And I will come again, my luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!”
That is drawing poetry out of doggerel, the work of genius.
THE IBERIAN’S HOUSE
Not long ago I was on the Downs in pursuit of wild raspberries, which, as the old phrase goes, are very plenty this year. Although the days are still those of the dog, there was autumn in the air even then: a grey sky with a cool stream of wind from the west in which was that familiar taint of things dying which autumn always brings. The flowers were of autumn too—scabious, bedstraw and rest-harrow; mushrooms were to be had for the stooping, which we usually seek in dewy September dawns. On the other hand, there were the raspberries; the brambles were in flower, and the corn just tinged with yellow. After a burning May and June, a dripping July, the times are out of joint—but I filled a hat full of raspberries.
I found the best of them in a pear-shaped hollow in the ground, a place rather like a giant’s sauce-boat, in depth perhaps some six feet. Allowing for the slow accumulation of soil tumbled from the sides, for growth by vegetation and decay spread over many centuries, it may once have been another three feet down. Call it, then, nine feet deep. By outside measurements it was fourteen yards long by nine at the broad end of the pear, narrowing down to three where the stalk would have been. To-day the actual floor-space is barely two yards at the broad end. That is because the sides have fallen in, and made descent a matter of walking, which originally, no doubt, was contrived by some sort of a ladder, or by slithering down a tree-trunk. Vegetation is profuse in there: the turf like a sponge, the scabious as big as ladies’ watches, the raspberries good enough for Bond Street. Well they may be, for they are rooted in the bones and household spoil of more than two thousand years. The place was a house long before Cæsar knew Britain, before the Belgae were in Wilts, before Wilts was Wilts. To revert to a convenient term, I picked my raspberries in an Iberian house.
I considered it that day in the light thrown upon its proportions for me (all unknown to the author) by a terrible little book, the more terrible for its dispassionate statement, called “The Woman in the Little House,” whose author, Mrs. Margaret Eyles, has herself experienced what she writes of. Her Little House is one of, I daresay, a million; one of those narrow, flat-faced boxes of brick—“two up and two down,” as they are expressed—sprawling far and wide over the home counties about London, in which the artisans and operatives who work thereabout contrive, as best they may, to bestow themselves. It does not need—or should not—Mrs. Eyles’s calm and good-tempered account to realise that such dwellings are bad for health and morals, fatal to the nerves and ruinous to the purses of their occupants. Yet she mentions more than one simple truth which proves immediately that the smallest house at the lowest possible rent may be much more costly than a large one—for instance, she points out that the smallness of the house and the want of storage room make purchase of stores in any kind of bulk out of the question. But I have neither the time nor the knowledge to develop these questions properly. I have only one criticism to make, and that is that the sufferings of the small householder cannot all be laid to size; that the difficulties of the Woman in the Little House are not only economic. Fecklessness in the Woman must take its share of blame. It is hard to bring up a family in the fear of God and the use of soap, where there seems to be neither room for the one nor chance for the other. It is wearing-down work to be nurse to many small and fretful children while you are carrying yet another, to keep order in a household which has neither scope for, nor desire of order, to deal with drunken husband, grudging landlord, quarrelsome neighbour—and so on. But Mrs. Eyles knows that these things can be done by the woman who realises that they must, that they have been done and are being done; and though both of us may grudge, as we do, the waste of nerve, youth, beauty, vitality which they involve, yet had we rather preach the gospel of such heroic dumb endurance, such constancy in adversity, such piety, and their reward, than have the heroines fall back, flounder in the trough of the wave, or the “sensual sty.” But for their lamps held up, indeed would “universal darkness cover all.”
I seem to be far from my neolithic dwelling; yet am close to it; for that itself was not much smaller than the “Little House” of to-day, and yet is three thousand years older at the very least. To its successor, the Celtic and early English wattle-and-daub hut this brick box has succeeded, while here in the village under the Down there are two-roomed, three-roomed tenements in which may be found man, wife, and eight or ten children. So far as floor-space, air-space, headroom, sanitation go, they will be very little better than the hole in the chalk. So far as intellectual and moral outlook go, so far as foresight, restraint of members, mental capacity, while tradition is still the universal guide—a tradition which it is not easy to distinguish from mere instinct—there is little reason to suppose the occupants of the one differ materially from those of the other. I am not to regret it or reprove it, but to state it; and go on to say that when tradition is modified by character the state of a family so conditioned may be not only orderly, not only prosperous, but happy—and by that I don’t mean merely contented, but consciously and avowedly happy. I know several which are so; and while I see, or hear, of their well-being I have no reason for being anything but glad of it. Sir Alfred Mond, to be sure, has had nothing to do with it; but it is my belief that when it comes to a tug-of-war between character and Sir Alfred Mond, character will pull the right honourable baronet all over the place.