‘Yes, I know, but I sometimes wonder which is the right side up. All your plans seem to begin by taking something for yourself, everlasting No. 1; “take, take, take,” and so your world goes round. I wonder if it would not go round as well to “give, give, give.” Think of others first; self is sure to get its turn. How would that be, I wonder? I do so wonder sometimes! Do the hardest thing first, and get that right. I do not think things can ever come right, unless you begin by giving up. Don’t you think it is just as disgusting to make as much as you honestly can, as to eat as much as you honestly can? Why do you want to stuff so? That is what I thought you meant yesterday. And you did mean it; you may say what you like. Suppose you are cleverer than the others; well, be thankful you can do something more for them. That seems the natural way. Are you sure you haven’t got a twist? I only ask. Why should brains be so greedy? All the harm in the world that I ever saw or heard of comes from greediness, gobbling. Give up, give up, give up. Oh, only that makes men different from pasturing brutes! Once I read a natural history book, and the gentleman that wrote it was trying to find out what made a man a man. The two legs wouldn’t do, you know, because there’s the chickens. Then he tried “no tails?”—“no feathers?” Oh, how he did try, taking off this and that, till the thing seemed almost ready to put in the oven. He made me laugh so. I came up here, and thought about it, just like a riddle; and at last I said, “give it up;” and then it came upon me, all of a sudden—why that was the very answer! That is why man is not the same as the pasturing brutes: because he can give up, because he can think of all, and himself as only one of them. He is real man when he is doing that, and real brute when he is doing the other thing. That is what I thought you were going to tell us last night—how much more we could give up. Do show us how they give up in England; that’s what we want to know.’
‘Victoria, don’t be troublesome. I am planning the estate.’
I turned and looked down upon the Island, north, south, and west, in all its heavenly beauty; ah, what a dish to carve! Blue sea, patches of coral sand, silver cascades gushing from the rocks; glory of trees and flowers, of clear skies, and of rainbow-tinted mists, flecking here and there the background of perfect turquoise; glory of the soft beauty of the grove and settlement, of the wild beauty of the hills, of the ordered beauty of the happy mean in the plantations beyond, all visible, from this height, to the farthest rocks that stood firm for ever against the beat of the waves. The delight of it came up to me through every sense; in its odours, from the groves and gardens, the soft breeze sighing my way; in its sounds, from the tinkle of a tame goat’s bell here and there, or from the faint echoes of the woodman’s axe, following, in due measure of seconds, after the flash of the sunlight on the polished steel. And, for sight again, there was more of the exquisite human life in tiny groups dotted all over the fields in leisured toil, or in opalescent green shapes in the water, off the far Point, that I knew to be the bodies of diving girls.
Then, for the inner eye, the scene changed, and I was once more on the steps of the Royal Exchange, with that other sight below me wrestling its way out of the London mist—the Blessed of Dividend day; the dandy clerks making for the turtle; the shabby clerks making for the buns; the parson hurrying away to his preaching, as per bequest of pious founder; the hungry-looking wretches peddling the pocket combs; the flower girls in their foul finery, mal-odorous of gin all this way off, types of that fatallest of all divisions of labour which puts the work in absolute non-relation to the life of the worker; the slouching beggar; the shunting policeman; the demonstrating rabble with the average 7s. 6d. to the hundred pockets, divided by a wall only from the bullion wells of the Bank; the nondescript thousands in black, and brown, and russet, and all, all, as explained, from the beggar upwards, tormented with the secret itch of civilisation, all scratching on the sly, and, with the scratching, throwing themselves everlastingly out of focus for my grand pictorial composition of a happy family of human kind.
And, as the grim pageant faded out again, I was once more back in the Blessed Isle—the Isle that I was laying out afresh for civilisation, to make it like the isle of my birth. I looked again, and hardly a point had changed in my short excursion to the other side of the world. The axe that was poised in the air was now buried in the tree, and the shining body of one of the girls had come to the surface, to catch the sunlight in its stead. Victoria was looking too, but with her head turned from mine; and, as we travelled in opposite directions round the circle of vision, our eyes had to meet at last.
I read in hers what she, I know, must have read in mine: ‘Oh, the pity of it!’
And, with this pang, came a strange question. As that scene was the beginning of the disease that drove me so far afield for ease from torment, is not this scene the beginning of the remedy? For, what may be the meaning of that troubled vision of the Exchange steps, what but ‘Each for himself,’ and the Devil ever on the track of the hindmost, till there is but one left for first and last? While, of this vision, the ever blessed interpretation is clear and true—‘Each for all’ in love, and truth, and mutual helpfulness, in real brotherhood and sisterhood—the core of the whole mystery, in morals, politics, religion, law and life.
CHAPTER XVI.
A DECLARATION.
‘When are we to begin the alterations?’ said the girl.
‘Not yet, my Victoria! No, not yet! Let all things stay as they are, and let me stay with them, here by your side. Beautiful, perfect creature! Let me speak what must be spoken: I love you!’