'Yes. That is why I came to you.'

'Just so. I cannot give you help. Go and ask it of one who can.'

'Speak more plainly.'

'Well then: if there be a God, he must hear you if you call to him.
If there be a father, he will listen to his child. He will teach
you everything.'

'But I don't know what I want.'

'He does: ask him to tell you what you want. It all comes back to
the old story: "If ye then being evil, know how to give good gifts
to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the
holy Spirit to them that ask him!" But I wish you would read your
New Testament--the Gospels I mean: you are not in the least fit to
understand the Epistles yet. Read the story of our Saviour as if
you had never read it before. He at least was a man who seemed to
have that secret of life after the knowledge of which your heart is
longing.'

Lady Georgina rose. Her eyes were again full of tears. Falconer
too was moved. She held out her hand to him, and without another
word left the room. She never came there again.

Her manner towards Falconer was thereafter much altered. People
said she was in love with him: if she was, it did her no harm. Her
whole character certainly was changed. She sought the friendship of
Miss St. John, who came at length to like her so much, that she took
her with her in some of her walks among the poor. By degrees she
began to do something herself after a quiet modest fashion. But
within a few years, probably while so engaged, she caught a fever
from which she did not recover. It was not till after her death
that Falconer told any one of the interview he had had with her.
And by that time I had the honour of being very intimate with him.
When she knew that she was dying, she sent for him. Mary St. John
was with her. She left them together. When he came out, he was
weeping.

CHAPTER XI.

THE SUICIDE.

Falconer lived on and laboured on in London. Wherever he found a
man fitted for the work, he placed him in such office as De Fleuri
already occupied. At the same time he went more into society, and
gained the friendship of many influential people. Besides the use
he made of this to carry out plans for individual rescue, it enabled
him to bestir himself for the first and chief good which he believed
it was in the power of the government to effect for the class
amongst which he laboured. As I have shown, he did not believe in
any positive good being effected save through individual
contact--through faith, in a word--faith in the human helper--which
might become a stepping-stone through the chaotic misery towards
faith in the Lord and in his Father. All that association could do,
as such, was only, in his judgment, to remove obstructions from the
way of individual growth and education--to put better conditions
within reach--first of all, to provide that the people should be
able, if they would, to live decently. He had no notion of domestic
inspection, or of offering prizes for cleanliness and order. He
knew that misery and wretchedness are the right and best condition
of those who live so that misery and wretchedness are the natural
consequences of their life. But there ought always to be the
possibility of emerging from these; and as things were, over the
whole country, for many who would if they could, it was impossible
to breathe fresh air, to be clean, to live like human beings. And
he saw this difficulty ever on the increase, through the rapacity of
the holders of small house-property, and the utter wickedness of
railway companies, who pulled down every house that stood in their
way, and did nothing to provide room for those who were thus
ejected--most probably from a wretched place, but only, to be driven
into a more wretched still. To provide suitable dwellings for the
poor he considered the most pressing of all necessary reforms. His
own fortune was not sufficient for doing much in this way, but he
set about doing what he could by purchasing houses in which the poor
lived, and putting them into the hands of persons whom he could
trust, and who were immediately responsible to him for their
proceedings: they had to make them fit for human abodes, and let
them to those who desired better accommodation, giving the
preference to those already tenants, so long as they paid their
reasonable rent, which he considered far more necessary for them to
do than for him to have done.

One day he met by appointment the owner of a small block, of which
he contemplated the purchase. They were in a dreadfully dilapidated
condition, a shame that belonged more to the owner than the
inhabitants. The man wanted to sell the houses, or at least was
willing to sell them, but put an exorbitant price upon them.
Falconer expostulated.

'I know the whole of the rent these houses could bring you in,' he
said, 'without making any deduction for vacancies and defalcations:
what you ask is twice as much as they would fetch if the full rent
were certain.'

The poor wretch looked up at him with the leer of a ghoul. He was
dressed like a broken-down clergyman, in rusty black, with a
neck-cloth of whitey-brown.

'I admit it,' he said in good English, and a rather educated tone.
'Your arguments are indisputable. I confess besides that so far
short does the yield come of the amount on paper, that it would pay
me to give them away. But it's the funerals, sir, that make it
worth my while. I'm an undertaker, as you may judge from my
costume. I count back-rent in the burying. People may cheat their
landlord, but they can't cheat the undertaker. They must be buried.
That's the one indispensable--ain't it, sir?'

Falconer had let him run on that he might have the measure of him.
Now he was prepared with his reply.

