Читать книгу Collected Works - George Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw - Страница 20

Erskine soon found plenty of themes for his newly begotten cynicism. Gertrude’s manner towards him softened so much that he, believing her heart given to his rival, concluded that she was tempting him to make a proposal which she had no intention of accepting. Sir Charles, to whom he told what he had overheard in the avenue, professed sympathy, but was evidently pleased to learn that there was nothing serious in the attentions Trefusis paid to Agatha. Erskine wrote three bitter sonnets on hollow friendship and showed them to Sir Charles, who, failing to apply them to himself, praised them highly and showed them to Trefusis without asking the author’s permission. Trefusis remarked that in a corrupt society expressions of dissatisfaction were always creditable to a writer’s sensibility; but he did not say much in praise of the verse.

“Why has he taken to writing in this vein?” he said. “Has he been disappointed in any way of late? Has he proposed to Miss Lindsay and been rejected?”

“No,” said Sir Charles surprised by this blunt reference to a subject they had never before discussed. “He does not intend to propose to Miss Lindsay.”

“But he did intend to.”

“He certainly did, but he has given up the idea.”

“Why?” said Trefusis, apparently disapproving strongly of the renunciation.

Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders and did not reply.

“I am sorry to hear it. I wish you could induce him to change his mind. He is a nice fellow, with enough to live on comfortably, whilst he is yet what is called a poor man, so that she could feel perfectly disinterested in marrying him. It will do her good to marry without making a pecuniary profit by it; she will respect herself the more afterwards, and will neither want bread and butter nor be ashamed of her husband’s origin, in spite of having married for love alone. Make a match of it if you can. I take an interest in the girl; she has good instincts.”

Sir Charles’s suspicion that Trefusis was really paying court to Agatha returned after this conversation, which he repeated to Erskine, who, much annoyed because his poems had been shown to a reader of Blue Books, thought it only a blind for Trefusis’s design upon Gertrude. Sir Charles pooh-poohed this view, and the two friends were sharp with one another in discussing it. After dinner, when the ladies had left them, Sir Charles, repentant and cordial, urged Erskine to speak to Gertrude without troubling himself as to the sincerity of Trefusis. But Erskine, knowing himself ill able to brook a refusal, was loth to expose himself.

“If you had heard the tone of her voice when she asked him whether he was in earnest, you would not talk to me like this,” he said despondently. “I wish he had never come here.”

“Well, that, at least, was no fault of mine, my dear fellow,” said Sir Charles. “He came among us against my will. And now that he appears to have been in the right—legally—about the field, it would look like spite if I cut him. Besides, he really isn’t a bad man if he would only let the women alone.”

“If he trifles with Miss Lindsay, I shall ask him to cross the Channel, and have a shot at him.”

“I don’t think he’d go,” said Sir Charles dubiously. “If I were you, I would try my luck with Gertrude at once. In spite of what you heard, I don’t believe she would marry a man of his origin. His money gives him an advantage, certainly, but Gertrude has sent richer men to the rightabout.”

“Let the fellow have fair play,” said Erskine. “I may be wrong, of course; all men are liable to err in judging themselves, but I think I could make her happier than he can.”

Sir Charles was not so sure of that, but he cheerfully responded, “Certainly. He is not the man for her at all, and you are. He knows it, too.”

“Hmf!” muttered Erskine, rising dejectedly. “Let’s go upstairs.”

“By-the-bye, we are to call on him to-morrow, to go through his house, and his collection of photographs. Photographs! Ha, ha! Damn his house!” said Erskine.

Next day they went together to Sallust’s House. It stood in the midst of an acre of land, waste except a little kitchen garden at the rear. The lodge at the entrance was uninhabited, and the gates stood open, with dust and fallen leaves heaped up against them. Free ingress had thus been afforded to two stray ponies, a goat, and a tramp, who lay asleep in the grass. His wife sat near, watching him.

“I have a mind to turn back,” said Sir Charles, looking about him in disgust. “The place is scandalously neglected. Look at that rascal asleep within full view of the windows.”

“I admire his cheek,” said Erskine. “Nice pair of ponies, too.”

