The Demi-Gods, page 3
“I’ll stand in nobody’s light, and teaching people is God’s own work; this is the way I do it, your worships, and anyone that likes can follow me up.”
He seized two pieces of bread, placed a slice of cheese between them, and bit deeply into that trinity.
The strangers followed his actions with fidelity, and in a moment their mouths were as full as his was and as content.
Patsy paused between bites:
“When I’ve this one finished,” said he, “I’ll take two more bits of bread and I’ll put a lump of meat between them, and I’ll eat that.”
“Ah!” said that one of the angels whose mouth chanced to be free.
Patsy’s eye roved over the rest of the food.
“And after that,” he continued, “we will take a bit of whatever is handy.”
In a short time there was nothing left on the newspaper but soft sugar, butter, tea, and tobacco. Patsy was abashed.
“I did think that there was more than that,” said he.
“I’ve had enough myself,” he continued, “but maybe your honours could eat more.”
Two of the angels assured him that they were quite satisfied, but the youngest angel said nothing.
“I’m doubting that you had enough,” said Patsy dubiously to him.
“I could eat more if I had it,” returned that one with a smile.
Mary went to the cart and returned bearing two cold potatoes and a piece of bread, and she placed these before the young angel. He thanked her and ate these, and then he ate the package of soft sugar, and then he ate a little piece of the butter, but he didn’t care for it. He pointed to the plug of tobacco:
“Does this be eaten?” he enquired.
“It does not,” said Patsy. “If you ate a bit of that you’d get a pain inside of your belly that would last you for a month. There’s some people do smoke it, and there’s others do chew it; but I smoke it and chew it myself, and that’s the best way. There’s two pipes there on the paper, and I’ve a pipe in my own pocket, so whichever of you would like a smoke can do exactly as I do.”
With a big jackknife he shredded pieces from the plug, and rolled these between his palms, then he carefully stuffed his pipe, pulled at it to see was it drawing well, lit the tobacco, and heaved a sigh of contentment. He smiled around the circle.
“That’s real good,” said he.
The strangers examined the pipes and tobacco with curiosity, but they did not venture to smoke, and they watched Patsy’s beatific face with kindly attention.
VIII
Now at this moment Mary was devoured with curiosity. She wanted to know how her father had become possessed of the basketful of provisions. She knew that three shillings would not have purchased a tithe of these goods, and, as she had now no fear of the strangers, she questioned her parent.
“Father,” said she, “where did you get all the good food?”
The angels had eaten of his bounty, so Mac Cann considered that he had nothing to fear from their side. He regarded them while he pulled thoughtfully at his pipe.
“Do you know,” said he, “that the hardest thing in the world is to get the food, and a body is never done looking for it. We are after eating all that we got this morning, so now we’ll have to search for what we’ll eat tonight, and in the morning we’ll have to look again for more of it, and the day after that, and every day until we are dead we’ll have to go on searching for the food.”
“I would have thought,” said the eldest angel, “that of all problems food would be the simplest in an organised society.”
This halted Mac Cann for a moment.
“Maybe you’re right, sir,” said he kindly, and he dismissed the interruption.
“I heard a man once—he was a stranger to these parts, and he had a great deal of the talk—he said that the folk at the top do grab all the food in the world, and that then they make every person work for them, and that when you’ve done a certain amount of work they give you just enough money to buy just enough food to let you keep on working for them. That’s what the man said: a big, angry man he was, with whiskers on him like the whirlwind, and he swore he wouldn’t work for anyone. I’m thinking myself that he didn’t work either. We were great friends, that man and me, for I don’t do any work if I can help it; it’s that I haven’t got the knack for work, and, God help me! I’ve a big appetite. Besides that, the work I’d be able to do in a day mightn’t give me enough to eat, and wouldn’t I be cheated then?”
“Father,” said Mary, “where did you get all the good food this morning?”
“I’ll tell you that. I went down to the bend of the road where the house is, and I had the three shillings in my hand. When I came to the house the door was standing wide open. I hit it a thump of my fist, but nobody answered me. ‘God be with all here,’ said I, and in I marched. There was a woman lying on the floor in one room, and her head had been cracked with a stick; and in the next room there was a man lying on the floor, and his head had been cracked with a stick. It was in that room I saw the food packed nice and tight in the basket that you see before you. I looked around another little bit, and then I came away, for, as they say, a wise man never found a dead man, and I’m wise enough no matter what I look like.”
“Were the people all dead?” said Mary, horrified.
“They were not—they only got a couple of clouts. I’m thinking they are all right by this, and they looking for the basket, but, please God, they won’t find it. But what I’d like to know is this, who was it hit the people with a stick, and then walked away without the food and the drink and the tobacco, for that’s a queer thing.”
He turned to his daughter.
“Mary, a cree, let you burn up that basket in the brazier, for I don’t like the look of it at all, and it empty.”
So Mary burned the basket with great care while her father piled their goods on the cart and yoked up the ass.
