CHAPTER III

THE HAUNTS OF MEN REVISITED AND THE FIRST BEMERTONIAN NUGGET

My first few days over Bemerton's were a dream of joy and liberty. I am happy enough still (my nature is happy), but in those first few days I was realising the desire of half a lifetime--I was in the dovecote, so to speak, that all my thoughts had been homing to, day and night, for years and years.

How often had I awakened and lain awake for hours, powerless to sleep again with all London in my head--not only its sights and sounds but the scents of it. Latterly, when the date of my release was fixed and grew nearer, this small-hour excitement had so intensified that I began to fear brain-fever, and indeed at the end nothing but drugs had saved me; but the voyage put things right: once again the sea washed away--as who says? is it not Lucretius?--the ills of man.

At my stepsister's I was in a kind of trance. It was all so strange and unreal, and also there, even if subconsciously, I played the voluptuary, the epicure, and postponed the true rapture to the last, thinking that I would not begin to realise all the best anticipations until my rooms were my own--until once again I was my own master, as one never is in any one else's house. Dreams of London liberty that were dreamed alone should be realised alone; and so, although Naomi and I went everywhere, and I tasted many of the pleasures I had meditated upon, there was, as it were, a veil between them and my sensorium, not to be lifted until I was free once more and the obligations of a grateful guest were removed. Dear Naomi, I think, understood, and hastened accordingly in her search for rooms.

At first this perfect irresponsibility in my city of delight was almost too much: I was in danger of another breakdown. Sleep I could not. I roamed London from west to east, from south to north. I drifted wherever the impulse took me. I was intoxicated with humanity--bemused by people. I stood for hours on the bridges watching the tugs and the barges. I stood for hours in Farringdon Street at this barrow and that.

I had no method: I boarded buses for the docks, and never got beyond the stalls of Butchers' Row. I set out in the morning for Highgate, and by evening was still in the Charing Cross Road. I accepted invitations to dinner, and what time the entrée was being served I might be seen through the steam of sausage and mashed dining in a small eating-house. I started to pay calls on old friends, and wandered to the National Gallery. I read the advertisements of the best plays, and found myself in the Middlesex. I meditated Hampstead Heath, and instead inhaled invigorating draughts of naphtha in the New Cut. I bought a ticket for Queen's Hall, and allowed a melodrama in the Mile End Road to play fast and loose with my emotions.

But I had my disappointments too. It was too often not the London of my dreams. My dreams had taken no account of change. The Piccadilly I had visualised so long and so longingly was the Piccadilly of 1875--now different from this! My Strand was a Strand on which no County Council had wreaked its zeal. One of my favourite haunts as a youth had been Clare Market--that Hogarthian oasis--and Clare Market has passed for ever; and who can lay his hand upon his heart and say that the Charing Cross Road is any real substitute for the street of Holy Well? That that area was insanitary and is better away has nothing to do with it. The true Londoner cares no straw for sanitation. He thrives on ill conditions.

I swear to you that through my heaven blow pungent clouds of sulphurous metropolitan smoke--such as we breathed in perfection years ago between Portland Road and King's Cross and between Blackfriars and Charing Cross. Where are they now? The higher slopes of Snowdon are hardly more free from grime than the ladylike highway into which electricity has converted the underground.

London's other new means of rapid transit were a disappointment too. We have motor cars in Buenos Ayres, but I was not prepared for such a capture of the streets as I found. For how many nights before I came away did coloured omnibuses in full sail fill my dreams in irresistible onset! That was London. The motor bus has its onset too, but it has none of the old rollick. It comes rigidly towards you, immense and terrifying. It does not sway nor roll. It wears the inflexible, pitiless air of progress. It is Juggernaut. How human and genial was the bus!

But among all the London phantasmagoria that had flickered before my sleeping and waking and dozing eyes the hansom cab was, I think, the most constant. I used to hear the horse's bell.... I had never forgotten my first hansom ride. Does any one forget it? My next--my second first hansom ride, so to say--was to be as memorable. I thought about it absurdly. I remembered the sense of comfort with which one settled down into the seat and closed the flaps and then composed oneself to watch London unfold.... But I found the motor cab the master of the streets. The hansom was still there, but not the hansom that I had known. The dashing driver was gone, the knowing fellow with a straw in his mouth, and a coat with large buttons, and a raffish tall hat on the side of his head. The hansom driver to-day is more like the growler driver of the past: a beaten man. I am sorry for him, and so long as I am not in a hurry I will climb into his vehicle as of old--that is, until it disappears, as I suppose it must. And what then? In my youth old hansoms when they died went to Oxford. Where will they go to-day?

