Such Is Life (48 page)

“It won't be difficult to do that,” I replied dejectedly, as I withdrew to enjoy my unearned slumber.

Now the night, replete with such sphere-music, was past, and the cares that infest the day had returned to everyone on the station, except myself and two or three equally clean, useless, and aristocratic loafers in the boss's house. Toby, the half-caste, was cantering away toward Clarke's, for the weekly mail. Priestley, at his wagon, was bullocking even more desperately than usual, with a view to getting out of sight of the station as soon as possible. Paw-some, repairing a side-saddle, on his extemporised bench, was softly crooning a familiar hymn, the sentiment of which seemed appropriate to himself, whilst the language breathed the very aroma of his social atmosphere:—

Must I be carried to the skies

On flowery beds of ease,

While others fought to gain the prize,

And sail'd through (adj.) seas?

In the veranda of the house, Mr. Folkestone, a young English gentleman of not less than two hundred-weight, lolled on a hammock,
smoking a chibouque, and reading a magazine; while straight between us two aristocratic loafers, Vandemonian Jack, aged about a century, was mechanically sawing firewood in the hot, sickly sunshine. This is one of the jobs that it takes a man of four or five score years to perform ungrudgingly; and, to any illuminated mind, the secret of these old fellows' greatness is very plain. Bathing, though an ancient heresy, has been of strictly local prevalence, and, for the best of reasons, of transient continuance. Our relapse belongs to the present generation. Though our better-class grand-sires understood no science unconnected with the gloves, a marvellous instinct taught them the unwholesomeness of sluicing away that panoply of dirt which is Nature's own defence against the microbe of imbecility, and which, indeed, was the only armour worn by the formidable Berserkers, from whom some of them claimed descent. We have done it however (at least, we say so), whilst our social inferiors have held on to the old-time religion (at least, we say so, here again); wherefore—

“I say, Mr. Collins,” faltered Ida, breaking in on my reflections, “I picked up this little buckle aside o' your b—d; it's come off o' the back o' your tr—rs. I'll sew it on for you any time, for I notice you're bothered with them slippin' down. O, Mr. Collins!”—and the poor unlovely face was suddenly distorted with anguish and wet with tears—“ain't Mrs. Bodyzart wicked to put a slur on me like that? There ain't one word o' truth in it; I'd say the same if I was to die to-night; an' you may believe me or believe me not, but I'm tellin' the truth. Far be it, indeed!”

“Hush! Stop crying, Ida! Don't look round—Mrs. Beaudesart's watching you from the window, over there. You poor thing! you shouldn't trouble yourself over what anybody says. Did you feed Pup this morning?”

“I give him a whole milk-dish full o' scraps; but if people tells the truth, there's nobody in the world can say black is the whiteo' my eye; an' you may believe me or believe me not”—

“You'll need to give Pup a drink, Ida.”

“He's got a dish o' good rain-water aside him; but if people would on'y consider”—

“True—very true. Now go away, dear, and don't come fooling about me, or you'll give her liberty to talk.”

The girl limped back to the scene of her unromantic martyrdom, and I made a feeble effort to shake the dew-drops from my mane, and, so to speak, look myself in the face. I must give this life over, I thought; and I will give it over; an I do not, I am a villain.
After all, there are not two sides to this question; there is only one; and you may trust an overclean man to be an authority on the evil effects of bathing, upon mind, body, and estate; just as the grogbibber is our highest authority on headaches, fantods, and bankruptcy.

The Spartans (so ran my reflections) were as much addicted to dirt as the Sybarites to cleanliness; and just compare the two communities. The conquering races of later ages—Goths, Huns, Vandals, Longobards, &c.—were no less celebrated for one kind of grit than for the other. It is the Turkish bath that has made the once-formidable Ottoman Empire the sick man of Europe.
Latifundia perdidere Italian
(Large estates ruined Italy). Yes. Blame it on the large estates. Would a large estate ruin you? Bathing did the business for Italy, as it does the business for all its victims. If Rome had left to the soft Capuan his baths and his perfumes, she would have pulled-through. But think of the polished Roman debating the question of survival with the superlatively dirty barbarian of the North! Polished is good, for, in the ruins of the fatal Roman baths, the innumerable
strigulœ
, used by the bathers to polish their skins, bear sad testimony to the suicidal cleanliness of that doomed race. And just compare your
strigula
-polished Roman, morally and physically, with his contemporary, the filth-encrusted anchorite of the Thebaid—the former flickering briefly in a puerile, semi-vital way, and going out with a sulphurous smell; the latter, on a ration of six dates per week, attaining an interminable longevity, and possessing the power of striking scoffers dead, or blind, or paralytic, at pleasure.

