MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY(豪夫人和怀女士)

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MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

MADAM HOW AND

LADY WHY

By Charles Kingsley

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

CHAPTER I

—THE GLEN

You find it dull walking up here upon Hartford Bridge Flat this sad

November day? Well, I do not deny that the moor looks somewhat

dreary, though dull it need never be. Though the fog is clinging to the

fir-trees, and creeping among the heather, till you cannot see as far as

Minley Corner, hardly as far as Bramshill woods--and all the Berkshire

hills are as invisible as if it was a dark midnight--yet there is plenty to be

seen here at our very feet. Though there is nothing left for you to pick,

and all the flowers are dead and brown, except here and there a poor half-

withered scrap of bottle-heath, and nothing left for you to catch either, for

the butterflies and insects are all dead too, except one poor old Daddy-

long-legs, who sits upon that piece of turf, boring a hole with her tail to

lay her eggs in, before the frost catches her and ends her like the rest:

though all things, I say, seem dead, yet there is plenty of life around you,

at your feet, I may almost say in the very stones on which you tread. And

though the place itself be dreary enough, a sheet of flat heather and a little

glen in it, with banks of dead fern, and a brown bog between them, and a

few fir-trees struggling up--yet, if you only have eyes to see it, that little

bit of glen is beautiful and wonderful,--so beautiful and so wonderful and

so cunningly devised, that it took thousands of years to make it; and it is

not, I believe, half finished yet.

How do I know all that? Because a fairy told it me; a fairy who lives

up here upon the moor, and indeed in most places else, if people have but

eyes to see her. What is her name? I cannot tell. The best name that I

can give her (and I think it must be something like her real name, because

she will always answer if you call her by it patiently and reverently) is

Madam How. She will come in good time, if she is called, even by a

little child. And she will let us see her at her work, and, what is more,

teach us to copy her. But there is another fairy here likewise, whom we

can hardly hope to see. Very thankful should we be if she lifted even the

smallest corner of her veil, and showed us but for a moment if it were but

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

her finger tip--so beautiful is she, and yet so awful too. But that sight, I

believe, would not make us proud, as if we had had some great privilege.

No, my dear child: it would make us feel smaller, and meaner, and more

stupid and more ignorant than we had ever felt in our lives before; at the

same time it would make us wiser than ever we were in our lives before- -

that one glimpse of the great glory of her whom we call Lady Why.

But I will say more of her presently. We must talk first with Madam

How, and perhaps she may help us hereafter to see Lady Why. For she is

the servant, and Lady Why is the mistress; though she has a Master over

her again--whose name I leave for you to guess. You have heard it often

already, and you will hear it again, for ever and ever.

But of one thing I must warn you, that you must not confound Madam

How and Lady Why. Many people do it, and fall into great mistakes

thereby,--mistakes that even a little child, if it would think, need not

commit. But really great philosophers sometimes make this mistake

about Why and How; and therefore it is no wonder if other people make it

too, when they write children's books about the wonders of nature, and

call them "Why and Because," or "The Reason Why." The books are

very good books, and you should read and study them: but they do not

tell you really "Why and Because," but only "How and So." They do not

tell you the "Reason Why" things happen, but only "The Way in which

they happen." However, I must not blame these good folks, for I have

made the same mistake myself often, and may do it again: but all the

more shame to me. For see--you know perfectly the difference between

How and Why, when you are talking about yourself. If I ask you, "Why

did we go out to-day?" You would not answer, "Because we opened the

door." That is the answer to "How did we go out?" The answer to Why

did we go out is, "Because we chose to take a walk." Now when we talk

about other things beside ourselves, we must remember this same

difference between How and Why. If I ask you, "Why does fire burn

you?" you would answer, I suppose, being a little boy, "Because it is hot;"

which is all you know about it. But if you were a great chemist, instead of

a little boy, you would be apt to answer me, I am afraid, "Fire burns

because the vibratory motion of the molecules of the heated substance

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

communicates itself to the molecules of my skin, and so destroys their

tissue;" which is, I dare say, quite true: but it only tells us how fire burns,

the way or means by which it burns; it does not tell us the reason why it

burns.

But you will ask, "If that is not the reason why fire burns, what is?"