Sallust’s House was square and painted cinnamon color. Beneath the cornice was a yellow frieze with figures of dancing children, imitated from the works of Donatello, and very unskilfully executed. There was a meagre portico of four columns, painted red, and a plain pediment, painted yellow. The colors, meant to match those of the walls, contrasted disagreeably with them, having been applied more recently, apparently by a color-blind artist. The door beneath the portico stood open. Sir Charles rang the bell, and an elderly woman answered it; but before they could address her, Trefusis appeared, clad in a painter’s jacket of white jean. Following him in, they found that the house was a hollow square, enclosing a courtyard with a bath sunk in the middle, and a fountain in the centre of the bath. The courtyard, formerly open to the sky, was now roofed in with dusty glass; the nymph that had once poured out the water of the fountain was barren and mutilated; and the bath was partly covered in with loose boards, the exposed part accommodating a heap of coals in one corner, a heap of potatoes in another, a beer barrel, some old carpets, a tarpaulin, and a broken canoe. The marble pavement extended to the outer walls of the house, and was roofed in at the sides by the upper stories which were supported by fluted stone columns, much stained and chipped. The staircase, towards which Trefusis led his visitors, was a broad one at the end opposite the door, and gave access to a gallery leading to the upper rooms.

“This house was built in 1780 by an ancestor of my mother,” said Trefusis. “He passed for a man of exquisite taste. He wished the place to be maintained forever—he actually used that expression in his will—as the family seat, and he collected a fine library here, which I found useful, as all the books came into my hands in good condition, most of them with the leaves uncut. Some people prize uncut copies of old editions; a dealer gave me three hundred and fifty pounds for a lot of them. I came into possession of a number of family fetishes—heirlooms, as they are called. There was a sword that one of my forbears wore at Edgehill and other battles in Charles the First’s time. We fought on the wrong side, of course, but the sword fetched thirty-five shillings nevertheless. You will hardly believe that I was offered one hundred and fifty pounds for a gold cup worth about twenty-five, merely because Queen Elizabeth once drank from it. This is my study. It was designed for a banqueting hall.”

They entered a room as long as the wall of the house, pierced on one side by four tall windows, between which square pillars, with Corinthian capitals supporting the cornice, were half sunk in the wall. There were similar pillars on the opposite side, but between them, instead of windows, were arched niches in which stood life-size plaster statues, chipped, broken, and defaced in an extraordinary fashion. The flooring, of diagonally set narrow boards, was uncarpeted and unpolished. The ceiling was adorned with frescoes, which at once excited Sir Charles’s interest, and he noted with indignation that a large portion of the painting at the northern end had been destroyed and some glass roofing inserted. In another place bolts had been driven in to support the ropes of a trapeze and a few other pieces of gymnastic apparatus. The walls were whitewashed, and at about four feet from the ground a dark band appeared, produced by pencil memoranda and little sketches scribbled on the whitewash. One end of the apartment was unfurnished, except by the gymnastic apparatus, a photographer’s camera, a ladder in the corner, and a common deal table with oil cans and paint pots upon it. At the other end a comparatively luxurious show was made by a large bookcase, an elaborate combination of bureau and writing desk, a rack with a rifle, a set of foils, and an umbrella in it, several folio albums on a table, some comfortable chairs and sofas, and a thick carpet under foot. Close by, and seeming much out of place, was a carpenter’s bench with the usual implements and a number of boards of various thicknesses.

“This is a sort of comfort beyond the reach of any but a rich man,” said Trefusis, turning and surprising his visitors in the act of exchanging glances of astonishment at his taste. “I keep a drawing-room of the usual kind for receiving strangers with whom it is necessary to be conventional, but I never enter it except on such occasions. What do you think of this for a study?”

“On my soul, Trefusis, I think you are mad,” said Sir Charles. “The place looks as if it had stood a siege. How did you manage to break the statues and chip the walls so outrageously?”

Trefusis took a newspaper from the table and said, “Listen to this: ‘In spite of the unfavorable nature of the weather, the sport of the Emperor and his guests in Styria has been successful. In three days 52 chamois and 79 stags and deer fell to 19 single-barrelled rifles, the Emperor allowing no more on this occasion.’

“I share the Emperor’s delight in shooting, but I am no butcher, and do not need the royal relish of blood to my sport. And I do not share my ancestors’ taste in statuary. Hence—” Here Trefusis opened a drawer, took out a pistol, and fired at the Hebe in the farthest niche.

“Well done!” said Erskine coolly, as the last fragment of Hebe’s head crumbled at the touch of the bullet.

