The island

by Richard Whiteing

‘You talk cruel on purpose: somebody just helps him out.’

‘Victoria, give me a chance! Suppose nobody helps him. When, by heroic labour, he has cleared his forelegs, his wings are still coated with the sugary mire; and, as he plants the forelegs down, to attend to the rest of him, the forelegs are besmeared again. Let him resolve to leave them behind, in his desperation, and he will but lose his balance, and foul the wings once more. Poor fly! Poor Swart! Poor, Poor Stupids! whose history through the ages is my humble theme. The only difference is that the Swarts are sunk in slime instead of jam, and that they have the power of breeding there, and leaving their heritage of fruitless struggle to countless generations. Always the slime is peopled with this race, and never shall they get out, till God send a brother to scrape them. The tragi-comedy of the situation is found when one, by miracle of discovery of a brother’s body for foothold, wriggles himself free, and then stands on the brink, to comfort the others with Penny Readings from the author of “Self Help.”

For full seven centuries, as I could trace it now, had the Swarts been waiting for the deliverer with a potsherd. Their history was a history of illusions in the belief that he had come at last. Once, clearly, they thought it was Kett, for there was a Swart in his rebellion in 1549. I hear him at their foolish Litany of human rights: “Look at them and look at us! have we not all the same form, are we not all born in the same way?” Eternal protest! Nature’s everlasting whisper to the innermost heart of man—never sufficiently answered by a knock on his head from the outside! The Earl of Warwick and his mercenaries were prompt enough with this response, yet the Swarts were still unconvinced. There was a Swyrte—I can but think it was the same family, and I am confirmed in that opinion by one of our kings-at-arms—in Wat Tyler’s affair, in the fourteenth century. The conjecture is that he was one of the “landless men,” whom the lawyers of the time were trying to bring back into serfage, after their extremely informal manumission by the Black Death. Nearly sixty thousand persons, it may be remembered, perished of that pest in Norwich alone, and this had probably convinced the Swyrtes that it was time to be stirring. A sort of insane joy in the ravage wrought by the disorder, as in a clearance for right and freedom, by the Devil as redeemer, is apparent in some of the sayings of the time; and the surviving Swyrte in the train of Tyler may have felt, in his extremity, that he was open to a fair offer from that other side. The sentiment is perhaps hereditary, for I remember to have noticed a strange elation in the Swart of the Victorian era, when the late visitation of Asiatic cholera was threatened, or as, I fear, he took it, promised, to our shores. His manner exhibited the tremulousness of a great uncertain hope, and his reading of the telegrams from Marseilles and Paris in his Sunday paper took a rhythmic cadence, as though they were portions of a saga. The circumstance is perhaps, incidentally, suggestive of his Norse descent, but we must not go too far. Local Kentish records tend to show that the earlier Swyrte just mentioned had risen to a certain eminence in the movement, the highest perhaps the family ever attained, for a man of that name undoubtedly acted on one occasion, as deputy tub-bearer to the “mad priest of Kent,” John Ball. Ball, as we know, was preaching, five centuries ago, just what they are preaching at Clerkenwell Green to-day. “Good people, things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common, and so long as there be villains and gentlemen. But what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we eat oat cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us, and of our toil, that these men hold their state.” We may easily imagine the effect of such words on one of this stupid race.

‘When Ball was thrown into prison, his deputy tub-bearer seems to have joined Tyler as a man of action, for the name turns up in a rude muster-roll of the gathering at Blackheath. He was possibly one of the band that forced their way into the Tower, and pulled the beards of the scandalised knights, promising to be their equals and good comrades in the time to come. He never came within touch of chivalry again, unless he happened to be among that village remnant of revolt that fell under its maces in the wood at Billericay, after a two days’ fight, for “the same liberties as their lords.” But this is only matter of supposition, and it is more likely that the Swyrte of Blackheath simply sneaked into town on the death of his leader, to root his offshoot of this great family in the London slime.