My dear child, I do not know. That is Lady Why's business, who is

mistress of Mrs. How, and of you and of me; and, as I think, of all things

that you ever saw, or can see, or even dream. And what her reason for

making fire burn may be I cannot tell. But I believe on excellent grounds

that her reason is a very good one. If I dare to guess, I should say that

one reason, at least, why fire burns, is that you may take care not to play

with it, and so not only scorch your finger, but set your whole bed on fire,

and perhaps the house into the bargain, as you might be tempted to do if

putting your finger in the fire were as pleasant as putting sugar in your

mouth.

My dear child, if I could once get clearly into your head this difference

between Why and How, so that you should remember them steadily in

after life, I should have done you more good than if I had given you a

thousand pounds.

But now that we know that How and Why are two very different

matters, and must not be confounded with each other, let us look for

Madam How, and see her at work making this little glen; for, as I told you,

it is not half made yet. One thing we shall see at once, and see it more

and more clearly the older we grow; I mean her wonderful patience and

diligence. Madam How is never idle for an instant. Nothing is too

great or too small for her; and she keeps her work before her eye in the

same moment, and makes every separate bit of it help every other bit.

She will keep the sun and stars in order, while she looks after poor old Mrs.

Daddy- long-legs there and her eggs. She will spend thousands of years

in building up a mountain, and thousands of years in grinding it down

again; and then carefully polish every grain of sand which falls from that

mountain, and put it in its right place, where it will be wanted thousands of

years hence; and she will take just as much trouble about that one grain of

sand as she did about the whole mountain. She will settle the exact place

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

where Mrs. Daddy- long-legs shall lay her eggs, at the very same time that

she is settling what shall happen hundreds of years hence in a stair

millions of miles away. And I really believe that Madam How knows her

work so thoroughly, that the grain of sand which sticks now to your shoe,

and the weight of Mrs. Daddy-long-legs' eggs at the bottom of her hole,

will have an effect upon suns and stars ages after you and I are dead and

gone. Most patient indeed is Madam How. She does not mind the least

seeing her own work destroyed; she knows that it must be destroyed.

There is a spell upon her, and a fate, that everything she makes she must

unmake again: and yet, good and wise woman as she is, she never frets,

nor tires, nor fudges her work, as we say at school. She takes just as

much pains to make an acorn as to make a peach. She takes just as much

pains about the acorn which the pig eats, as about the acorn which will

grow into a tall oak, and help to build a great ship. She took just as much

pains, again, about the acorn which you crushed under your foot just now,

and which you fancy will never come to anything. Madam How is wiser

than that. She knows that it will come to something. She will find

some use for it, as she finds a use for everything. That acorn which you

crushed will turn into mould, and that mould will go to feed the roots of

some plant, perhaps next year, if it lies where it is; or perhaps it will be

washed into the brook, and then into the river, and go down to the sea, and

will feed the roots of some plant in some new continent ages and ages

hence: and so Madam How will have her own again. You dropped your

stick into the river yesterday, and it floated away. You were sorry,

because it had cost you a great deal of trouble to cut it, and peel it, and

carve a head and your name on it. Madam How was not sorry, though

she had taken a great deal more trouble with that stick than ever you had

taken. She had been three years making that stick, out of many things,

sunbeams among the rest. But when it fell into the river, Madam How

knew that she should not lose her sunbeams nor anything else: the stick

would float down the river, and on into the sea; and there, when it got

heavy with the salt water, it would sink, and lodge, and be buried, and

perhaps ages hence turn into coal; and ages after that some one would dig

it up and burn it, and then out would come, as bright warm flame, all the

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

sunbeams that were stored away in that stick: and so Madam How would

have her own again. And if that should not be the fate of your stick, still

something else will happen to it just as useful in the long run; for Madam

How never loses anything, but uses up all her scraps and odds and ends

somehow, somewhere, somewhen, as is fit and proper for the Housekeeper

of the whole Universe. Indeed, Madam How is so patient that some

people fancy her stupid, and think that, because she does not fall into a

passion every time you steal her sweets, or break her crockery, or

disarrange her furniture, therefore she does not care. But I advise you as

a little boy, and still more when you grow up to be a man, not to get that

fancy into your head; for you will find that, however good-natured and

patient Madam How is in most matters, her keeping silence and not

seeming to see you is no sign that she has forgotten. On the contrary, she

bears a grudge (if one may so say, with all respect to her) longer than any

one else does; because she will always have her own again. Indeed, I

sometimes think that if it were not for Lady Why, her mistress, she might

bear some of her grudges for ever and ever. I have seen men ere now

damage some of Madam How's property when they were little boys, and

be punished by her all their lives long, even though she had mended the

broken pieces, or turned them to some other use. Therefore I say to you,

beware of Madam How. She will teach you more kindly, patiently, and

tenderly than any mother, if you want to learn her trade. But if, instead

of learning her trade, you damage her materials and play with her tools,

beware lest she has her own again out of you.

