THE SCISSORS-GRINDER.
FOR some years he was only known to us as the Scissors- Grinder, an impersonal functionary who sometimes called at the back-door; a silent man with a stoop which appeared to be deferential, but which proved to be merely the result of too much piano-tuning. Next we learnt be bad become an inhabitant of the Alms Row, two simple and beauti- ful buildings of Kentish rag flanking the Grammar Scheid. Edward VI.'s foundation. Accordingly I made my way thither with the next blades for repair. The Scissors-Grinder opened the door himself. His eyes gleamed under shaggy brows and bristling grizzled hair : he was clean-shaven, and looked like a pocket-edition of the late Professor Huxley. The two little white rooms opened into each other, miracles of clean- liness and crowded with unusual pieces of furniture. A large American organ occupied the middle of the floor. A cumbrous wooden corn-mill, with hopper and sifter complete, stood in a line with the scissors-grinding machine. Both were connected with a huge driving-wheel, worked by a treadle. A studio camera and various other less recognisable forms were veiled in faded purple wrappers round the walls. Our two chairs and a small bare table occupied the only space left on the floor. The walls were hung with oil paintings, crudely correct. On the mantel-shelf stood an American clock, of the Sam Slick pattern, flanked by two oranges, and these, again, by two violet liniment bottles, each with a spray of scarlet sumach leaves stuck in its neck.
"I keep them there for ornament," he said. "I am passion- ately fond of their colour, and orange is the complementary. The sumach leaves I brought with me from the United States; those are the only ones I have left, I am sorry to say. Colour is my passion, especially purple, but the cover of my camerr is the only piece of real purple I possess now."
He spoke of passion, but with the cold and stilted-utterance of the self-educated man. However, the lover of purple proved to be a student of Ruskin, and must have been one of his earliest working-class disciples. It was the first of many visits. He explained his machines to me, and the pneumatic bell, his own invention. All had been put-together by himself. The corn-mill was accounted for by the fact of his bein4 a vegetarian. He was likewise a republican, a free- thinker, a homeopath, phrenologist, anti-tobacconist, an - vaccinationist, anti-vivisectionist, but not a Socialist. No; though he quoted Mr. Hyndman, and raged against the capitalist. He was, in fact, an Individualist of the narrowest and crudest type. No human being more self-centred ever breathed. His favourite topic was his prospect of earthly immortality as the result of never eating animal or mineral food (salt was taboo). He clung intensely to life, though his was dreary enough. The subject of religion he could not let alone, notwithstanding that his visitor never started it. "There is no God," he would assert angrily and quite gratuitously.—" Isn't it strange, then, that people all the world over should be trying to worship one P "- "Yes, man is a religious animal—a religious animal, that's how I should put it. I was always an original thinker. Carlyle makes the same remark, I think—or is it Huxley ? . . . Still " (after a few minutes' further conversation) " I allow the possibility of a First Cause, but as to a Providence that watches over us every moment and interferes with all we do, why the idea is—is hateful and disgusting to me ! " (" Interference " was his bugbear.) " While as for worship or praying, the very idea is degrading."—" Have you never-- ? " —" Well, I do not deny that in moments of extremity I may have been a fool like other men ; but I loathed and despised myself for it." He paused and a glow came over his face. "I will tell you my religion. When I was a lad in the spring I used to get up day after day in the dark and walk across the park to those woods" (pointing through the window). "You can see them on the horizon. You know what they are when the wild hyacinth is in bloom ? " (I did know.) "Did you ever watch those glades when the sun rose upon them— the white level beams darting through between the tree- trunks P Then you don't know what I saw and felt. I used to fling myself down on my face and ache and weep with the delight. of it ; and that is the nearest approach I have ever w felt to worship." Harding was a true poet at heart, but utterance was denied him. He could seldom get beyond bonrowed formulas, whether in speech, music, or drawing, and this gave a curious unreality even to his most genuine expressions. "I educated my- self," he told me. " Seventy years ago " (this was spoken about 1890) " book-learning for a working lad was hard to come at, but I understood machinery, and I could paint and play the piano, and I gave lessons. Still, I could not make much of a living at it, so I went to the States, where piano-tuning was at a premium, and I was making money fast. But I bad a brother, an epileptic, and when I was about forty he became so much worse that I had to take him to live with me. Then I had to give up piano-tuning and take to scissors-sharpening, which I could practise at home, for my brother could not be left alone for a moment. Even then I could not earn enough to keep us, attendance on him was so unremitting. I had to use up my savings. For twelve years my brother lived with me—the twelve best years of my life, when I might have been making a home and business for myself. Marriage? What woman could I ask to share such a burden ? " (Evidently not the Desired One ; and here surely was the secret of his bitterness.) "Then he died and I went back to my tuning, but it jarred my spine too much and I had to give it up. That's why I'm here now ! Talk of there being a God. He ought to be ashamed of Himself if there is one. I have always done right, and this is the result. Why doesn't He provide "
Vain and tactless was the endeavour to prove to him that it was no unkind Providence that had secured to him in his old age, and in his native town, two pretty rooms rent free, a garden plot, six shillings and eightpence a week, and perfect liberty to supplement it. The bread of charity was bitter in his mouth.
