Bones and I

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

So Jonah was exceeding glad of the Gourd. I can understand his feelings perfectly. Does it not happen to most of us, at least once in a lifetime, thus to be “exceeding glad of the Gourd,” and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred with the same result? “Nil violentum est perpetuum.” So surely as it comes up in a night, so surely must it wither in a day. You have been in a hot climate? I don’t intend any disagreeable allusion, I mean the tropics, I give you my honour! Do you not remember the delight of getting out of your tent, or “booth” as we still call them at our village merry-makings, to sit under anything like a tree or shrub, where, shaded from the sun, you could catch the welcome breath of every breeze that blew? The French officers in the Crimea used to build for themselves trellised out-houses of branches interlaced, swearing volubly the while, and appearing to derive from these bowers no small comfort and refreshment. I can imagine the astonishment of “mon lieutenant” when, on waking in his tent, he should have discovered, like “Jack and the Beanstalk,” that one of these had sprung up for him, unsolicited, in a night. How he would have stared, and shrugged, and gesticulated, and cursed his star with less asperity, and been “exceeding glad of the Gourd!”

They are of many kinds, these excrescences that grow up with such marvellous celerity to afford us an intense and illusive delight; but they all resemble their prototype at Nineveh, in so far that, ere the seed has yet germinated, the worm is already prepared which shall smite the gourd, and cause it to wither away. There were hundreds of them shot to gigantic dimensions and exploded with the South Sea bubble of the last century. Thousands owed their birth and disappearance to the railway fever of five-and-twenty years ago. Not a few were called into existence by a blockade of the Southern ports, during the late war of opinion in the United States, and destroyed by its suspension at the peace. It seems to be a law in the moral as in the physical world that the endurance of things must be in proportion to the length of time required to bring them to maturity. The oak is said to be three hundred years in arriving at its prime, and that its vigour is still unimpaired after a thousand changes of foliage we have ocular demonstration in many parts of England; while the mustard-and-cress, which can be raised in twenty minutes on a square of flannel dipped in hot water, wastes and withers away in an hour.

The same in the animal creation. Like Minerva from the brain of Jove, the butterfly springs into its sunny existence, winged, armed, and clothed in gorgeous apparel, all at once; but when the night-breeze shakes the perfume from your garden-flowers, and the evening bank of clouds is coming up from the west, you look for that ephemeral masterpiece in vain. Now the elephant only attains his majority, so to speak, when between forty and fifty years of age; therefore he has hardly become an “old rogue” at two hundred, and the identical proboscis that saluted Clyde, or curled round the crushed remains of Tippoo Sahib’s victims, is to-day lowered in honour of our own jeunesse dorée, with whom a run through British India is considered little more of an expedition than a jaunt into Welsh Wales.

Cornaro, if I remember right, fixes the normal duration of life, in the Mammalia, at a term of five times the number of years required to reach their prime. Thus a dog, he says, comes to maturity at two, and lives till ten; a horse at five, and lives till five-and-twenty; and, arguing by analogy, a man, who only attains his full strength at twenty-three or four, should not, therefore, if he led a natural and rational life, succumb till he had arrived at a hundred and fifteen or twenty years.

Forbid it, Atropos! for their sakes as well as ours. Think of the old fogies, now sufficiently numerous, who would overflow the clubs! Think, when it came to our own turn, of the numbers of Gourds we should have raised, outlived, buried, but, alas! not forgotten.

“A fine old man, sir!” said one of the best judges of human nature that ever fathered a proverb. “There’s no such thing. If his head or his heart had been worth anything, they would have worn him out years ago!”

“You have got off the subject as usual,” objected Bones, “and are trenching on a topic of which you are far less qualified to speak than myself. What do you know about the duration of life, the ceaseless wear-and-tear, the gradual decay, the last flickers of the candle, leaping up, time after time, with delusive strength, until it goes out once for all? You can tell where Noah was, but do you know where the candle went to when it left the great sea-captain in the dark? Not you! Never mind, don’t fret, you will find out some day sure enough, and be as wise as ‘Tullus, Ancus, good Eneas,’ and the rest of us! In the meantime stick to your text. The morbid spirit possesses you, and well I know it will only come out of the man with much talking. If it does you any good, never mind me—fire away! Tell us something more about the Gourd, and the worm that smote it. That is what you are driving at, I feel sure.”

“‘Morbid!’” I repeated, somewhat indignantly. “And why morbid, I should like to know? A man takes his stand, as you and I do, outside of, and apart from, the circling, shifting mass of his fellow-creatures, and makes his own observations, uninfluenced by their clamour, their customs, their ridiculous prejudices and opinions, confiding those observations unreservedly to one who should, ex officio indeed, be entirely free from the earthly trammels that cumber liberal discussion in general society, and he is to be called morbid, forsooth! It was only one of your ghastly jests, was it? Enough! I am satisfied. There can be no bone of contention—I mean no subject of dispute—between you and me—we have not the ghost of a reason—I mean the shadow of a cause—for disagreement. I confess my weakness: I own to a fatal tendency to digression. One thought leads to another, and they follow in a string, like wild geese, or heirs of entail, ‘velut unda supervenit undam.’ By the way, this very subject, the association of ideas, opens up a boundless field for speculation. But I refrain—I return to my Gourd—I am back in Nineveh with the prophet once more. Nineveh, in its imperial splendour, gorgeous in Eastern colouring, sublime with Eastern magnificence, glittering with Eastern decorations—solemn, gloomy, and gigantic; grand in the massive dignity of size, winged bulls hewn from the solid rock guard the long perspective of a thousand avenues, leading to palaces that rise, tier upon tier, into the glowing sky. Lavish profusion—marble, and bronze, and gold—gleams and dazzles and flashes in the streets. The palm-tree bends her graceful head earthward; the aloe aims her angry spikes at heaven; the camel, with meek appealing eyes, seems to protest against the bales of costly merchandise with which its back is piled; the white elephant in scarlet trappings, stolid and sagacious, stands patient, waiting for its lord; throngs of dusky, half-naked Asiatics pass to and fro along the baking causeways; loud bleatings of sheep, lowings of oxen, cries of parched, thirsty animals resound in the suburbs; while over all a Southern sun blazes down with scorching fury, and an east wind off the Desert comes blustering in, hot and stifling, like a blast from hell.

“So the prophet is ‘exceeding glad of his Gourd.’ He will rest in its shade; he will look pitifully on the broiling passers-by; he will hug himself in that sense of comfort which human nature, alas! is too apt to experience from the very fact that others are in a worse condition than its own; but even while he thus rejoices, the worm has done its work—the Gourd is withered up, the sirocco suffocates his lungs, the sun beats on his head, and, like the rest of us when we lose that which we choose to consider the one thing essential to our happiness, he shows the white feather on the spot, and says, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’

“Death never seems to come for those who wish it—though perhaps if the Great Liberator felt bound to appear every time he was invoked, the cry might not be raised quite so often. Who is there that has not bowed his head in misery, and wondered whether he could be so wretched anywhere else as here, in the mocking sunlight, with his Gourd withered before his face? It is gone—gone. See! There is the very spot on which it stood but yesterday, so green, so fresh, so full of life, so rich in promise! And to-day—a blank! It seems impossible! Ay, that is perhaps the worst of the suffering—that numbed, stupefied state, which refuses for a time to grasp the extent of its affliction—that perverse and cowardly instinct which clings to a thread that it yet knows is wholly severed—which turns even Hope to a curse, because it makes her a bar to resignation. Few of us can boast more courage than Jonah when the Gourd is fairly withered away.