Some people think, again, that Madam How is not only stupid, but ill-

tempered and cruel; that she makes earthquakes and storms, and famine

and pestilences, in a sort of blind passion, not caring where they go or

whom they hurt; quite heedless of who is in the way, if she wants to do

anything or go anywhere. Now, that Madam How can be very terrible

there can be no doubt: but there is no doubt also that, if people choose to

learn, she will teach them to get out of her way whenever she has business

to do which is dangerous to them. But as for her being cruel and unjust,

those may believe it who like. You, my dear boys and girls, need not

believe it, if you will only trust to Lady Why; and be sure that Why is the

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

mistress and How the servant, now and for ever. That Lady Why is

utterly good and kind I know full well; and I believe that, in her case too,

the old proverb holds, "Like mistress, like servant;" and that the more we

know of Madam How, the more we shall be content with her, and ready to

submit to whatever she does: but not with that stupid resignation which

some folks preach who do not believe in lady Why--that is no resignation

at all. That is merely saying -

"What can't be cured Must be endured,"

like a donkey when he turns his tail to a hail-storm,--but the true

resignation, the resignation which is fit for grown people and children

alike, the resignation which is the beginning and the end of all wisdom and

all religion, is to believe that Lady Why knows best, because she herself is

perfectly good; and that as she is mistress over Madam How, so she has a

Master over her, whose name--I say again--I leave you to guess.

So now that I have taught you not to be afraid of Madam How, we will

go and watch her at her work; and if we do not understand anything we

see, we will ask her questions. She will always show us one of her

lesson books if we give her time. And if we have to wait some time for

her answer, you need not fear catching cold, though it is November; for

she keeps her lesson books scattered about in strange places, and we may

have to walk up and down that hill more than once before we can make

out how she makes the glen.

Well--how was the glen made? You shall guess it if you like, and I

will guess too. You think, perhaps, that an earthquake opened it?

My dear child, we must look before we guess. Then, after we have

looked a little, and got some grounds for guessing, then we may guess.

And you have no ground for supposing there ever was an earthquake here

strong enough to open that glen. There may have been one: but we

must guess from what we do know, and not from what we do not.

Guess again. Perhaps it was there always, from the beginning of the

world? My dear child, you have no proof of that either. Everything

round you is changing in shape daily and hourly, as you will find out the

longer you live; and therefore it is most reasonable to suppose that this

glen has changed its shape, as everything else on earth has done. Besides,

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

I told you not that Madam How had made the glen, but that she was

making it, and as yet has only half finished. That is my first guess; and

my next guess is that water is making the glen--water, and nothing else.

You open your young eyes. And I do not blame you. I looked at

this very glen for fifteen years before I made that guess; and I have looked

at it some ten years since, to make sure that my guess held good. For

man after all is very blind, my dear boy, and very stupid, and cannot see

what lies under his own feet all day long; and if Lady Why, and He whom

Lady Why obeys, were not very patient and gentle with mankind, they

would have perished off the face of the earth long ago, simply from their

own stupidity. I, at least, was very stupid in this case, for I had my head

full of earthquakes, and convulsions of nature, and all sorts of prodigies

which never happened to this glen; and so, while I was trying to find what

was not there, I of course found nothing. But when I put them all out of

my head, and began to look for what was there, I found it at once; and lo

and behold! I had seen it a thousand times before, and yet never learnt

anything from it, like a stupid man as I was; though what I learnt you may

learn as easily as I did.

And what did I find?

The pond at the bottom of the glen.

You know that pond, of course? You don't need to go there? Very

well. Then if you do, do not you know also that the pond is always

filling up with sand and mud; and that though we clean it out every three

or four years, it always fills again? Now where does that sand and mud

come from?

Down that stream, of course, which runs out of this bog. You see it

coming down every time there is a flood, and the stream fouls.

Very well. Then, said Madam How to me, as soon as I recollected

that, "Don't you see, you stupid man, that the stream has made the glen,

and the earth which runs down the stream was all once part of the hill on

which you stand." I confess I was very much ashamed of myself when

she said that. For that is the history of the whole mystery. Madam How

is digging away with her soft spade, water. She has a harder spade, or

rather plough, the strongest and most terrible of all ploughs; but that, I am

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

glad to say, she has laid by in England here.

