CHAPTER XVII

IN WHICH, AFTER EXCEEDINGLY TEDIOUS TALK ABOUT THE WISE EXPENDITURE OF SUPERFLUOUS CASH, AN IDLER IS SET TO WORK

"Riches," said Miss Gold, "are a great responsibility. I want to be altruistic, but I want to be sure--or as sure as possible--of the money going in the right way."

Trist, who had come down to Esher with me, smiled cynically.

"There are hospitals and so forth, I know," Miss Gold continued, "but this mere writing of cheques seems to me such a cowardly thing. I feel that one ought to think so hard before every gift. I not only feel that, but I must confess to wanting a little fun for my money too. The solving of the problem how to spend it wisely is indeed my chief hobby."

"A very fascinating one," I said.

"Yes," she replied, "so fascinating that when people calling here say, 'Oh, Miss Gold, how kind and charitable you are!' I blush, because I know that although it may look like kindness and charity it is really nothing whatever but self-indulgence."

"My dear Miss Gold," said Trist, "my dear Miss Gold, may I implore you not to begin that. Between us three, let it be understood from the outset that there is no such thing as unselfishness."

She laughed. "Very well," she said, "but, none the less, the thought is with me continually. I take it for granted one minute, and the next I am up in arms against it."

"If you are at all troubled about small benefactions," I said, "I must bring Miss Wynne to see you. She could help in the little ways so very sensibly."

"I should love to see her," said Miss Gold. "Every one whom one can trust to do a few little things is so valuable; but it is the large sums that are the hardest nuts to crack. I have so much, you know, and I can spend so little. This house costs practically nothing; I want no clothes; the doctor is almost my heaviest expense, and really I could do without him, because whether he comes or whether he doesn't this thing has got to go on getting worse. That is fixed."

My poor Agnes.

"I have had the most fantastic ideas," she hurried on. "I'll tell you of one of them. You know Burns's lines about resisting temptation? They're in that green book on the second shelf, there; the fourth from the end. It is Cunningham's edition, and came from your shop. The book-mark is in the place."

I found them.

"Read them aloud," Miss Gold commanded.

I did so--

"Then gently scan your brother Man, Still gentlier sister Woman; Tho' they may gang a kennin' wrang, To step aside is human: One point must still be greatly dark, The moving _Why_ they do it; And just as lamely can ye mark How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis _He_ alone Decidedly can try us, He knows each chord, its various tone, Each spring, its various bias: Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's _done_ we partly may compute, But know not what's _resisted_."

"Well," she said, "what do you think I did? I wrote to a thousand clergymen, chosen at random from the directory, and asked if I might be allowed to defray the cost of having these lines suitably illuminated in gold in some part of their church. Many did not answer at all; others refused straightforwardly on their own responsibility; many said that they themselves would like to give permission, but their bishops would not approve. One only asked me to do it, and I did it; but I have a notion, from the report of a spy that I sent down, that a hatchment has since been hung over it."

"You might," said Trist, "have offered to strike a bargain with them. In place, for example, of the tenth commandment, which was devised for the well-being of an Eastern tribe in camp, and has no bearing whatever at the present day in a civilisation that demands Sunday labour of most kinds, from cooking to shunting, and is broken perhaps most flagrantly by the clergymen who enunciate it at so much a year (yes, and call it work too, holding their poor foreheads as they tell you of their weary life)--you might have offered Burns's lines in place of that. Burns at any rate touches real life, whereas the presence of that law on the walls of the chancel has merely an archæological value."

"Yes," said Miss Gold, "but we must not look for logic."

"Nor," said Trist, "in a social society like the Church for courage."

"I don't blame the clergymen," I said. "They have to live. Better, they very properly thought, go on with elemental condemnations than let in the thin end of such a dangerous wedge as imaginative understanding."

"The New Testament," said Trist, "will never catch up with the Old in this country. The Old is certainly the best from the point of view of men who have to bring up families. Trade unionism must be very wary, and look ahead."

