Leave we now, with story pending, Biddy and Eoa, Pearl, and even Amy;
thee, too, rare Bull, and thee, O Rufus, overcast with anger. It is
time to track the steps of him whom Fortune, blithe at her cruel trade,
shall track as far as Gades, Cantaber, and wild Syrtes, where the
Moorish billow is for ever heaving. Will he exclaim with the poet, who
certainly was a jolly mortal,—“I praise her while she is my guest. If
she flap her nimble wings, I renounce her charities; and wrap me in my
manhood robe, and woo the upright poverty, the bride without a dower.”
“A very fine sentiment, Master Horace; but were you not a little too
fond even of Sabine and Lesbian—when the Massic juice was beyond your
credit—to do anything more than _feel_ it?”
As Cradock Nowell trudged that night towards the Brockenhurst Station,
before he got very far from Amy, and while her tears were still on his
cheek, he felt a little timid lick, a weak offering of sympathy.
Hereby black Wena made known to him that she was melted by his
misfortunes, and saw that the right and most feeling course, and
the one most pleasing to her dead master, was the transfer of her
allegiance, and the swearing of fealty to the brother. To which
conclusion the tender mode in which she was being carried conduced,
perhaps, considerably; for she was wrapped in Claytonʼs woolly jacket,
enthroned on Cradockʼs broad right arm, and with only her black nose
exposed to the moon. So she jogged along very comfortably, until she
had made up her mind, and given Cradock the kiss of seisin.
“Dear little thing,” he cried, for he looked on her now as Amyʼs
keepsake, “you shall go with me wherever I go. You are faithful enough
to starve with me; but you shall not starve until after me.”
Then he put her down, for he thought that a little run would do her
good, and, in spite of all her misery, Amy had kept her pretty plump,
plumper than she herself was; and it became no joke to carry her, with
a travelling–bag, &c., after the first half mile.
Then Wena capered about, and barked, and came and licked his shoe, and
offered to carry the coat for him. As he would not let her do this,
she occupied her mind with the rabbits, which were out upon the feed
largely, and were the last she would see for a long while, except the
fat Ostenders.
When he got to London, and took small lodgings at a Mrs.
Ducksacreʼs, “greengrocer and general fruiterer, Mortimer–street,
Cavendish–square,”—I quote from the ladyʼs bags: confound it, there! I
am always saying improper things; _honi soit_—I mean, of course, her
paper bags—it was not long before he made two important discoveries,
valuable rather than gratifying.
The first of these discoveries was, that our university portals are
a mere side–postern, and not the great _janua mundi_. He found his
classical scholarship, his early fame at Oxford, his love of elegant
literature, rather a disadvantage than a recommendation for business.
“Prigs, sir, prigs,” said a member of an eminent City firm; “of course,
I donʼt mean to be personal; but I have always found you Oxford men
prigs, quite unfit for desk–work. You fancy you know so much; you are
always discovering mareʼs–nests, and you wonʼt bear to be spoken to,
even if you stick to your work; which, I assure you, is quite the
exception. Then you hold yourself aloof, with your stupid etiquette,
from the other young men, who are quite as good as you are. I assure
you, the place was too hot to hold us with the last Oxford man we
took in the counting–house; he gave himself such airs, the donkey! I
vowed never to do it again: and I never will, sir. Good morning, sir;
Gregson, show this gentleman the way out.”
Gregson did so with a grin, for Cradockʼs face proved that the
principal had not been altogether wrong.
Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion,
disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one
cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of
Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run
too far into the free and easy.
Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50_l._ is no large capital to
commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his
start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has
never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs
friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in
this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped
all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood;
and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be
common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that
one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his
gratitude to her father.
John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of
high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known at college.
But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he
never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as
the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and
irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer—although the name
is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst,
however, are proud of the double _l_, and think a good deal of the
_w_—and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her
Majesty.
Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce,
and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “_prima
virorum_,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would
not swing back for him. The _mare magnum_—to mix metaphors, although
bars are added to the Lucrine—the _mare magnum_ of letters was more
like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten—bare–footed
as we must be—over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he
might have swum there.