Water? But water is too simple a thing to have dug out all this great

glen.

My dear child, the most wonderful part of Madam How's work is, that

she does such great things and so many different things, with one and the

same tool, which looks to you so simple, though it really is not so. Water,

for instance, is not a simple thing, but most complicated; and we might

spend hours in talking about water, without having come to the end of its

wonders. Still Madam How is a great economist, and never wastes her

materials. She is like the sailor who boasted (only she never boasts) that,

if he had but a long life and a strong knife, he would build St. Paul's

Cathedral before he was done. And Madam How has a very long life,

and plenty of time; and one of the strongest of all her tools is water. Now

if you will stoop down and look into the heather, I will show you how she

is digging out the glen with this very mist which is hanging about our feet.

At least, so I guess.

For see how the mist clings to the points of the heather leaves, and

makes drops. If the hot sun came out the drops would dry, and they

would vanish into the air in light warm steam. But now that it is dark

and cold they drip, or run down the heather-stems, to the ground. And

whither do they go then? Whither will the water go,--hundreds of

gallons of it perhaps,--which has dripped and run through the heather in

this single day? It will sink into the ground, you know. And then what

will become of it? Madam How will use it as an underground spade, just

as she uses the rain (at least, when it rains too hard, and therefore the rain

runs off the moor instead of sinking into it) as a spade above ground.

Now come to the edge of the glen, and I will show you the mist that

fell yesterday, perhaps, coming out of the ground again, and hard at work.

You know of what an odd, and indeed of what a pretty form all these

glens are. How the flat moor ends suddenly in a steep rounded bank,

almost like the crest of a wave--ready like a wave- crest to fall over, and as

you know, falling over sometimes, bit by bit, where the soil is bare.

Oh, yes; you are very fond of those banks. It is "awfully jolly," as

you say, scrambling up and down them, in the deep heath and fern; besides,

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

there are plenty of rabbit-holes there, because they are all sand; while

there are no rabbit-holes on the flat above, because it is all gravel.

Yes; you know all about it: but you know, too, that you must not go

too far down these banks, much less roll down them, because there is

almost certain to be a bog at the bottom, lying upon a gentle slope; and

there you get wet through.

All round these hills, from here to Aldershot in one direction, and from

here to Windsor in another, you see the same shaped glens; the wave-crest

along their top, and at the foot of the crest a line of springs which run out

over the slopes, or well up through them in deep sand-galls, as you call

them--shaking quagmires which are sometimes deep enough to swallow

up a horse, and which you love to dance upon in summer time. Now the

water of all these springs is nothing but the rain, and mist, and dew, which

has sunk down first through the peaty soil, and then through the gravel and

sand, and there has stopped. And why? Because under the gravel

(about which I will tell you a strange story one day) and under the sand,

which is what the geologists call the Upper Bagshot sand, there is an

entirely different set of beds, which geologists call the Bracklesham beds,

from a place near the New Forest; and in those beds there is a vein of clay,

and through that clay the water cannot get, as you have seen yourself when

we dug it out in the field below to puddle the pond-head; and very good

fun you thought it, and a very pretty mess you made of yourself. Well:

because the water cannot get though this clay, and must go somewhere, it

runs out continually along the top of the clay, and as it runs undermines

the bank, and brings down sand and gravel continually for the next shower

to wash into the stream below.

Now think for one moment how wonderful it is that the shape of these

glens, of which you are so fond, was settled by the particular order in

which Madam How laid down the gravel and sand and mud at the bottom

of the sea, ages and ages ago. This is what I told you, that the least thing

that Madam How does to-day may take effect hundreds and thousands of

years hence.

But I must tell you I think there was a time when this glen was of a

very different shape from what it is now; and I dare say, according to your

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MADAMHOWANDLADYWHY1MADAMHOWANDLADYWHYByCharlesKingsleyMADAMHOWANDLADYWHY2CHAPTERI—THEGLENYoufinditdullwalkinguphereuponHartfordBridgeFlatthissadNovemberday?Well,Idonotdenythatthemoorlookssomewhatdreary,thoughdullitneedneverbe.Thoughthefogisclingingtothefir-trees,andcreepingamongtheheather,tillyoucan...

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