Our savage has also got, what I believe the Red Indians have not, an agreeable sense of humour, which no doubt is limited by practical details, but is in its way very captivating. What a stroke of delightful irony it was for a pair of our savages to take a long street between them, the man begging down the right-hand side, and the woman the left, while the man told a mournful tale of his wife's death, and asked money to get her a coffin that she might be respectably buried—he being poor (but proud) and a broken-hearted widower—as well as to clothe their two mourning little ones in black for the funerals, and for the woman to tell exactly the same story as she went down the opposite side of the street, except that it was her husband she was burying, and she poor (but proud) and a broken-hearted widow. They took no notice of one another across the street, and none when they completed their work at the further end, but a few minutes later they were sitting in the same public-house together, both wonderfully comforted and affording a remarkable illustration of the dead burying their dead.
Our vagabond is a superb actor within his own province, and greatly enjoys a triumph in any conflict with the enemy. He was one day singing the “Sweet By-and-By” with such a voice and so much unctuous emotion that I lost patience, and broke out on him for his laziness and profanity. For a moment he was almost confounded, and then he assumed an air of meek martyrdom suggestive of a good man who had been trying to do his little best for the salvation of his fellow-creatures, and was being persecuted for righteousness sake. This was for the benefit of a simple-minded old gentleman who had been greatly shocked at my remarks, and now, as a rebuke to an ungodly and unsympathetic clergyman and an encouragement to humble piety, gave the vagabond a shilling. “God bless you,” he said with much feeling to the philanthropist, and started again the “Sweet By-and-By”! but before we parted he tipped me a wink over his victory, charged with inexpressible humour.
When one of the savages honoured our humble home by calling one day as an incapacitated member of the Mercantile Marine and obtained half-a-crown from my tender-hearted wife, partly through sympathy, but also through alarm, because the suffering sailor proposed to exhibit the sores upon his legs, I knew that the tidings would be carried far and wide throughout the nearest tribe, our local Black-feet as it were, and that we would be much favoured in days to come. So we were, by other sailors, also with sores, by persons who had been greatly helped by my preaching in the years of long ago, by widow women full of sorrow and gin, by countrymen stranded helpless in a big unsympathetic city, till our house was little better than a casual ward. Then I took the matter in hand and interviewed the next caller, who had been long out of employment, but had now obtained a job and only wanted the means of living till Monday when he would be independent of everybody. He had spent his last penny the day before on a piece of bread, and had tasted nothing since. “Not even drink,” I ventured to inquire, for by this time the air round me was charged with alcohol, when he replied with severe dignity that he had been a teetotaller since his boyhood. Then I addressed him briefly but clearly, explaining that the half-crown had been given by mistake, that we were greatly obliged for the visit of his friends, that I had enjoyed his own call, but that it would save a great deal of trouble to both sides if he would only intimate to his fellow-tribesmen and women when they gathered round the camp fire in the evening that there was no more spoil to be obtained at our house. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and a smile came over his face. “I'm fly,” he said. And then as he went out at the door he turned for a last shot, “Look here, sir, if you give me a bob, I'll join your church, and be an elder in a month.” A fellow of infinite jest, and I gave him a shilling, but without conditions.
The humour of our nomad is always practical, and when it masters him it sweeps all professional hypocrisy before it like a water-flood, and reveals the real man. Certainly quite unclothed, but also quite unashamed. He had told his story so artfully, with such care in detail and such conviction in tone, that I did believe for the moment that he was a poor Scot trying to get home by sea to Glasgow, together with his wife and four children, that he had obtained his passage-money from the Caledonian Society, and that he only needed a little money for food and such like expenses. This money I gave him somewhat lavishly, and yet not quite without suspicion, and he left full of gratitude and national enthusiasm. Three years later a man got entrance to my study on the grounds of Christianity and nationality, and before he addressed me directly I thought that I knew his voice. When he explained that he had got his passage to Glasgow from that noble institution, the Caledonian Society, but that as he had a wife and four children... I was sure we had met before, and I offered to do the rest of the story myself, which I did with such an accurate memory that he listened with keen appreciation like a composer to the playing of his own piece, and only added when I had finished, “So I did it here afore. Well, sir, ye may take my word for it, it's the first mistake I've made in my business.” And he departed with the self-conceit of the Scots only slightly chastened.
V.—OUR BOY
THE boy must have had a father, and some day he may be a father himself, but in the meantime he is absolutely different from anything else on the face of the earth. He is a race by himself, a special creation that cannot be traced, for who would venture to liken his ways to the respectability of his father, or who would ever connect him with the grave and decorous man which he is to be. By-and-by, say in thirty years, he will preside at a meeting for the prevention of cruelty to animals, or make enthusiastic speeches for the conversion of black people, or get in a white heat about the danger of explosives in the house, or be exceedingly careful about the rate of driving. Meanwhile he watches two dogs settle their political differences with keen interest, and would consider it unsportsmanlike to interfere if they were fairly matched, and the sight of a black man is to him a subject of unfailing and practical amusement, if he can blow himself and a brother up with gunpowder, he feels that time has not been lost, and it is to him a chief delight—although stolen—to travel round at early morn with the milkman, and being foolishly allowed to drive, to take every corner on one wheel. He is skilful in arranging a waterfall which comes into operation by the opening of a door; he keeps a menagerie of pets, unsightly in appearance, and extremely offensive in smell in his bedroom. He has an inexhaustible repertory of tricks for any servant with whom he has quarrelled, and it is his pleasure to come downstairs on the bannisters, and if any one is looking to make believe that he is going to fall off and dash himself to destruction three floors below. His father is aghast at him, and uses the strongest language regarding his escapades; he wonders how it came to pass that such a boy should turn up in his home, and considers him what gardeners would call “a sport” or unaccountable eccentricity in the family. He is sure that he never did such things when he was a boy, and would be very indignant if you insinuated he had simply been a prophecy of his son. According to his conversation you would imagine that his early life had been distinguished by unbroken and spotless propriety, and his son himself would not believe for a moment that the pater had ever been guilty of his own exploits. The Boy is therefore lonely in his home, cut off from the past and the future; he is apt to be misunderstood and even (in an extreme case) censured, and his sufferings as a creature of a foreign race with all the powers of government against him would be intolerable had he not such a joy in living, and were he not sustained in everything he does by a quite unaffected sense of innocence, and the proud consciousness of honourable martyrdom.
As wild animals are best studied in their native states, and are much restricted in the captivity of a cage, so the Boy is not seen at his best in a middle-class home where he is sadly fettered by vain customs (although it is wonderful how even there he can realize himself). When you want to understand what manner of creature he is, you must see him on the street. And the boy in exedsis, and de profundis too, is a message-boy.
Concluding that his son has had enough of the Board School, and learning from his master that there was not the remotest chance he would ever reach a higher standard, his father brings him some morning to a respectable tradesman, and persuades the unsuspecting man to take him as message-boy. Nothing could exceed the modesty and demure appearance of the Boy, and the only fear is that he be too timid and too simple for his duty—that he may be run over by a cab or bullied upon the streets. Carefully washed by his mother, and with his hair nicely brushed, in a plain but untorn suit of clothes, and a cap set decently on his head, he is a beautiful sight, and he listens to his father's instructions to do what he is told, and his master's commandment that he is not to meddle with anything in the shop, in respectful and engaging silence. His father departs with a warning look, and his master gives him an easy errand, and the Boy goes out to begin life in a hard, unfriendly world, while one pities his tender youth.