In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called
were gentlemen, and told him the truth.
“Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his
manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published
it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.”
“Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise; “is there no chance,
then, of a sale for it?”
“None whatever. Poetry, unless it be some oneʼs whose name is well
known, is a perfect drug in the market. In the course of ten or a dozen
years, by advertising continually, by influence among the reviewers,
by hitting some popular vein, or being taken up by some authority, you
might attain an audience. Are you ready to encounter all this? Even if
you are, we must decline, we are sorry to say, to have anything to do
with it.”
“Verse, eh? Better have cut your throat,” more tersely replied an
elderly gentleman, well known for his rudeness to authors. However,
even that last was a friend, when compared with some whom it might have
been his evil luck to consult. They advertise their patent methods
of putting a work before the public, without any risk to the author,
&c. &c. Disinterested gentlemen! They are to have no profit whatever,
except from the sale of the work, and they know they wonʼt sell five
copies.
However, there are not many of this sort in an honourable and most
important profession; and Cradock Nowell was lucky enough not to
fall in with any of them. So he accepted the verdict so unanimously
returned, and stored away with a heavy heart his laborious little
manuscript. It was only a translation in verse of the Halieutics, and a
few short original pieces—the former at any rate valuable, as having
been revised by John Rosedew.
There are courts and alleys in the neighbourhood of Mortimer–street
which, for misery and poverty, dirt and desperation, may vie with
almost any of the more famous shames of London.
Cradockʼs own great trouble, the sympathy he had met with, and the
comfort he received from it, had begun by this time to soften his
heart, and render it more sensitive to the distress of others. At
first, it had been far otherwise. The feeling of bitter injustice,
resentment at, and defiance of, a blow which seemed to him so
unmerited, and, worse than all, his own fatherʼs base and low mistrust
of him—who could have been surprised if these things, acting upon a
sad lone heart, and a bold mind beginning to think for itself, had made
the owner an infidel? And very likely they would have done so, when he
was removed from John Rosedewʼs influence, but for that scene with Amy.
He loved that girl so warmly, so devotedly, so purely, that, when he
found his love returned in equal quantity and quality, it renewed his
faith in justice. He saw that there is a measure and law, even where
all appears to be anarchy and anomaly; that the hand of God is not
stretched forth upon His children wantonly; that we cannot gauge His
circling survey by the three–inch space between human eyes, neither
does He rest His balance on His earthly footstool. So Cradock escaped
the deadly harm, which almost seems designed to poise that noblest
gift of Heaven—a free and glorious intellect—he escaped it through
the mercy which gave him true affection.
And now once more he looked with love upon his fellow–men, such love
as the frigid atheist school shall never form nor educate—which truth
alone to a great heart might be conclusive against that school—the
love which few religions except our own inculcate, and no other takes
for its essence.
As yet he was too young to know the blind and inhuman selfishness,
the formality and truckling, and the other paltry dishonesties, which
still exist and try to cheat us under the name of “Society.” The cant
is going by already. Every man who dares to think knows that its laws
are obsolete, because they have not for their basis either of these
three—truth, simplicity, charity.
Even that young man was astonished at the manner in which society
ignores its broader and only true meaning—fellowship among men—and
renounces all other duties, save that of shaking from its shoes
its fellow–dust. He could not look upon the scenes so nigh to him,
and to each other, parted often by nothing more than nine inches
of brick or two inches of deal; the wealth and the want, the feast
and the famine, the satiety and the ravening, the euphemy and the
blasphemy—though sometimes that last got inside the door, blew its
nose, and was infidelity; the prudery and the indecency, the whispered
lie and the yelled one, the sale of maidens by their mothers, or
of women by themselves—though here again the difference was never
very perceptible; all this impious contrast, spread as if for Godʼs
approval, for the Universal Fatherʼs blessing, in the land most chiefly
blessed by Him: which of His sons, not cast out for ever, could look on
it without weeping?