But, when all is said, the London that one most desired in such an exile as mine was the London of winter. London on a fine November evening at, say, six o'clock, after Christmas has been signalled, when there is an edge on the air and an indigo mist in the streets and the shops are all lighted. The return home to a bright fire under these conditions, with the evening paper or a new book or magazine! It was a simple ideal, but it carried extraordinary comfort and satisfaction with it.

Slippers ...

I used to meditate on it for hours.

What a deal of pleasant undress repose must be missed by the fashionable! How poor an exchange are dress boots for soft slippers, a stall for an arm-chair, and (I myself would add) a play for a book!

That reminds me that I must tell you about my first Bemerton purchase, the Chinese Biographical Dictionary. Mr. Bemerton was right: it is a treasure. I only nibbled at it at first, opening at random and reading a life here and there--there are 2,579 lives in it altogether--and I was never disappointed. And then I began to take it seriously, and now I know something of its merits and for awhile am measuring mankind by a Chinese standard.

It is the model of biographical dictionaries. I have long possessed our own _Dictionary of National Biography_, in how many weighty volumes? Sixty-two, including the _Errata_; but after the dry, epigrammatic conciseness of Dr. Giles it is unreadable. To this sage appraiser of Chinese genius and address all meritorious men come alike--whether statesmen, cynics, sorcerers, or saints. He never questions: he merely puts on record in brief credulous sentences their characters and deeds. When all is said, it is, I suppose, their imperturbability and saturnine humour that are the most engaging qualities of the Chinese. They could not have found a better celebrant, or one more in tune with themselves, than Dr. Giles. He sets down everything gravely, and is as kind to the supernatural as to the natural. The sole qualification for admission into the Gilesian Valhalla is merit.

The book's brevity is its great charm. It was Henri Taine, I think, who said that there was no volume he could not compress into a chapter, and no chapter that would not go into a sentence. Dr. Giles has carried out Taine's thrasonical brag. There is no Chinese lifetime, however crowded and illustrious, that he cannot pack into a paragraph or a page. Nor does anything strike one as wanting. One could do with more, of course, and yet who would have the olive larger? There is no blemish on this work save its prohibitive weight as a bed book, and that I have overcome by cutting it into four pamphlets.

I find a disdain for worldly advantage among these pagan Celestial philosophers that makes a more reasonable ideal for some of our Western plutocrats to-day than many that are placed before them in the professional pulpit. A few Englishmen have had a similar whimsical unworldliness, but they are few and far between. I imagine that J. K. Stephen had, for one, and the Shelley that emerges from certain of Hogg's pages. A glittering example of the humorous romantic detachment and carelessness of public opinion that I mean is Chang Chih-ho, of the eighth century A.D., who spent his time in angling, but used no bait, his object not being to catch fish. When Lu asked him why he roamed about, Chang's answer was instant: "With the Empyrean as my home, the bright moon my constant companion, and the four seas my inseparable friends--what mean you by _roaming_?" and when a friend offered him a comfortable home instead of his poor boat, he replied, "I prefer to follow the gulls into cloud-land rather than bury my ethereal self beneath the dust of the world." Isn't that fine?

There should certainly be a Chang Chih-ho Society. The spread of such roseate impracticableness would do no harm at all. Indeed, the crying need for the moment in this country, as in America, is a gospel of poverty to cope with the gospel of riches that is vitiating society. Sufficient exemplars for preachers of this new evangel could probably be found in Dr. Giles's pages alone, but if others were needed there is always the wise and silent India in reserve. Yang Ksiung, a poet of the first century B.C. (note the period), would be one high among them. On the completion of Yang's most famous work, "a wealthy merchant of the province was so struck by its excellence that he offered to give 100,000 _cash_ if his name should merely be mentioned in it. But Yang answered with scorn that a stag in a pen or an ox in a cage would not be more out of place than the name of a man with nothing but money to recommend him in the sacred pages of a book."

Another recluse, Cháo Fu, who flourished B.C. 2,357, took to the branches of the trees to be removed as far as possible from contact with the world. "Yao offered him the throne, but he declined and immediately went and washed his ears to free them from the defilement of such worldly contamination," nor would he let his calves drink of the water.

Not the least interesting and instructive thing about this work is its record of virtue, genius, and fortitude of not only a non-Christian people but to a large extent, as we understand it, a non-civilised people.

