There are courts and alleys in the neighbourhood of Mortimer–street which, for misery and poverty, dirt and desperation, may vie with almost any of the more famous shames of London.
Cradockʼs own great trouble, the sympathy he had met with, and the comfort he received from it, had begun by this time to soften his heart, and render it more sensitive to the distress of others. At first, it had been far otherwise. The feeling of bitter injustice, resentment at, and defiance of, a blow which seemed to him so unmerited, and, worse than all, his own fatherʼs base and low mistrust of him—who could have been surprised if these things, acting upon a sad lone heart, and a bold mind beginning to think for itself, had made the owner an infidel? And very likely they would have done so, when he was removed from John Rosedewʼs influence, but for that scene with Amy. He loved that girl so warmly, so devotedly, so purely, that, when he found his love returned in equal quantity and quality, it renewed his faith in justice. He saw that there is a measure and law, even where all appears to be anarchy and anomaly; that the hand of God is not stretched forth upon His children wantonly; that we cannot gauge His circling survey by the three–inch space between human eyes, neither does He rest His balance on His earthly footstool. So Cradock escaped the deadly harm, which almost seems designed to poise that noblest gift of Heaven—a free and glorious intellect—he escaped it through the mercy which gave him true affection.
And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate—which truth alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school—the love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes for its essence.
As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness, the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these three—truth, simplicity, charity.
Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society ignores its broader and only true meaning—fellowship among men—and renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him, and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the blasphemy—though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered lie and the yelled one, the sale of maidens by their mothers, or of women by themselves—though here again the difference was never very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on it without weeping?
Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where fights were.
At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should, he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass. Of course he got imposed upon—of course he helped the unworthy; but after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy—some two hundred per cent.—began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good luck.
One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock, every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”
Then he remembered that, but for his trouble, he might never have thought of the good to be done. And the good done to him was threefold as much as he could do to others. Every day he grew less selfish, less imperious, less exacting; every day he saw more clearly the good which is in the worst of us.
There is a flint of peculiar character—I know not the local name of it—which is found sometimes on the great Chissel Bank, and away towards Lyme Regis. It is as hard, and sullen, and dull a flint (with even the outside polish lost from the chafing of the waves)—a stone as grey and foggy–looking;—as ever Deucalion took the trouble to cast away over the left into an empty world. Yet it has, through the heart of it, traversing it from pole to pole (for its shape is always conical) a thread, a spindle, a siphuncle, of the richest golden hue. None but those who are used to it can see the head of the golden column, can even guess its existence. The stone is not hollow; it is quite distinct from all pudding–stones and conglomerates.