Cradock did something more than weep. He went with his little stock of
money, though he knew it could not do much; and he tried to help in
little ways, though as yet he had no experience. He bought meat, and
clothes, and took things out of pawn, and tried to make peace where
fights were.
At first he was grossly insulted, as a meddlesome swell; but, when he
had done two or three good things, and done them as a brother should,
he began to be owned among them. In one thing he was right, although he
had no experience; he confined his exertions to a very narrow compass.
Of course he got imposed upon—of course he helped the unworthy; but
after a while he began to know them, and even the unworthy—some two
hundred per cent.—began to have faint ideas of trying to deserve good
luck.
One man who attempted to pick Cradʼs pocket was knocked down by the
biggest thief there. “I wish I had a heap of money,” said Cradock,
every day; “I must keep some for myself, I suppose. Perhaps, after all,
I was wrong, in throwing up so hastily my chance of doing good.”
Then he remembered that, but for his trouble, he might never have
thought of the good to be done. And the good done to him was threefold
as much as he could do to others. Every day he grew less selfish, less
imperious, less exacting; every day he saw more clearly the good which
is in the worst of us.
There is a flint of peculiar character—I know not the local name
of it—which is found sometimes on the great Chissel Bank, and away
towards Lyme Regis. It is as hard, and sullen, and dull a flint (with
even the outside polish lost from the chafing of the waves)—a stone
as grey and foggy–looking;—as ever Deucalion took the trouble to
cast away over the left into an empty world. Yet it has, through the
heart of it, traversing it from pole to pole (for its shape is always
conical) a thread, a spindle, a siphuncle, of the richest golden hue.
None but those who are used to it can see the head of the golden
column, can even guess its existence. The stone is not hollow; it is
quite distinct from all pudding–stones and conglomerates.
Many such flints poor Crad came across, and sought in vain for the
beauty of them. He never tried to split them with a hammer, as too many
do of our Boanergæ; but he was too young to see or feel the chord of
the golden siphuncle. One, especially, one great fellow, was harder and
rougher than any flint, like the matrix of the concentric jasper.
“Confound that fellow,” said Cradock to himself; “I never shall get
at the heart of him. If my pluck were up a little more. Iʼd fight him;
though I know he would lick me. Heʼd be sorry for me afterwards.”
Issachar Jupp could lick any two men in the court. He was a bargee, of
good intentions—at least, when he took to the cuddy; but his horses
had pulled crosswise ever since; and the devil knew, better than the
angels, what his nature now was.
“None of your d—d Scripture–reading for me!” he cried, when Cradock
came near him; though the young man had never attempted anything of the
sort.
He knew that the Word of God is not bread to a blackguardʼs empty
belly. And another thing he knew—that he was not of the age and aspect
for John Bunyanʼs business. Moreover, Jupp was wonderfully jealous
of his wife, a gentle but grimy woman, forty–five years old, whom he
larruped every day; although he might be an infidel, he would ensure
his wifeʼs fidelity. Nevertheless, he had his pure vein, and Cradock at
last got at it.
Mrs. and Miss Ducksacre were very good–hearted women, but, like many
other women of that fibre, whose education has been neglected, of a hot
and hasty order. Not that we need suppose the pepper to be neutralized
by the refinement, only to be absorbed more equably, and transfused
more generally.
A little thing came feeling the way into the narrow, dingy shop, one
dark November evening, groping along by the sacks of potatoes (all of
them “seconds,” for the firm did not deal much in “Ware Regents”),
feeling its way along the sacks which towered above its head, like
bulky snow–giants embrowned with thaw; and then by the legs of the
“tatie–bin,” with the great scales hanging above it, and then by the
heap of lighting–wood, piled in halfpenny bundles, with the ends
against the wall; and so the little thing emerged between two mighty
hills of coleworts, and under the frugal gas–burner, and congratulated
itself, with a hug of the heart, upon safety.
