Don't you fret,' said a man who
had lost nothing and was anxious to console.
'I'm a shareholder,' said the American, and smoked on.
The rain continued to fall, and the umbrellas dripped in the racks, and
the wet men came and went, circling round the central fact that it was a
bad business, till the day, as was most fit, shut down in drizzling
darkness. There was a refreshing sense of brotherhood in misfortunes in
the little community that had just been electrocuted and did not want
any more shocks. All the pain that in England would be taken home to be
borne in silence and alone was here bulked, as it were, and faced in
line of company. Surely the Christians of old must have fought much
better when they met the lions by fifties at a time.
At last the men departed; the bachelors to cast up accounts by
themselves (there should be some good ponies for sale shortly) and the
married men to take counsel. May heaven help him whose wife does not
stand by him now! But the women of the Overseas settlements are as
thorough as the men. There will be tears for plans forgone, the changing
of the little ones' schools and elder children's careers, unpleasant
letters to be written home, and more unpleasant ones to be received from
relatives who 'told you so from the first.' There will be pinchings too,
and straits of which the outside world will know nothing, but the women
will pull it through smiling.
Beautiful indeed are the operations of modern finance - especially when
anything goes wrong with the machine. To-night there will be trouble in
India among the Ceylon planters, the Calcutta jute and the Bombay
cotton-brokers, besides the little households of small banked savings.
In Hongkong, Singapore, and Shanghai there will be trouble too, and
goodness only knows what wreck at Cheltenham, Bath, St. Leonards,
Torquay, and the other camps of the retired Army officers. They are
lucky in England who know what happens when it happens, but here the
people are at the wrong end of the cables, and the situation is not
good. Only one thing seems certain. There is a notice on a shut door, in
the wet, and by virtue of that notice all the money that was theirs
yesterday is gone away, and it may never come back again. So all the
work that won the money must be done over again; but some of the people
are old, and more are tired, and all are disheartened. It is a very
sorrowful little community that goes to bed to-night, and there must be
as sad ones the world over. Let it be written, however, that of the
sections under fire here (and some are cruelly hit) no man whined, or
whimpered, or broke down. There was no chance of fighting. It was bitter
defeat, but they took it standing.
HALF-A-DOZEN PICTURES
'Some men when they grow rich, store pictures in a gallery,' Living,
their friends envy them, and after death the genuineness of the
collection is disputed under the dispersing hammer.
A better way is to spread your picture over all earth; visiting them as
Fate allows. Then none can steal or deface, nor any reverse of fortune
force a sale; sunshine and tempest warm and ventilate the gallery for
nothing, and - in spite of all that has been said of her
crudeness - Nature is not altogether a bad frame-maker. The knowledge
that you may never live to see an especial treasure twice teaches the
eyes to see quickly while the light lasts; and the possession of such a
gallery breeds a very fine contempt for painted shows and the smeary
things that are called pictures.
In the North Pacific, to the right hand as you go westward, hangs a
small study of no particular value as compared with some others. The
mist is down on an oily stretch of washed-out sea; through the mist the
bats-wings of a sealing schooner are just indicated. In the foreground,
all but leaping out of the frame, an open rowboat, painted the rawest
blue and white, rides up over the shoulder of a swell. A man in
blood-red jersey and long boots, all shining with moisture, stands at
the bows holding up the carcase of a silver-bellied sea-otter from whose
pelt the wet drips in moonstones. Now the artist who could paint the
silver wash of the mist, the wriggling treacly reflection of the boat,
and the raw red wrists of the man would be something of a workman.
But my gallery is in no danger of being copied at present. Three years
since, I met an artist in the stony bed of a brook, between a line of
300 graven, lichened godlings and a flaming bank of azaleas, swearing
horribly. He had been trying to paint one of my pictures - nothing more
than a big water-worn rock tufted with flowers and a snow-capped hill
for background. Most naturally he failed, because there happened to be
absolutely no perspective in the thing, and he was pulling the lines
about to make some for home consumption. No man can put the contents of
a gallon jar into a pint mug. The protests of all uncomfortably-crowded
mugs since the world began have settled that long ago, and have given us
the working theories, devised by imperfect instruments for imperfect
instruments, which are called Rules of Art.
Luckily, those who painted my gallery were born before man. Therefore,
my pictures, instead of being boxed up by lumbering bars of gold, are
disposed generously between latitudes, equinoxes, monsoons, and the
like, and, making all allowance for an owner's partiality, they are
really not so bad.
'Down in the South where the ships never go' - between the heel of New
Zealand and the South Pole, there is a sea-piece showing a steamer
trying to come round in the trough of a big beam sea.
