‘Swart read his paper meanwhile, and joined the crowd in the “pub,” when he had a penny to spare. He never missed his paper, being quite a hopeful kind of fool, and inclined to believe that the better luck was just going to begin. He had revelled in that anticipation, from Sunday to Sunday, for at least five-and-thirty years. The foreign intelligence, especially, used to cheer his soul. We were always taking something to round our Empire off; soon it would be quite trim, and then! “You may reckon we’ve got Burmah, sir,” he said to me one day, when news came of the execution of a fresh batch of dacoits. “It’s as good as ours. There’ll be fine times, I’m thinking, soon. Such a rumpus, indeed, when it’s all for their good!” He was really angry with the Burmese. He regarded their war, and all the other little wars, as only so many accidents of human perversity that tended to defer the grand opening of a vast humanitarian entertainment known as “Better times all round.” He had hoped the curtain was going to rise, when India was quieted down, in the pit. Then came the stupid interruptions from the Abyssinian and Ashantee sections of the gallery. Then the Afghan and Zulu fights at the doors. Next, “them there fellers in the Soudan.” Now, “the Burmah lot.” Swart had been waiting through all this for a curtain that never stirred.’
‘The curtain is to hide the stage when they are changing the scenery,’ she said, wandering from the subject for a moment, like the big child she was. ‘It is let down five times in most of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays. I know.’
‘Yes, you know, Vickey, and so did Swart. Swart was just the man for that kind of stage-play, being one of those profounder fools who take everything as it is offered to them, and who will very contentedly accept two deal boards and a sheet of canvas for a blossoming tree. They had told him that he, too, was a lord of India, and he believed it; and he was quite touched, as with the sense of an accession of personal dignity, when his Sovereign was made Empress as well as Queen. As he would often observe, all the people in his court were lords of India, if they only knew it, heirs to the Great Mogul—for he had a smattering of history—conquerors at Plassey, Mooltan, Moodkee, Sobraon, and the rest. All Clare Market and Collier’s Rents, and all the Minories had their share in that great heritage, yet they never gave it a thought.
‘They could not be got to see it in that way, there was the difficulty. Swart had endless arguments with them on the calm Sabbath afternoons, while they waited at the street corners, ankle deep in slush, for the opening of the houses. He would hurl his figures at their heads; totals for imports and exports, the growth in shipping, the growth in trade. There was sometimes an inert obstructive force in their stupidity against which he could not prevail. The brighter witted mocked him openly, and always led the argument back from the pageant of Empire to his own rags. The duller merely spat, but there was dissent in their expectoration; and sometimes he was obliged to fancy they spat at him. He would ask me for help in his strait, and I lent him some of the popular literature of Federation, where the right arguments are all set down.’
‘We have begun praying for Federation, every Sunday—just after the Collect. The schoolmaster is writing a Federation hymn.’
‘Try to interrupt me as little as you can, my dear. It checks the flow. Make notes, and we’ll settle it up afterwards.’ (She took off her girdle and tied a knot for ‘Federation.’)
‘But I felt less interest in Swart’s dealings with others than in his dealings with himself. That was the ever-present wonder. I found, on probing his wound of penury, that he had been waiting for relief, not for five-and-thirty years merely, but, in a sense, for five hundred. He was of a most ancient stock, as indeed are most of us, if you will but think of it; and for all the years it had flourished on this earth, in so far as the straining vision could trace it through the night of time, that stock had never escaped from its parent dunghill. And Swart’s gaze carried back very far. For a man of his class, he had a quite exceptional knowledge of family history, partly oral, partly recorded on the fly-leaf of a family Bible, which, for the purpose of our researches, I lent him the money to get out of pawn.’ (She tied another knot at ‘pawn.’)
‘The Swarts knew themselves as far back as Anne; nay, with allowances and conjectural emendations, as far back as the second Charles. Here, then, was my opportunity, unique, as far as I know, to get at a real pedigree of a Poor Stupid; how infinitely more interesting than any pedigree of the baronage, if only by reason of its rarity. I encouraged him, therefore, by every means in my power, to leave the current affairs of the Empire for a season, and to talk about the past of his own race. He was nothing loath, and, after weeks of labour, we had a family tree drawn out for him that, for hoary age, might not have been unworthy of a seventh Earl. We had sometimes to make a perilous leap from bough to bough, as in the best performances of this description, but we kept that secret to ourselves.’
CHAPTER XIX.
PEDIGREE OF A POOR STUPID.
‘Swart then, to cast it in proper form, was of the Swarts of Norfolk, and his family had been settled in that part of the country from an extremely early time. They had subsequently removed to London, and had planted offshoots in many of the great towns, but their earliest family seat was a swineherd’s hovel on the bank of one of the Broads. Swart’s father, Jeremiah Swart, more commonly known as “Jerry,” had assisted at the rise of our great cotton industry, not exactly as one of the cotton lords, but as one of the others. Swart had often heard his history from his own lips. He was born in 1800, and in 1816 he took another infant to wife, without the formality of a visit to the parson. Babes of every age, from five and six upwards, were common enough in the factories at that time, and they worked from twelve to fourteen and fifteen hours a day. Puberty began early, for the temperature of the factories was the temperature of Bombay, yet, even with this chance in their favour, half the children never reached a marriageable age. They perished like flies, and the few that were left, like flies of a certain sort, had just time to arrange for the propagation of their species, and then to die. Boys and girls, men and women, worked together, lived together. Inspection was unknown; control of any sort, on the part of law, equally so; their common lodging-houses, not to put too fine a point on it, were common stews. They toiled for just as much as would keep their bodies together; and the rate of pay was calculated on the sound economical assumption that they had no souls.