“Take care, my dear,” cried Mrs. Ducksacre, looking large behind the
counter, “or youʼll tumble down the coal–trap, where the black bogeys
lives. Bless my heart, if it ainʼt little Loo! Why, Loo, I hardly knew
you. You ainʼt looking like yourself a bit, child. And who sent you out
at this time of night? What a shame, to be sure!”
Loo, the pride of Issachar Jupp, was rather a pretty little body,
about three and a half years old, “going on for four,” as she loved
to say, if anybody asked her; and her pale but clean face would have
been _very_ pretty, if her mother would have let her hair alone. But
it was all combed back, and tied tightly behind, like the tail of a
horse at a fair, or as affording a spout to pour the little girl out
by. She looked up at Mrs. Ducksacre, while her fingers played with the
coleworts, for her hands were hot, and this cooled them; and then,
with the instinct of nature, she stuck up for her father and mother.
“Pease, maʼam, Loo not fray much,”—though her trembling frock belied
her, all over the throat and the heart of it—“and father don from
home, maʼam, on the Wasintote” [Basingstoke canal], “and mother dot
nobody, onʼy Loo, to do thins. And she send this, ‘cause Looʼs poor
troat be bad, maʼam.”
The little child, whose throat was tied up with worn flannel from the
char–bucket, with the grey edge still upon it, wriggled in and out of
her shape and self, in the way only children can do; and at length
drew, from some innermost shrine, a halfpenny and a farthing.
“And what am I to give you for it, Loo? Oh, you poor little thing, how
very hoarse you are!”
Loo, with a confidence in human nature purely non–Londinian, had placed
her cash upon the altar, upon the inside of which so many worship,
while on the outside so many are sacrificed; without circumlocution,
the counter. Her eyes were below the rim of it, till she stood upon
tiptoe with one foot, while the other was up in the colewort roots, and
then she could see the money, and she poked out her little lips at it,
as if she would fain suck it back again.
“Pease, maʼam, Looʼs troat so bad, mother are goin to make a ‘tew, tree
haʼporth of tipe and a haʼporth of ‘egents, and a fardy of inons!”
“What a splendid stew, Loo!” said Mrs. Ducksacre, seeming to smell
it; “and so you want a haʼporth of taties, and a farthingʼs worth
of onions. And you shall have them, my dear, and as good a three
farthings’ worth as ever was put up in London. Where are you going to
put them all?”
Loo opened her sore throat, and pointed down it. She had not yet lost
her appetite; and that child did love tripe so.
“No, no, I donʼt mean that, Loo. I know you have a nice room inside;
though some will be for mother, wonʼt it, now? I mean, how are you
going to carry it home?”
“In Looʼs pinney,” replied the child, delighted with her success; for
ever so many people had told her, that the Ducksacres now were getting
so high, they would soon leave off making farthings–worths; and any
tradesman who does that is above the sphere of the street–child.
“My dear, your pinney wonʼt hold them, potatoes are so cheap now”—she
had just sworn they were awfully dear to a person she disliked—“I
am sure you canʼt carry a haʼporth. Oh, Mr. Newman, you are so
good–natured”—Cradock was just coming in, rather glum from another
failure—“I really donʼt believe you would think you were bemeaning
yourself by going home with this poor little atom.”
“I should rather hope I would not,” replied Cradock, looking grand.
“Oh, I did not know. I beg your pardon, Iʼm sure. I would go myself,
only Sally is out, and the boy gone home ever so long ago. I beg your
pardon, Iʼm sure, Mr. Newman; I thought you were so good–natured.”
“Mrs. Ducksacre,” said Cradock, “you utterly misunderstand me. I
replied to the form of your sentence, perhaps, rather than to its
meaning. What I meant was, that I should rather hope I would not think
it below me to go home with this little dear. If I could suppose it any
disgrace to me, I should deserve to be kicked by your errand–boy all
round this shop, Mrs. Ducksacre; and I am surprised you misunderstand
me so. Why, I know this little girl well; and her name is Louisa Jupp.”