“Very fruitlessly done,” said Trefusis. “I am a good shot, but of what use is it to me? None. I once met a gamekeeper who was a Methodist. He was a most eloquent speaker, but a bad shot. If he could have swapped talents with me I would have given him ten thousand pounds to boot willingly, although he would have profited as much as I by the exchange alone. I have no more desire or need to be a good shot than to be king of England, or owner of a Derby winner, or anything else equally ridiculous, and yet I never missed my aim in my life—thank blind fortune for nothing!”

“King of England!” said Erskine, with a scornful laugh, to show Trefusis that other people were as liberty-loving as he. “Is it not absurd to hear a nation boasting of its freedom and tolerating a king?”

“Oh, hang your republicanism, Chester!” said Sir Charles, who privately held a low opinion of the political side of the Patriot Martyrs.

“I won’t be put down on that point,” said Erskine. “I admire a man that kills a king. You will agree with me there, Trefusis, won’t you?”

“Certainly not,” said Trefusis. “A king nowadays is only a dummy put up to draw your fire off the real oppressors of society, and the fraction of his salary that he can spend as he likes is usually far too small for his risk, his trouble, and the condition of personal slavery to which he is reduced. What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional monarch? We deny him all privacy; he may not marry whom he chooses, consort with whom he prefers, dress according to his taste, or live where he pleases. I don’t believe he may even eat or drink what he likes best; a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a remonstrance from the Privy Council. We dictate everything except his thoughts and dreams, and even these he must keep to himself if they are not suitable, in our opinion, to his condition. The work we impose on him has all the hardship of mere task work; it is unfruitful, incessant, monotonous, and has to be transacted for the most part with nervous bores. We make his kingdom a treadmill to him, and drive him to and fro on the face of it. Finally, having taken everything else that men prize from him, we fall upon his character, and that of every person to whom he ventures to show favor. We impose enormous expenses on him, stint him, and then rail at his parsimony. We use him as I use those statues—stick him up in the place of honor for our greater convenience in disfiguring and abusing him. We send him forth through our crowded cities, proclaiming that he is the source of all good and evil in the nation, and he, knowing that many people believe it, knowing that it is a lie, and that he is powerless to shorten the working day by one hour, raise wages one penny, or annul the smallest criminal sentence, however unjust it may seem to him; knowing that every miner in the kingdom can manufacture dynamite, and that revolvers are sold for seven and sixpence apiece; knowing that he is not bullet proof, and that every king in Europe has been shot at in the streets; he must smile and bow and maintain an expression of gracious enjoyment whilst the mayor and corporation inflict upon him the twaddling address he has heard a thousand times before. I do not ask you to be loyal, Erskine; but I expect you, in common humanity, to sympathize with the chief figure in the pageant, who is no more accountable for the manifold evils and abominations that exist in his realm than the Lord Mayor is accountable for the thefts of the pickpockets who follow his show on the ninth of November.”

Sir Charles laughed at the trouble Trefusis took to prove his case, and said soothingly, “My dear fellow, kings are used to it, and expect it, and like it.”

“And probably do not see themselves as I see them, any more than common people do,” assented Trefusis.

“What an exquisite face!” exclaimed Erskine suddenly, catching sight of a photograph in a rich gold and coral frame on a miniature easel draped with ruby velvet. Trefusis turned quickly, so evidently gratified that Sir Charles hastened to say, “Charming!” Then, looking at the portrait, he added, as if a little startled, “It certainly is an extraordinarily attractive face.”

“Years ago,” said Trefusis, “when I saw that face for the first time, I felt as you feel now.”

Silence ensued, the two visitors looking at the portrait, Trefusis looking at them.

“Curious style of beauty,” said Sir Charles at last, not quite so assuredly as before.

Trefusis laughed unpleasantly. “Do you recognize the artist—the enthusiastic amateur—in her?” he said, opening another drawer and taking out a bundle of drawings, which he handed to be examined.

“Very clever. Very clever indeed,” said Sir Charles. “I should like to meet the lady.”

“I have often been on the point of burning them,” said Trefusis; “but there they are, and there they are likely to remain. The portrait has been much admired.”

“Can you give us an introduction to the original, old fellow?” said Erskine.

“No, happily. She is dead.”

Disagreeably shocked, they looked at him for a moment with aversion. Then Erskine, turning with pity and disappointment to the picture, said, “Poor girl! Was she married?”

“Yes. To me.”

“Mrs. Trefusis!” exclaimed Sir Charles. “Ah! Dear me!”

Erskine, with proof before him that it was possible for a beautiful girl to accept Trefusis, said nothing.