"Why didn't you go on to offer the verses to the Nonconformists?" I asked.

"I was discouraged," she said. "That is one of the temptations to which I most easily fall a prey--discouragement. I felt I could not reopen the project."

"You might have given it a turn," I said. "For example, in my Chinese book it is written of Wang Kung-i, of the seventh century A.D., that on being asked by the Emperor Kao Tsung to explain the secret of the harmony in which three generations of his family had lived, he wrote the single word 'Forbearance' many times. You might have offered them that anecdote, and entitled it 'A Lesson from a Heathen Land,' and therefore, even if apposite, negligible here. Every one, then, would be pleased."

"Of course," said Miss Gold, "money is really the last instrument with which benevolence, charity, altruism, whatever you call it, works; but most of us, being in a hurry, put it first. The first really is thought. I will give you an example of what I call the truest thought for others, and one which to my mind, if not to the Rontgen-rayed eye of a cynical bachelor, really involves self-sacrifice. I have a friend who spends a great deal of her time--how do you think? In writing letters to prisoners in the gaols. They are pious letters, full of appeals to the better nature and reminders of Christ's loving-kindness and the chance that remains to every one. They must, to a large extent, merely reproduce the ordinary solace that is offered by the chaplains and visitors; but this lady writes them herself, very carefully and legibly, and she employs several of her nieces to paint flowers on the top of each piece of note-paper. She is a wealthy and an intellectual woman, and might be much more congenially employed: but she does this because she wants to do something to alleviate the lot of the outcast. It seems to me a very beautiful deed."

"How I envy her!" I said.

"Envy?"

"Yes, her singleness of mind. I could not do it; not only because I should not dare to offer such solace, but also because my sympathy would be too much with them. I should feel, in the case of so many, that their imprisonment was the real offence rather than the so-called crime that took them there, and that would stay my hand. The letter that I should write would be a letter that would never pass the governor's office. Take, for example, a starving man who stole bread, and is in prison for that. It would be too cruel a mockery to comfort him with evangelical maxims. Hunger comes before conduct and far before religion. Another man might be there for debt, which is quite as often the result of accident as turpitude. Another might have merely killed the middle-aged seducer of a child of tender years. It is too difficult. I am too uncertain."

"Yes," said Miss Gold. "I am a little like that too; we are too complex for charity, you and I. In all probability we are merely meddling busy-bodies, groping towards what we hope is light, but doing harm by the way."

"I agree with you entirely," said Trist, who had been silent for some time. "My suspicion is that no one can do anything for any one; and my belief is that certain persons with soft hearts are doomed to ruin where they would assist. Most of the charitable are wreckers--certainly the cheque-writers are, and certainly I am. I have proved it again and again; but I shall probably go on, since resistance is so difficult and one is usually so much wiser than one's deeds. I will give you an example. I once did such an apparently harmless thing as to give a tailor's assistant a season ticket for Earl's Court. It admitted one only and he could not afford a shilling a night for his wife; he went every night alone; their home life was interrupted and then destroyed, and they have never been happy since. That, of course, was an error on my part. Had I thought a little longer I should have realised that the ticket was putting him, as the saying is, above himself, and have held my hand.

"That is one example. I could give you many others," Trist continued, "all of which convince me that I am a danger to society and ought to be locked up for giving money away as surely as any of your kind friend's prisoners are locked up for abstracting it."

"This is very terrible," said Miss Gold.

"Well, I believe it to be true of myself," Trist said; "others may have better fortune; but for the most part the feckless should be left alone. It sounds brutal, but after my experience you will acquit me of wishing to speak brutally. England, as I said before, is an Old Testament country, and had better be left to it. Christianity meddles."

"That means," I said, "not the cessation of charity but the materialisation of it. Manna and quails once more. And a very good thing too."

"Certainly," said Miss Gold.

"Those stanzas of yours," I went on, "might have a serious undermining influence on the single-minded. Is it worth while to interfere with such an accepted beatitude as 'Blessed are the untempted, for they shall be accounted the best men?'"