'You've told me your profession,' he said: 'I'll tell you mine. I
am a lawyer. If you don't let me have those houses for five
hundred, which is the full market value, I'll prosecute you. It'll
take a good penny from the profits of your coffins to put those
houses in a state to satisfy the inspector.'

The wretched creature was struck dumb. Falconer resumed.

'You're the sort of man that ought to be kept to your pound of
filthy flesh. I know what I say; and I'll do it. The law costs me
nothing. You won't find it so.'

The undertaker sold the houses, and no longer in that quarter killed
the people he wanted to bury.

I give this as a specimen of the kind of thing Falconer did. But he
took none of the business part in his own hands, on the same
principle on which Paul the Apostle said it was unmeet for him to
leave the preaching of the word in order to serve tables--not that
the thing was beneath him, but that it was not his work so long as
he could be doing more important service still.

De Fleuri was one of his chief supports. The whole nature of the
man mellowed under the sun of Falconer, and over the work that
Falconer gave him to do. His daughter recovered, and devoted
herself to the same labour that had rescued her. Miss St. John was
her superior. By degrees, without any laws or regulations, a little
company was gathered, not of ladies and gentlemen, but of men and
women, who aided each, other, and without once meeting as a whole,
laboured not the less as one body in the work of the Lord, bound in
one by bonds that had nothing to do with cobweb committee meetings
or public dinners, chairmen or wine-flushed subscriptions. They
worked like the leaven of which the Lord spoke.

But De Fleuri, like almost every one in the community I believe, had
his own private schemes subserving the general good. He knew the
best men of his own class and his own trade, and with them his
superior intellectual gifts gave him influence. To them he told the
story of Falconer's behaviour to him, of Falconer's own need, and of
his hungry-hearted search. An enthusiasm of help seized upon the
men. To aid your superior is such a rousing gladness!--Was anything
of this in St. Paul's mind when he spoke of our being fellow-workers
with God? I only put the question.--Each one of these had his own
trustworthy acquaintances, or neighbours, rather--for like finds out
like all the world through, as well as over--and to them he told the
story of Falconer and his father, so that in all that region of
London it became known that the man who loved the poor was himself
needy, and looked to the poor for their help. Without them he could
not be made perfect.

Some of my readers may be inclined to say that it was dishonourable
in Falconer to have occasioned the publishing of his father's
disgrace. Such may recall to their minds that concealment is no law
of the universe; that, on the contrary, the Lord of the Universe
said once: 'There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed.'
Was the disgrace of Andrew Falconer greater because a thousand men
knew it, instead of forty, who could not help knowing it? Hope lies
in light and knowledge. Andrew would be none the worse that honest
men knew of his vice: they would be the first to honour him if he
should overcome it. If he would not--the disgrace was just, and
would fall upon his son only in sorrow, not in dishonour. The grace
of God--the making of humanity by his beautiful hand--no, heart--is
such, that disgrace clings to no man after repentance, any more than
the feet defiled with the mud of the world come yet defiled from the
bath. Even the things that proceed out of the man, and do terribly
defile him, can be cast off like the pollution of the leper by a
grace that goes deeper than they; and the man who says, 'I have
sinned: I will sin no more,' is even by the voice of his brothers
crowned as a conqueror, and by their hearts loved as one who has
suffered and overcome. Blessing on the God-born human heart! Let
the hounds of God, not of Satan, loose upon sin;--God only can rule
the dogs of the devil;--let them hunt it to the earth; let them drag
forth the demoniac to the feet of the Man who loved the people while
he let the devil take their swine; and do not talk about disgrace
from a thing being known when the disgrace is that the thing should
exist.

One night I was returning home from some poor attempts of my own. I
had now been a pupil of Falconer for a considerable time, but having
my own livelihood to make, I could not do so much as I would.