“I keep her portrait constantly before me to correct my natural amativeness. I fell in love with her and married her. I have fallen in love once or twice since but a glance at my lost Hetty has cured me of the slightest inclination to marry.”

Sir Charles did not reply. It occurred to him that Lady Brandon’s portrait, if nothing else were left of her, might be useful in the same way.

“Come, you will marry again one of these days,” said Erskine, in a forced tone of encouragement.

“It is possible. Men should marry, especially rich men. But I assure you I have no present intention of doing so.”

Erskine’s color deepened, and he moved away to the table where the albums lay.

“This is the collection of photographs I spoke of,” said Trefusis, following him and opening one of the books. “I took many of them myself under great difficulties with regard to light—the only difficulty that money could not always remove. This is a view of my father’s house—or rather one of his houses. It cost seventy-five thousand pounds.”

“Very handsome indeed,” said Sir Charles, secretly disgusted at being invited to admire a photograph, such as house agents exhibit, of a vulgarly designed country house, merely because it had cost seventy-five thousand pounds. The figures were actually written beneath the picture.

“This is the drawing-room, and this one of the best bedrooms. In the right-hand corner of the mount you will see a note of the cost of the furniture, fittings, napery, and so forth. They were of the most luxurious description.”

“Very interesting,” said Sir Charles, hardly disguising the irony of the comment.

“Here is a view—this is the first of my own attempts—of the apartment of one of the under servants. It is comfortable and spacious, and solidly furnished.”

“So I perceive.”

“These are the stables. Are they not handsome?”

“Palatial. Quite palatial.”

“There is every luxury that a horse could desire, including plenty of valets to wait on him. You are noting the figures, I hope. There is the cost of the building and the expenditure per horse per annum.”

“I see.”

“Here is the exterior of a house. What do you think of it?”

“It is rather picturesque in its dilapidation.”

“Picturesque! Would you like to live in it?”

“No,” said Erskine. “I don’t see anything very picturesque about it. What induced you to photograph such a wretched old rookery?”

“Here is a view of the best room in it. Photography gives you a fair idea of the broken flooring and patched windows, but you must imagine the dirt and the odor of the place. Some of the stains are weather stains, others came from smoke and filth. The landlord of the house holds it from a peer and lets it out in tenements. Three families occupied that room when I photographed it. You will see by the figures in the corner that it is more profitable to the landlord than an average house in Mayfair. Here is the cellar, let to a family for one and sixpence a week, and considered a bargain. The sun never shines there, of course. I took it by artificial light. You may add to the rent the cost of enough bad beer to make the tenant insensible to the filth of the place. Beer is the chloroform that enables the laborer to endure the severe operation of living; that is why we can always assure one another over our wine that the rascal’s misery is due to his habit of drinking. We are down on him for it, because, if he could bear his life without beer, we should save his beer-money—get him for lower wages. In short, we should be richer and he soberer. Here is the yard; the arrangements are indescribable. Seven of the inhabitants of that house had worked for years in my father’s mill. That is, they had created a considerable part of the vast sums of money for drawing your attention to which you were disgusted with me just now.”

“Not at all,” said Sir Charles faintly.

“You can see how their condition contrasts with that of my father’s horses. The seven men to whom I have alluded, with three hundred others, were thrown destitute upon the streets by this.” (Here he turned over a leaf and displayed a photograph of an elaborate machine.) “It enabled my father to dispense with their services, and to replace them by a handful of women and children. He had bought the patent of the machine for fifty pounds from the inventor, who was almost ruined by the expenses of his ingenuity, and would have sacrificed anything for a handful of ready money. Here is a portrait of my father in his masonic insignia. He believed that freemasons generally get on in the world, and as the main object of his life was to get on, he joined them, and wanted me to do the same. But I object to pretended secret societies and hocus pocus, and would not. You see what he was—a portly, pushing, egotistical tradesman. Mark the successful man, the merchant prince with argosies on every sea, the employer of thousands of hands, the munificent contributor to public charities, the churchwarden, the member of parliament, and the generous patron of his relatives his self-approbation struggling with the instinctive sense of baseness in the money-hunter, the ignorant and greedy filcher of the labor of others, the seller of his own mind and manhood for luxuries and delicacies that he was too lowlived to enjoy, and for the society of people who made him feel his inferiority at every turn.”

“And the man to whom you owe everything you possess,” said Erskine boldly.