Meanwhile the angels were talking together, and after a short time they approached Mac Cann.
“If it is not inconvenient,” said their spokesman, “we would like to remain with you for a time. We think that in your company we may learn more than we might otherwise do, for you seem to be a man of ability, and at present we are rather lost in this strange world.”
“Sure,” said Patsy heartily, “I haven’t the least objection in the world, only, if you don’t want to be getting into trouble, and if you’ll take my advice, I’d say that ye ought to take off them kinds of clothes you’re wearing and get into duds something like my own, and let you put your wings aside and your fine high crowns, the way folk won’t be staring at you every foot of the road, for I’m telling you that it’s a bad thing to have people looking after you when you go through a little village or a town, because you can never know who’ll remember you afterwards, and you maybe not wanting to be remembered at all.”
“If our attire,” said the angel, “is such as would make us remarkable—”
“It is,” said Patsy. “People would think you belonged to a circus, and the crowds of the world would be after you in every place.”
“Then,” replied the angel, “we will do as you say.”
“I have clothes enough in this bundle,” said Patsy, with a vague air. “I found them up there in the house, and I was thinking of yourselves when I took them. Let you put them on, and we will tie up your own things in a sack and bury them here so that when you want them again you’ll be able to get them, and then we can travel wherever we please and no person will say a word to us.”
So the strangers retired a little way with the bundle, and there they shed their finery.
When they appeared again they were clad in stout, ordinary clothing. They did not look a bit different from Patsy Mac Cann except that they were all taller men than he, but between his dilapidation and theirs there was very little to choose.
Mac Cann dug a hole beside a tree and carefully buried their property, then with a thoughtful air he bade Mary move ahead with the ass, while he and the angels stepped forward at the tailboard.
They walked then through the morning sunlight, and for a time they had little to say to each other.
IX
In truth Patsy Mac Cann was a very able person.
For forty-two years he had existed on the edges of a society which did not recognise him in any way, and, as he might himself have put it, he had not done so very badly at all.
He lived as a bird lives, or a fish, or a wolf. Laws were for other people, but they were not for him; he crawled under or vaulted across these ethical barriers, and they troubled him no more than as he had to bend or climb a little to avoid them—he discerned laws as something to be avoided, and it was thus he saw most things.
Religion and morality, although he paid these an extraordinary reverence, were not for him either; he beheld them from afar, and, however they might seem beautiful or foolish, he left them behind as readily as he did his debts, if so weighty a description may be given to his volatile engagements. He did not discharge these engagements; he elongated himself from them; between himself and a query he interposed distance, and at once that became foreign to him, for half a mile about himself was his frontier, and beyond that, wherever he was, the enemy lay.
He stood outside of every social relation, and within an organised humanity he might almost have been reckoned as a different species. He was very mobile, but all his freedom lay in one direction, and outside of that pasturage he could never go. For the average man there are two dimensions of space wherein he moves with a certain limited freedom; it is for him a horizontal and a perpendicular world; he goes up the social scale and down it, and in both these atmospheres there is a level wherein he can exercise himself to and fro, his journeyings being strictly limited by his business and his family. Between the place where he works and the place where he lives lies all the freedom he can hope for; within that range he must seek such adventures as he craves, and the sole expansion to which he can attain is upwards towards another social life if he be ambitious, or downward to the underworlds if he is bored. For Mac Cann there was no upward and no downward movements, he had plumbed to the very rocks of life, but his horizontal movements were bounded only by the oceans around his country, and in this gigantic underworld he moved with almost absolute freedom, and a knowledge which might properly be termed scientific.
In despite of his apparent outlawry he was singularly secure; ambition waved no littlest lamp at him; the one ill which could overtake him was death, which catches on every man; no enmity could pursue him to any wall, for he was sunken a whole sphere beneath malice as beneath benevolence. Physical ill-treatment might come upon him, but in that case it was his manhood and his muscle against another manhood and another muscle—the simplest best would win, but there was no glory for the conqueror nor any loot to be carried from the battle.
Casual warfares, such as these, had been frequent enough in his career, for he had fought stubbornly with every kind of man, and had afterwards medicined his wounds with the only unguents cheap enough for his usage—the healing balsams of time and patience. He had but one occupation, and it was an engrossing one—he hunted for food, and for it he hunted with the skill and pertinacity of a wolf or a vulture.
With what skill he did hunt! He would pick crumbs from the lank chaps of famine; he gathered nourishment from the empty air; he lifted it from wells and watercourses; he picked it off clothes lines and hedges; he stole so cleverly from the bees that they never felt his hand in their pocket; he would lift the eggs from beneath a bird, and she would think that his finger was a chicken; he would clutch a hen from the roost, and the housewife would think he was the yard dog, and the yard dog would think he was its brother.
He had a culture too, and if it was not wide it was profound; he knew wind and weather as few astronomers know it; he knew the habit of the trees and the earth; how the seasons moved, not as seasons, but as days and hours; he had gathered all the sweets of summer, and the last rigour of winter was no secret to him; he had fought with the winter every year of his life as one fights with a mad beast, he had held off that grizzliest of muzzles and escaped scatheless.