It was late, nearly twelve o'clock, as I passed through the region
of Seven Dials. Here and there stood three or four brutal-looking
men, and now and then a squalid woman with a starveling baby in her
arms, in the light of the gin-shops. The babies were the saddest to
see--nursery-plants already in training for the places these men and
women now held, then to fill a pauper's grave, or perhaps a
perpetual cell--say rather, for the awful spaces of silence, where
the railway director can no longer be guilty of a worse sin than
house-breaking, and his miserable brother will have no need of the
shelter of which he deprived him. Now and then a flaunting woman
wavered past--a night-shade, as our old dramatists would have called
her. I could hardly keep down an evil disgust that would have
conquered my pity, when a scanty white dress would stop beneath a
lamp, and the gay dirty bonnet, turning round, reveal a painted
face, from which shone little more than an animal intelligence, not
brightened by the gin she had been drinking. Vague noises of strife
and of drunken wrath flitted around me as I passed an alley, or an
opening door let out its evil secret. Once I thought I heard the
dull thud of a blow on the head. The noisome vapours were fit for
any of Swedenborg's hells. There were few sounds, but the very
quiet seemed infernal. The night was hot and sultry. A skinned
cat, possibly still alive, fell on the street before me. Under one
of the gas-lamps lay something long: it was a tress of dark hair,
torn perhaps from some woman's head: she had beautiful hair at
least. Once I heard the cry of murder, but where, in that chaos of
humanity, right or left, before or behind me, I could not even
guess. Home to such regions, from gorgeous stage-scenery and
dresses, from splendid, mirror-beladen casinos, from singing-halls,
and places of private and prolonged revelry, trail the daughters of
men at all hours from midnight till morning. Next day they drink
hell-fire that they may forget. Sleep brings an hour or two of
oblivion, hardly of peace; but they must wake, worn and miserable,
and the waking brings no hope: their only known help lies in the
gin-shop. What can be done with them? But the secrets God keeps
must be as good as those he tells.

But no sights of the night ever affected me so much as walking
through this same St. Giles's on a summer Sunday morning, when
church-goers were in church. Oh! the faces that creep out into the
sunshine then, and haunt their doors! Some of them but skins drawn
over skulls, living Death's-heads, grotesque in their hideousness.

I was not very far from Falconer's abode. My mind was oppressed
with sad thoughts and a sense of helplessness. I began to wonder
what Falconer might at that moment be about. I had not seen him for
a long time--a whole fortnight. He might be at home: I would go and
see, and if there were light in his windows I would ring his bell.

I went. There was light in his windows. He opened the door
himself, and welcomed me. I went up with him, and we began to talk.
I told him of my sad thoughts, and my feelings of helplessness.

'He that believeth shall not make haste,' he said. 'There is plenty
of time. You must not imagine that the result depends on you, or
that a single human soul can be lost because you may fail. The
question, as far as you are concerned, is, whether you are to be
honoured in having a hand in the work that God is doing, and will
do, whether you help him or not. Some will be honoured: shall it be
me? And this honour gained excludes no one: there is work, as there
is bread in his house, enough and to spare. It shows no faith in
God to make frantic efforts or frantic lamentations. Besides, we
ought to teach ourselves to see, as much as we may, the good that is
in the condition of the poor.'

'Teach me to see that, then,' I said. 'Show me something.'

'The best thing is their kindness to each other. There is an
absolute divinity in their self-denial for those who are poorer than
themselves. I know one man and woman, married people, who pawned
their very furniture and wearing apparel to procure cod-liver oil
for a girl dying in consumption. She was not even a relative, only
an acquaintance of former years. They had found her destitute and
taken her to their own poor home. There are fathers and mothers who
will work hard all the morning, and when dinner-time comes "don't
want any," that there may be enough for their children--or half
enough, more likely. Children will take the bread out of their own
mouths to put in that of their sick brother, or to stick in the fist
of baby crying for a crust--giving only a queer little helpless
grin, half of hungry sympathy, half of pleasure, as they see it
disappear. The marvel to me is that the children turn out so well
as they do; but that applies to the children in all ranks of life.
Have you ever watched a group of poor children, half-a-dozen of
them with babies in their arms?'

'I have, a little, and have seen such a strange mixture of
carelessness and devotion.'

'Yes. I was once stopped in the street by a child of ten, with face
absolutely swollen with weeping, asking me to go and see baby who
was very ill. She had dropped him four times that morning, but had
no idea that could have done him any harm. The carelessness is
ignorance. Their form of it is not half so shocking as that of the
mother who will tremble at the slightest sign of suffering in her
child, but will hear him lie against his brother without the
smallest discomfort. Ah! we shall all find, I fear, some day, that
we have differed from each other, where we have done best, only in
mode--perhaps not even in degree. A grinding tradesman takes
advantage of the over supply of labour to get his work done at
starvation prices: I owe him love, and have never thought of paying
my debt except in boundless indignation.'

'I wish I had your faith and courage, Mr. Falconer,' I said.

'You are in a fair way of having far more,' he returned. 'You are
not so old as I am, by a long way. But I fear you are getting out
of spirits. Is to-morrow a hard day with you?'

'I have next to nothing to do to-morrow.'

'Then will you come to me in the evening? We will go out together.'

Of course I was only too glad to accept the proposal. But our talk
did not end here. The morning began to shine before I rose to leave
him; and before I reached my abode it was broad daylight. But what
a different heart I carried within me! And what a different London
it was outside of 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?'