" Mr. Harding, the earth is full of God's providing, but we have to exert ourselves to take it. A father provides for his children, but he doesn't go round to them each with a spoon."
"No, but" (with the only look and tone of tenderness he ever betrayed)—" no, but he would feed the babies. My brother was helpless."—" He gave you to your brother."— "Yes, and look at the result. Why should I suffer for the mistakes of Providence? But there is no Providence." And indeed this was his great quarrel with the universe—that it contained no Being Whom he could debit at compound in- terest with his brother's maintenance for twelve years and with his own consequent losses and privations. The dread of pauper burial haunted him, and to avert it he tried to devise means of raising money. "I have some books you might like to buy." He brought out an odd volume of " Modern Painters." " My greatest treasure for years," he said wistfully, handling this, " but " (puffing himself together) " my sight is failing somewhat; I can no longer see to read it.' Then be produced his music—his own compositions—exquisite penmanship in handsomely bound MS. books. They were chiefly cantatas—operas he called them. One of them had a sort of resemblance to Ii Flauto Magico. The soprano solo, I remember, written in C sharp, ended with the keynote in alt, sustained throughout eighteen bars with a cadenza ranging over two and a half octaves. They were submitted to a musical authority, who was surprised and interested. " Entirely modelled on Mozart or Bach," was his verdict. " The counterpoint is simply amazing, but there is no melody or beauty of any kind." I reported what discretion permitted, and my friend was much gratified. "A great musician in the States told me somewhat the same. He said, There is no living composer who could write such music as yours, and if there were, there are no vocalists nowa- days who could sing it.'" Next we tried the freehand drawings, elaborate patterns for ground glass windows. " They took me a long time," he said sadly, rolling them up, " and now I am afraid that, after all, the only good of them was the pleasure of doing it. But as to destroying them, I couldn't. It would be like tearing up my own heart. Have you seen my table—my magnum opus?" He reverently unwrapped a round table, the top of which worked on a hinge. It was a masterpiece indeed! Painted on a ground of Brunswick black, the design, which covered every inch of surface, consisted in rows of flowers arranged in concentric circles round the centre, a violently pink heraldic rose. " The colours chosen were primary and secondary tints," he remarked. Unmistakably they were. Alas! the
general effect was appalling—a miracle of delicate futility and misapplied industry.
Nothing concealed that was done, but all things done to adorning
Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish."
For instance, the grooved line of every screw-head used in the construction had been neatly painted white, with a little sprig of mustard and cress springing from either side. Above or below, one found no escape from the exuberance of orna- ment—the trail of the convolvulas was over it all. " I would take six guineas for it,, but there is no taste for such things in this neighbourhood." He covered it up again with set lips, and turned to another favourite, topic—vegetarian cookery. The machines proved to be his only available assets, his strength being no longer equal to the work they demanded. But the loss of his mill did not drive him to the trade for wholemeal flour ; he distrusted it too much. He took to haricot beans instead. His independent nature would not accept the smallest service without requital, BO the offering of a basket of strawberries or a bag of oranges always met with some return in the shape of a gardening magazine or a cookery recipe neatly inscribed. This was one of them: " The beans will take some hours to cook thoroughly. Put them on at nine o'clock, with the saucepan-handle pointing due east. At ten o'clock turn it to the south, at eleven to the west, and at twelve to the north. By one o'clock they should be ready for eating. This plan will ensure every portion being thoroughly done."—" Wouldn't it answer the same purpose if one stirred them now and then? "—" Perhaps it might. But I had never thought of that. At any rate the same regularity would not attend that process." Which nobody could deny.
Our friendship extended over several years, during which his faculties sensibly declined. When we left the neighbour- hood a friend—an Indian frontier officer—promised to look after him. The profession of arms was the object of the Scissors-Grinder's deepest contempt. Nevertheless—by what magic of persuasion .E know not—the Irish Colonel won per- mission, not only to visit him, but to read the New Testament. Mr. Harding would sit enduring it with polite indifference, deepening into apathy as paralysis gradually benumbed his senses. One day he interrupted the reading : " Pardon me, would you be kind enough to repeat that ?" It was the Parable of the Prodigal Son. " I seem to have heard that once before—somewhere, long ago. . . . When I was a boy I suppose. I wished to hear it again. Thank you, nothing further at present." It was the last flash of that keen intelli- gence. On the Colonel's next visit—so he told me—he found Harding paralyzed and unconscious, but whether or not he was buried by the parish we could never ascertain.
R. B.
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