Another eminent pagan was Chang Chēn-chou, of the seventh century A.D., who, on being appointed Governor of Shu-chou, "proceeded to his old home and spent ten days in feasting his relatives and friends. Then calling them together, he gave to each a present of money and silk, and took leave of them with tears in his eyes, saying, 'We have had this pleasant time together as old friends. To-morrow I take up my appointment as Governor; after that we can meet no more.' The result was an impartial and successful administration."

Of Chēn Shih, A.D. 104-187, who was also famous for his probity, a pleasant story is told. On one occasion "when a thief had hidden himself among the roof-beams, he quietly called together his sons and grandsons, and after a short moral lecture pointed up at the thief, saying, 'Do not imitate this gentleman on the beam.' The latter was so touched that he came down and asked forgiveness, promising to lead an honest life for the future, and departing joyfully with a present of money."

Another sage was Sun Fang, of the twelfth century A.D., an Imperial physician, who called himself the Hermit of the Four Stops. He explained this to mean that when he had taken his fill of plain food, he stopped; when he had put on enough plain clothes to keep himself warm, he stopped; when he had realised a fair proportion of his wishes, he stopped; and finally, after growing old, free from covetousness or envy, he would also be prepared to stop.

With him may be coupled Ping Chi, who died B.C. 55, at the time that our tight little island was being invaded by the Romans. "In 63 he was ennobled as Marquis, and in 59 became Minister of State. The following story is told of his acumen. One spring day he came upon a crowd of brawlers, among whom were several killed and wounded; but he took no notice of them and passed on. Soon afterwards he saw an ox panting violently, and at once showed the greatest concern. 'For,' as he explained, 'the brawlers can be left to those whose business it is to deal with such matters; whereas an ox panting in spring means that heat has come before its time, and that the seasons are out of joint, thus opening a question of the deepest national interest.'"

Among the philosophers I like Yin Hao, who, when he failed to grapple with the rebellion of Yao Hsiang, was impeached for incompetence and cashiered. "He took his punishment without complaint, except that he spent his days in writing with his finger in the air the four words 'Oh! oh! strange business!'" Sang Wei-han had philosophy of another kind: "He was short of stature, with a long beard; but used to stand before a mirror and say, 'One foot of face is worth seven of body.' At the same time, he was so hideously ugly that the very sight of him made people sweat, even in mid-winter."

Chinese thoroughness is also worth some attention in the West. Look at Chi Cháng. Chi Cháng was an archer who arrived at proficiency by painful measures. "He began by lying for three years under his wife's loom, in order to learn not to blush. He then hung up a louse, and gazed at it for three years, until at length it appeared to him as big as a cart-wheel. After this, he is said to have been able to pierce through the heart with an arrow." Another conscientious model was Liu Hsün, who died A.D. 521, and "who read all night, having a lighted twist of hemp arranged in such a way as to burn his hair if he began to nod from drowsiness."

Chang I, who died B.C. 310, a political adventurer, and eventually Prime Minister, had a certain dry humour. "It is recorded that in his early life, after a banquet at the house of a Minister of Ch'u, at which he had been present, he was wrongly accused of stealing some valuable gem, and was very severely beaten. On his return home, he said to his wife, 'Look and see if they have left me my tongue.' And when his wife declared that it was safe and sound, he cried out, 'If I still have my tongue, that is all I want.'"

Here is humour again: Tung-fang So, a censor in the first century B.C., "on one occasion drank off some elixir of immortality which belonged to the Emperor, and the latter in a rage ordered him to be put to death. But Tung-fang So smiled and said, 'If the elixir was genuine, your Majesty can do me no harm; if it was not, what harm have I done?'"

Of Chao Kao, who died B.C. 207, a famous rebel, we have this sinister variant of Andersen's story of the Emperor's new clothes: "Tradition says that on one occasion, in order to discover which of the officials at the Court of Hu Hai, the Second Emperor, would be likely to defy him, he presented the Emperor with a stag, saying that it was a horse. His Majesty, bewildered by the absurdity of the statement, appealed to his surrounding courtiers. Those who were bold enough to say that it was a stag were marked down by Chao Kao for destruction."

Are they not an interesting company? Let me end this taste by the celebration of one of the most attractive of all--Ch'ēn Tsun. Ch'ēn Tsun, who died A.D. 25, was distinguished as a letter-writer, but still more famous for his love of good company. That, however, is nothing: the characteristic that fills me with pleasure is the following: "He used to keep his guests with him, even against their will, by throwing the linch-pins of their carriages into a well." What a delightful trait--or, rather, habit!