第42章

The Sea Wife.

These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse.

-STEPHEN CRANE.

YOU MIGHT NOT EXPECT TO FIND the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but that is where I found her, on a mean street, in the poor quarter of Maidstone.In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and persuasion was necessary before she could bring herself to let me sleep in her front room.In the evening I descended to the semi-subterranean kitchen, and talked with her and her old man, Thomas Mugridge by name.

And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this tremendous machine civilization vanished away.It seemed that I went down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it, and in Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence of this remarkable English breed.I found there the spirit of the wander-lust which has lured Albion's sons across the zones; and Ifound there the colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English into foolish squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness and stubbornness which have brought them blindly through to empire and greatness; and likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible patience which has enabled the home population to endure under the burden of it all, to toil without complaint through the weary years, and docilely to yield the best of its sons to fight and colonize to the ends of the earth.

Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man.It was because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier.He had remained at home and worked.His first recollections were connected with work.He knew nothing else but work.He had worked all his days, and at seventy-one he still worked.Each morning saw him up with the lark and afield, a day laborer, for as such he had been born.Mrs.

Mugridge was seventy-three.From seven years of age she had worked in the fields, doing a boy's work at first, and later, a man's.She still worked, keeping the house shining, washing, boiling, and baking, and, with my advent, cooking for me and shaming me by making my bed.

At the end of threescore years and more of work they possessed nothing, had nothing to look forward to save more work.And they were contented.They expected nothing else, desired nothing else.

They lived simply.Their wants were few,- a pint of beer at the end of the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to pore over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as meditative and vacant as the chewing of a heifer's cud.From a wood engraving on the wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them, and underneath was the legend: 'Our Future Queen.' And from a highly colored lithograph alongside looked down a stout and elderly lady, with underneath: 'Our Queen- Diamond jubilee.'