“I possess very little. Everything he left me, except a few pictures, I spent long ago, and even that was made by his slaves and not by him. My wealth comes day by day fresh from the labor of the wretches who live in the dens I have just shown you, or of a few aristocrats of labor who are within ten shillings a week of being worse off. However, there is some excuse for my father. Once, at an election riot, I got into a free fight. I am a peaceful man, but as I had either to fight or be knocked down and trampled upon, I exchanged blows with men who were perhaps as peacefully disposed as I. My father, launched into a free competition (free in the sense that the fight is free: that is, lawless)—my father had to choose between being a slave himself and enslaving others. He chose the latter, and as he was applauded and made much of for succeeding, who dare blame him? Not I. Besides, he did something to destroy the anarchy that enabled him to plunder society with impunity. He furnished me, its enemy, with the powerful weapon of a large fortune. Thus our system of organizing industry sometimes hatches the eggs from which its destroyers break. Does Lady Brandon wear much lace?”

“I—No; that is—How the deuce do I know, Trefusis? What an extraordinary question!”

“This is a photograph of a lace school. It was a filthy room, twelve feet square. It was paved with brick, and the children were not allowed to wear their boots, lest the lace should get muddy. However, as there were twenty of them working there for fifteen hours a day—all girls—they did not suffer much from cold. They were pretty tightly packed—may be still, for aught I know. They brought three or four shillings a week sometimes to their fond parents; and they were very quick-fingered little creatures, and stuck intensely to their work, as the overseer always hit them when they looked up or—”

“Trefusis,” said Sir Charles, turning away from the table, “I beg your pardon, but I have no appetite for horrors. You really must not ask me to go through your collection. It is no doubt very interesting, but I can’t stand it. Have you nothing pleasant to entertain me with?”

“Pooh! you are squeamish. However, as you are a novice, let us put off the rest until you are seasoned. The pictures are not all horrible. Each book refers to a different country. That one contains illustrations of modern civilization in Germany, for instance. That one is France; that, British India. Here you have the United States of America, home of liberty, theatre of manhood suffrage, kingless and lordless land of Protection, Republicanism, and the realized Radical Programme, where all the black chattel slaves were turned into wage-slaves (like my father’s white fellows) at a cost of 800,000 lives and wealth incalculable. You and I are paupers in comparison with the great capitalists of that country, where the laborers fight for bones with the Chinamen, like dogs. Some of these great men presented me with photographs of their yachts and palaces, not anticipating the use to which I would put them. Here are some portraits that will not harrow your feelings. This is my mother, a woman of good family, every inch a lady. Here is a Lancashire lass, the daughter of a common pitman. She has exactly the same physical characteristics as my well-born mother—the same small head, delicate features, and so forth; they might be sisters. This villainous-looking pair might be twin brothers, except that there is a trace of good humor about the one to the right. The good-humored one is a bargee on the Lyvern Canal. The other is one of the senior noblemen of the British Peerage. They illustrate the fact that Nature, even when perverted by generations of famine fever, ignores the distinctions we set up between men. This group of men and women, all tolerably intelligent and thoughtful looking, are so-called enemies of society—Nihilists, Anarchists, Communards, members of the International, and so on. These other poor devils, worried, stiff, strumous, awkward, vapid, and rather coarse, with here and there a passably pretty woman, are European kings, queens, grand-dukes, and the like. Here are ship-captains, criminals, poets, men of science, peers, peasants, political economists, and representatives of dozens of degrees. The object of the collection is to illustrate the natural inequality of man, and the failure of our artificial inequality to correspond with it.”

“It seems to me a sort of infernal collection for the upsetting of people’s ideas,” said Erskine. “You ought to label it ‘A Portfolio of Paradoxes.’”

“In a rational state of society they would be paradoxes; but now the time gives them proof—like Hamlet’s paradox. It is, however, a collection of facts; and I will give no fanciful name to it. You dislike figures, don’t you?”

“Unless they are by Phidias, yes.”

“Here are a few, not by Phidias. This is the balance sheet of an attempt I made some years ago to carry out the idea of an International Association of Laborers—commonly known as THE International—or union of all workmen throughout the world in defence of the interests of labor. You see the result. Expenditure, four thousand five hundred pounds. Subscriptions received from working-men, twenty-two pounds seven and ten pence halfpenny. The British workmen showed their sense of my efforts to emancipate them by accusing me of making a good thing out of the Association for my own pocket, and by mobbing and stoning me twice. I now help them only when they show some disposition to help themselves. I occupy myself partly in working out a scheme for the reorganization of industry, and partly in attacking my own class, women and all, as I am attacking you.”