And, talking of hermits—do you think Peter of Picardy could have launched the muscular Christianity of Western Europe against the less muscular, because cleaner, Islamism of Western Asia, but for his well-advertised vow, never to change his clothes, nor wash himself, till his contract should be completed? Prouder in his rags than the Emperor in his purple! and justly too, for he achieved the very apotheosis of dirt—animate, no doubt, as well as inanimate. Or take the first Teutonic Emperor of Rome—conqueror, arbitrator, legislator, and what not. In those middle ages, you know, it was the custom to name monarchs from some peculiarity of person or habitude—and I put it to any reasonable soul; Was this mere Yarman Brince likely to have become the central figure of the 10th century, but for such rigid abstinence from external application of water as is implied in the significent name of Otto the Great?

Indeed, the most sweepingly appropriate bestowal of the title,
‘Great,' is made when we refer to the adherents of the dirt-cult, collectively, as the Great Unwashed. Again, Dr. Johnson's biographies lovingly preserve the personal habits of most of the loftiest and sweetest poets that ever trod English soil; and think what a large percentage of those Muse-invokers, according to their historian, carried a fair quantity of that soil perennially on their hides. And speaking of the Diogenes of Fleet Street himself, we know, on good authority, that his antipathy to the Order of the Bath caused him to appeal to more senses than one. He was another Otto the Great. The original Diogenes, by the way, revelled in dirt, as well as in wisdom. And the mighty scholar, Porson, as you may remember, never needed to wash, because he never perspired.

Yet in spite of this cloud of witnesses, and in the face of our own experience, we
will
entice external leakage of such incipient greatness as we have—soaking ourselves in water, as if we were possums, and our virility a eucalyptus flavour that we sought to dissipate. Look at myself—now a king; now thus! Thunder-and-turf! have I fallen so low? And yet I was once like our Otto and Co.!

Before touching the forbidden thing, I felt as if I wanted to pursue an aspiring, if purposeless, journey up uncomfortable Alpine heights, with my Excelsior-banner in my hand, and a tear in my solitary bright blue eye; now, the maiden's invitation seems to be the only part of the enterprise that has any pith in it. Then, I gloried in the fiendish adage of, ‘Two hours' sleep for a man, three for a woman, and four for a fool'; now, my liveliest ambition is to gaze my fill on yon calm deep, then, like an infant, sink asleep on this form, and so remain till dinner-time—lunch-time, I should say; belonging, as I do, to the better classes. Then, I was like Hotspur on his crop-eared roan; now, I merely wish the desert were my dwelling-place, with one fair Spirit for my minister. To confess the truth, I note a certain weak glimmer of self-righteousness investing the thought that I would be content with one fair Spirit. Go to, go to! By virtue, thou enforcest laughter.

“I wish I was as happy as you,” murmured Ida, who had again silently approached. “Here's two newspapers; they done with them in the house. O, Mr. Collins!”—and the girl's tears broke forth afresh, whilst ungovernable sobs shook her from head to foot—“I can't git it off o' my mind what Mrs. Bodyzart said.”

“Ida! Ida!” I remonstrated; “you're making your nose red.” The information acted like a charm; her crying was over, though she still persisted in chewing her grievance.

“I can prove there ain't one word o' truth in it,” she continued pertinaciously.

“What's your idea of proof, Ida?”

“I can prove it on the Bible,” she replied eagerly.

“That settles the matter beyond controversy—considering that you rightly belong to the Middle Ages.”

“Indeed I don't!” she replied, with a flash of resentment. “I was twenty-seven last birthday; an' I don't care who knows it—on the third of July, it was—an' I wouldn't care tuppence if her ladyship snoke roun' tellin' people I was forty. But to put a slur on me like that! I leave it to your own self, Mr. Collins—was it right?”