‘I cannot find any trace of a Swart at Cressy or at Poitiers, though many of that sort unquestionably left their bones in France. They were not without a monument, however, but it was in their works. Circumspice. It was in the wasted fields of Aquitaine, the stretches of utter solitude, the patches of direst poverty, league upon league of burnt homesteads, and of famine-struck hordes going mad with misery and rage. For the French lords being captive, the French serfs had naturally to raise the money for their ransom, and the agony of the operation at such a season of ravage drove them into sheer revolt. The captive lords, after the manner of their order, exhibited an admirable self-control; and, with much dignity, took their meals with the family in the English castles, while they awaited the remittances that were to set them free. So blood will always tell! The Swarts of England, to their ruin, had wrought this ruin to the Swarts of France—as it was in the beginning, and, probably, ever shall be, world without end. Victoria, there is a final word!’

But she only smiled faintly, and shook her head.

‘Here, I confess, I quite lose the scent of this interesting race, strong as it must naturally be. That some of them were doing something at the time of the Conqueror, the heralds, and even the physiologists, assure me is beyond a doubt. I have looked for them in the Bayeux Tapestry; and in one prostrate figure that is being used as a foot warmer, while his betters are presumably enjoying a view of the English landscape, I fancy I recognise the family nose. For my own part, I am tolerably certain that some of them were alive at Troy time, and that somebody was sitting on them then.

‘A wonderful old family, the Swarts, the Percys of the record but a set of parvenus beside them, a family that, in all ages, has helped to make the dark background for the picture of the beauty and the pride of life; for the frolic group of Chaucer, for Cressy’s firework blaze of triumph, for the Armada, for Blenheim, and for Waterloo; for the grandiose spectacle of pomp and vanity in every field. Hey! for the idle literature that all this while could sing its blasphemous song of perfumed bowers, while the wynd reeked; for the idle art that could find nothing more serious than a scheme of colour in the contrast between these Royal purples and these beggar’s browns! And hey! for the old, old Swarts, the true Ancients of Days! Surely they are as venerable as the Vedas, and, beside them, the best of merely historic stocks is but a mushroom growth. What a struggle among the tuft-hunters to get the Swarts to dinner, could they but see this! Such a family only want a blazon, to commend them to the world. I would suggest a Jackass, gules, between a stick (uplifted) and a bundle of wet hay. Motto (the same as that of the old King of Bohemia—blind, like the whole race that bear it in good faith): “I serve.” Crest: a Fool’s cap. Ever has that cap of the Swarts gone up for the victory, while the caps of the Swarts’ leaders have been held out for the reward. How have the Swarts shouted, honest folk, as province after province rolled into the mass of Empire, till it stretched beyond the purview of the sun!

‘Whatever he had lost through the ages, Swart’s joint-stock lordship of India remained, and he was proud of it, as I have tried to show. A Lascar was associated with him, as a boardman, in the Indian exhibition: they were the best of friends, but Swart made a point of walking first. It was a question of mere precedence, and it was not unkindly done; they always took their pipe together, at the midday halt in the mews. The Lascar was really Swart’s hierarchical superior, in a business point of view. He received threepence a day more than the others, because his complexion was suited to the character of the show. With this natural advantage, and with a turban manufactured with rare self-denial from the tail of his own shirt, he was altogether a specialist of publicity for such things as Indian Bitters, and the Turkish Bath. He was more of a philosopher than Swart. He had accepted caste as a law of Nature and of God, while the other, in the muddled English way, only took it as it came. He could give chapter and verse for it from his holy books. “For the sake of preserving the Universe, the Being supremely glorious allotted separate duties to those who sprang respectively from his mouth, his arm, his thigh, and his foot”—Read the Dharma Sāstra; and be still!

But the difference, as he was wont to observe, did not end here, for the foot is a thing of five toes, and there are toes, and toes. Chancing one day to meet in the gutter another Lascar, whom he suspected of a descent from the little toe, he spat on the ground, and exhibited every sign of repulsion, though his countryman, who was advertising an Arabian gum-drop, was in the same business as himself, and, to all appearance, was as good a man. There were really three toes between them, as he explained to Swart.