"Yes," said Trist, "but that expresses only part of the case. The real wording should be, 'Blessed are those who escape the prohibited temptations, for they shall be reputed the best men.' Avarice, for example, which the author of the beatitudes loathed with all his magnificent loathing, has become a very popular and highly esteemed temptation. A man indeed practically writes himself down both fool and failure if he does not succumb to it.

"Meekness also has gone out, although my own private opinion is that when Christ extolled the meek and promised them their inheritance, he was speaking ironically (as he often must have been), and the earth they were to inherit was a piece six feet by two."

Miss Gold liked that. "You should write a commentary," she said. "We want every point of view to be expressed, whether it's right or wrong; and I imagine," she added, "that no honest point of view can possibly be wholly wrong."

"As to temptation," I said, "take my own case. In the ordinary usage of the word, I am from temptation almost wholly free. I have the good or ill fortune to possess a mind that can occupy itself happily almost without a break, like a bee in that herbaceous border out there. Vice does not beckon me with any alluring finger; I am ill at once if I over-eat; I am ill the next day if I drink too much; and I care more for health than for the immediate pleasure of such excesses. I have a sufficient income; I do not desire more. I have no tendency to be a scandal-monger. The result is, that I am accounted a good man; the nice gentleman over Bemerton's, they probably call me in the neighbourhood; very likely mothers point me out as a model. But I am not deceived. I know perfectly well that the certificate is based not as it should be on what I do but on what I do not do. It is a negative honour that I enjoy or endure. Every time a wretched, besotted tippler tramples down the craving to have another drink, and thus saves twopence for his wife, he is a better man than I, who have no craving to conquer--except the craving (if I can apply to it so strong a word) not to have any craving; and that I submit to. Do you remember, Trist, that we were discussing this very question some years ago at Bentley's, and I claimed to have no temptations, when a shrewd being who knew me well remarked, 'Oh yes, you have, Falconer; your temptation is to be tolerant; you can find little twopenny-halfpenny faults with things, but you can't condemn.' Do you remember that? It was true then, and it is even more true now, when I am many years older. If a man can't condemn at twenty-five, he certainly will not at fifty, when he knows so much more of life and more than ever is conscious of the other side. Angels have their advocate as well as the devil, and both perhaps are unfair. The superficial may call me good, but before God I am only amiable."

"And yet," said Trist, "there was a fallacy in the criticism, for to be tolerant or intolerant is not a matter of will. When the drunkard tightens his fist on his twopence, and walks resolutely away from the public-house, he is deliberately resisting temptation at the command of his own will. Similarly, when a reviewer refrains from saying too hard a thing, for justice, about a book by a man whom he dislikes, or too kind a thing, for justice, about a book by a man whom he likes, he is deliberately resisting temptation at the command of his own will. But it is not a matter of will with you to be tolerant. It is temperament. And you are tolerant because you never made up your mind as to right and wrong."

"And never shall," I said. "As a child I had no doubts; but now? Take, for instance, telling the truth. I was brought up to believe that one should do that, and I knew a lie a mile off. But now I see that mendacity, or at any rate the suppression of one's real feelings and opinions, is the cement that binds society together."

"And yet truth," said Miss Gold, "is the only really interesting thing. But I have had enough ethics for one day, particularly as everything that Mr. Trist says is directed against the usefulness of the only hobby I possess. Tell me, Mr. Trist," she went on, "would you think this a dangerous scheme?--to hang one good picture, not an original, of course, but a really fine reproduction, in every common room of every workhouse in England."

"No," he said, "not even with a microscope could I find peril in that."

"Well," she said, "if I give you _carte blanche_, will you do that for me and so get back a little belief as to your usefulness? Will you find the pictures and arrange for their framing? I will communicate with the Guardians, because I know you could never bring yourself to do that. But will you help me over the pictures?"

And Trist said he would.

"I shall have a little work for you very soon, Kent," Miss Gold said to me as we left "It is time you did something."