第27章

When Mr.Goodchild had looked out of the Lancaster Inn window for two hours on end, with great perseverance, he begun to entertain a misgiving that he was growing industrious.He therefore set himself next, to explore the country from the tops of all the steep hills in the neighbourhood.

He came back at dinner-time, red and glowing, to tell Thomas Idle what he had seen.Thomas, on his back reading, listened with great composure, and asked him whether he really had gone up those hills, and bothered himself with those views, and walked all those miles?

'Because I want to know,' added Thomas, 'what you would say of it, if you were obliged to do it?'

'It would be different, then,' said Francis.'It would be work, then; now, it's play.'

'Play!' replied Thomas Idle, utterly repudiating the reply.'Play! Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion's belt, and he calls it Play! Play!' exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air.'You CAN'T play.You don't know what it is.You make work of everything.'

The bright Goodchild amiably smiled.

'So you do,' said Thomas.'I mean it.To me you are an absolutely terrible fellow.You do nothing like another man.Where another fellow would fall into a footbath of action or emotion, you fall into a mine.Where any other fellow would be a painted butterfly, you are a fiery dragon.Where another man would stake a sixpence, you stake your existence.If you were to go up in a balloon, you would make for Heaven; and if you were to dive into the depths of the earth, nothing short of the other place would content you.What a fellow you are, Francis!' The cheerful Goodchild laughed.

'It's all very well to laugh, but I wonder you don't feel it to be serious,'

said Idle.'A man who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man.'

'Tom, Tom,' returned Goodchild, 'if I can do nothing by halves, and be nothing by halves, it's pretty clear that you must take me as a whole, and make the best of me.'

With this philosophical rejoinder, the airy Goodchild clapped Mr.Idle on the shoulder in a final manner, and they sat down to dinner.

'By-the-by,' said Goodchild, 'I have been over a lunatic asylum too, since I have been out.'

'He has been,' exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, 'over a lunatic asylum! Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy Commissioner of himself - for nothing!'

'An immense place,' said Goodchild, 'admirable offices, very good arrangements, very good attendants; altogether a remarkable place.'

'And what did you see there?' asked Mr.Idle, adapting Hamlet's advice to the occasion, and assuming the virtue of interest, though he had it not.

'The usual thing,' said Francis Goodchild, with a sigh.'Long groves of blighted men-and-women-trees; interminable avenues of hopeless faces; numbers, without the slightest power of really combining for any earthly purpose; a society of human creatures who have nothing in common but that they have all lost the power of being humanly social with one another.'

'Take a glass of wine with me,' said Thomas Idle, 'and let US be social.'

'In one gallery, Tom,' pursued Francis Goodchild, 'which looked to me about the length of the Long Walk at Windsor, more or less - '

'Probably less,' observed Thomas Idle.

'In one gallery, which was otherwise clear of patients (for they were all out), there was a poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, with a perplexed brow and a pensive face, stooping low over the matting on the floor, and picking out with his thumb and forefinger the course of its fibres.The afternoon sun was slanting in at the large end-window, and there were cross patches of light and shade all down the vista, made by the unseenwindows and the open doors of the little sleeping-cells on either side.In about the centre of the perspective, under an arch, regardless of the pleasant weather, regardless of the solitude, regardless of approaching footsteps, was the poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, poring over the matting."What are you doing there?" said my conductor, when we came to him.He looked up, and pointed to the matting."I wouldn't do that, I think," said my conductor, kindly; "if I were you, I would go and read, or I would lie down if I felt tired; but I wouldn't do that." The patient considered a moment, and vacantly answered, "No, sir, I won't; I'll - I'll go and read," and so he lamely shuffled away into one of the little rooms.I turned my head before we had gone many paces.He had already come out again, and was again poring over the matting, and tracking out its fibres with his thumb and forefinger.I stopped to look at him, and it came into my mind, that probably the course of those fibres as they plaited in and out, over and under, was the only course of things in the whole wide world that it was left to him to understand - that his darkening intellect had narrowed down to the small cleft of light which showed him, "This piece was twisted this way, went in here, passed under, came out there, was carried on away here to the right where I now put my finger on it, and in this progress of events, the thing was made and came to be here." Then, I wondered whether he looked into the matting, next, to see if it could show him anything of the process through which HE came to be there, so strangely poring over it.Then, I thought how all of us, GOD help us! in our different ways are poring over our bits of matting, blindly enough, and what confusions and mysteries we make in the pattern.I had a sadder fellow-feeling with the little dark- chinned, meagre man, by that time, and I came away.'

Mr.Idle diverting the conversation to grouse, custards, and bride- cake, Mr.Goodchild followed in the same direction.The bride-cake was as bilious and indigestible as if a real Bride had cut it, and the dinner it completed was an admirable performance.