He knew men and women, and he knew them from an angle at which they seldom caught themselves or each other; he knew them as prey to be bitten and escaped from quickly. At them, charged with a thousand preoccupations, he looked with an eye in which there was a single surmise, and he divined them in a flash. In this quick vision he saw man, one expression, one attitude for all; never did he see a man or woman in their fullness, his microscopic vision caught only what it looked for, but he saw that with the instant clarity of the microscope. There were no complexities for him in humanity; there were those who gave and those who did not give; there were those who might be cajoled, and those who might be frightened. If there was goodness in a man he glimpsed it from afar as a hawk sees a mouse in the clover, and he swooped on that virtue and was away with booty. If there was evil in a man he passed it serenely as a sheep passes by a butcher, for evil did not affect him. Evil could never put a hand on him, and he was not evil himself.
If the denominations of virtue or vice must be affixed to his innocent existence, then these terms would have to be redefined, for they had no meaning in his case; he stood outside these as he did outside of the social structure. But, indeed, he was not outside of the social structure at all; he was so far inside of it that he could never get out; he was at the very heart of it; he was held in it like a deer in an ornamental park, or a cork that bobs peacefully in a bucket, and in the immense, neglected pastures of civilisation he found his own quietude and his own wisdom.
All of the things he knew and all of the things that he had done were most competently understood by his daughter.
X
It is to be remarked that the angels were strangely like Patsy Mac Cann. Their ideas of right and wrong almost entirely coincided with his. They had no property and so they had no prejudices, for the person who has nothing may look upon the world as his inheritance, while the person who has something has seldom anything but that.
Civilisation, having built itself at hazard upon the Rights of Property, has sought on many occasions to unbuild itself again in sheer desperation of any advance, but from the great Ethic of Possession there never has been any escape, and there never will be until the solidarity of man has been really created, and until each man ceases to see the wolf in his neighbour.
Is there actually a wolf in our neighbour? We see that which we are, and our eyes project on every side an image of ourselves; if we look with fear that which we behold is frightful; if we look with love then the colours of heaven are repeated to us from the ditch and the dungeon. We invent eternally upon one another; we scatter our sins broadcast and call them our neighbours; let us scatter our virtues abroad and build us a city to live in.
For Mac Cann and his daughter there was no longer any strangeness in their companions. As day and night succeeded, as conversation and action supplemented each other on their journeys, so each of them began to unfold from the fleshy disguise, and in a short time they could each have spoken of the others to an inquiring stranger, giving, within bounds, reasonably exact information as to habit and mentality.
What conversations they had engaged in! Sitting now by a hedge close to a tiny chaotic village, compact of ugliness and stupidity, now at twilight as they camped in a disused quarry, leaning their shoulders against great splintered rocks, and hearing no sound but the magnified, slow trickle of water and the breeze that sung or screamed against a razor edge of rock; or lying on the sheltered side of a pit of potatoes, they stared at the moon as she sailed on her lonely voyages, or watched the stars that glanced and shone from the drifting clouds; and as they lifted their eyes to these sacred voyagers in whose charge is the destiny of man they lifted their minds also and adored mutely that mind of which these are the thoughts made visible.
Sometimes they discussed the problems of man in a thousand superficial relationships. The angels were wise, but in the vocabulary which they had to use wisdom had no terms. Their wisdom referred only to ultimates, and was the unhandiest of tools when dug into some immediate, curious problem. Before wisdom can be audible a new language must be invented, and they also had to unshape their definitions and retranslate these secular findings into terms wherein they could see the subject broadly, and they found that what they gained in breadth they lost in outline, and that the last generalisation, however logically it was framed, was seldom more than an intensely interesting lie when it was dissected again. No truth in regard to space and time can retain virtue for longer than the beating of an artery; it too has its succession, its sidereal tide, and while you look upon it, round and hardy as a pebble, behold, it is split and fissured and transformed.
Sometimes when it rained, and it rained often, they would seek refuge in a haystack, if one was handy; or they would creep into a barn and hide behind hills of cabbages or piles of farming tools; or they slid into the sheds among the cattle where they warmed and fed themselves against those peaceful flanks; or, if they were nigh a town and had been lucky that day, they would pay a few coppers to sleep on the well-trodden, earthen floor of a house.
As for the ass, he slept wherever he could. When there was rain he would stand with his tail against the wind sunken in a reverie so profound that he no longer seemed to feel the rain or the wind. From these abysses of thought he would emerge to the realisation that there was a sheltered side to a wall or a clump of heather, and he also would take his timely rest under the stars of God.
What did they say to him? Down the glittering slopes they peer and nod; before his eyes the mighty pageant is unrolled in quiet splendour; for him too the signs are set. Does the Waterman care nothing for his thirst? Does the Ram not bless his increase? Against his enemies also the Archer will bend his azure bow and loose his arrows of burning gold.