“Right?” I repeated wearily. “In heaven's name, girl, what does it signify to you whether it was right or otherwise? That's Mrs. Beaudesart's own business, not yours. Why, if she charged me with stooping to folly, I would merely say, ‘Sorry to undeceive you, ma'am; but I've been too much given to letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,” like the poor bandicoot i' the adage.' But I certainly shouldn't concern myself with a question lying entirely between herself and Saint Peter.”

“Ah! but you're different,” replied the girl sadly.

“Simply because I'm a philosopher, Ida. I've held communion with the Unfathomable, and watched the exfoliation of the Inscrutable; and, you know, these things are altogether beyond the orbit of the girl-mind. Now clear off, like a good fellow, and let me read the papers.”

But I was too far gone to take any interest in either of the loathsome contemporaries; too much afflicted even to drift down to the swimming-hole again, much as I desired to do so. I also longed for the opinion of my mighty pipe on the dirt-question; but that faithful ally was packed among my things, forty feet away, and it might as well have been forty miles. So I just lay on the seat, clean, frail, and inert, as a recumbent statue, moulded in blancmange; whilst the ancient t'other-sider oscillated his frame-saw, and the pious Pawsome lightened his toil with selections from Sankey, and the perspiring Priestley hurried up his bullocks from the ration-paddock, and Sling Muck, the gardener, used his hoe among the callots and cabbagee, with the automatic stroke of a man brought up to one holiday per annum, and no Sunday. Meanwhile, the unreturning sands of Life dribbled through the unheeded isthmus of the Present Moment; and the fixed cone of the Past
expanded; and the dimple deepened in the diminished and hurrying Future.

Nevertheless, I collected the wreckage of what had been very fair faculties, and attempted to grapple with an idea which Ida's conversation had suggested. Finding this impossible, I made a mental memo, of the inspiration—and by the same token, I neatly utilised it within the next few hours. Your attention will be drawn to the circumstance in due season.

At mid-day, the bell sounded from the hut. Pawsome and the tribesmen quitted their work, and went to dinner. Priestley had started an hour before, bound for Nalrooka, with the remaining half of his load.

All the Levites, except Moriarty, were out on the run, but Martin, the head boundary rider, had timed himself for lunch. This man's status was a vexed question. He certainly rated—but did he rate high enough for the barracks? As head boundary man, decidedly not; but as recent proprietor of a small station absorbed by Runnymede, he was not destitute of pretensions. Out in the open air, he was, of course, as good as any Levite, but—Well, though we rather resented his presence in the Inner Court, we yielded him the benefit of the doubt; and he took that benefit, just as if he had been born in the purple, like ourselves.

Martin was an Orangeman of rank. He had attained the Black Degree. It was whispered that he held all the loyal brethren of Riverina under the whip, by reason of his being the only man in the region beyond the Murrumbidgee who could confer the Purple Degree. For, owing to an inherent haziness in the theses and aims of Orangeism, there are Orders in the Society as hard to attain as those German university degrees which no man ever took and had his eyesight perfect afterwards; though, to be sure, there is a certain difference in the relative value of the two species of attainment.

Moriarty—whose front name was Felix—was, if anything, a Catholic; and, partly on this account, partly on account of his being a young fellow, and partly on account of Miss King, the governess, Martin set him. Now, there was just one man within a hundred miles who knew less of Irish History than Martin, and that man was Moriarty; consequently, the two jostled each other as they rushed into that branch of learning where scholars fear to tread—each repeatedly appealing to me for confirmation of his outlandish myths and clumsy fabrications. I listlessly confirmed anything and everything. Having lost all mental, as well as physical, energy
where King John lost his regalia, namely, in the Wash, the line of least resistance was the line for me.

After a hearty lunch, I made my way back to the seat against the wall, while Moriarty lounged across to the store, and Martin went to speak to the High Priest at the door of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Then Martin mounted his horse, and rode away; and presently the tribesman, Jerry, brought a buggy and pair to the front door. Montgomery and Folkestone—the latter in knickerbockers—took their seats in the buggy, and whirled away down the horse-paddock fence. Then all was still, save for the faint pling-plong of a piano in the Holy of Holies.