“Tiss Loo,” said the little child, standing up on tiptoe, and spreading
out her arms to Cradock. All the children loved him, as the little ones
at Nowelhurst would run after Mr. Rosedew. Children are even better
judges of character than dogs.
“Why, you poor little soul,” said Crad, as he seated her on his strong
right arm with her little cheek to his, and she drew a thousand straws
of light through her lashes from the gas–jet, which she had never yet
been so close to, “how hot and dry your lips are! I hope you are not
taking the—sickness”—he was going to say “fever,” but feared to
frighten Loo.
“Mother fray,” cried the small girl, proud of the importance accruing
to her, “Loo dot wever; Irishers dot bad wever on the foor below
mother. Loo det nice thins, and lay abed, if me dot the wever.”
“Put the poor childʼs things, whatever they are, in a basket, Mrs.
Ducksacre. How odd her little legs feel! And a shillingʼs worth of
grapes, if you please, in a bag by themselves. Hereʼs the money for
them. You know Iʼll bring back the basket. But the bags donʼt come
back, do they?”
“No, sir, of course not. Half–a–crown a gross for the small ones, with
the name and the cross–handle basket, and the cabbage and carrots, sir.
Sixpence more for cornopean–pattern with a pineapple, and grapes and
oranges. But lor, sir, the cornopean” [cornucopiæ] “would frighten half
our customers. The basket–pattern pays better for an advertisement than
to get them back again, even if parties would bring them, which I knows
well they never would, sir.”
Then Cradock set forth with the child on his arm, his coat thrown over
his shoulders, and the best shillingʼs worth of foreign grapes—Mrs.
Ducksacre never bought English ones—and the best three farthingʼs
worth of potatoes and onions that was made that day by any tradesman in
any part of London, not excluding “them low costers,” as the Ducksacre
firm expressed it.
Little Loo Juppʼs sore throat proved to be, as Cradock feared it
would, the first symptom of scarlet fever; and the young man had the
pleasure—one of the highest and purest pleasures which any man can
have—of saving a human life. He watched that trembling flame of
life, and fostered it, and sheltered it, as if “the hopes of a nation
hung”—as the penny–a–liners love to say of some babe not a whit more
valuable—upon its feeble flicker. He hired another room for her, where
the air was purer; he made the doctor attend to the case, which at
first that doctor cared little to do; he brought her many a trifling
comfort; in a word, he waited upon her so that the old women of the
court called him thenceforth “Nurse Newman.”
“What, you here again, you white–livered young sneak!” cried Issachar
Jupp, reeling in at the door, just as Cradock was coming out; “take
that, then——” and he lifted a great oak bludgeon, newly cut from the
towing–path of the Basingstoke Canal. If Cradock had not been as quick
as lightning, and caught the stick over the bargemanʼs shoulder, there
would have been weeping and wailing and a lifelong woe for Amy.
“Hush,” he said; “donʼt make such a noise, man. Your child is at the
point of death, in the room overhead.”
Poor Crad, naturally of a bright complexion, but pale from long
unhappiness, might now have retorted the compliment as to the “pallor
jecoris.” The bargee turned so pale, that he looked like a collierʼs
tablecloth. Then he planted his heavy stick on the ground; else he
would have lain flat on his threshold.
“My Loo, my Loo!” was all he could say; “oh my Loo! _Itʼs a lie, sir!_”
“I wish it was,” replied Cradock; “take my arm, Mr. Jupp. Donʼt be
over–frightened. We hope with all our hearts to save her, and to–night
we shall know. Already I think I perceive some change in her breathing,
though her tongue is like a furnace.”
He spoke with a tone and in a voice which no man ever has described,
nor shall, but which every born man feels to be genuine, long ere he
can think.
“[Condemn] me for a [sanguineous] fool,” cried Jupp, with two enormous
tears guttering down the coal–dust, and his great chest heaving and
wanting to sob, only it didnʼt know the way; “[condemn] my eyes for
swearing so, and making such a [female dog] of myself, but what the
[Hades] am I to do? Oh my Loo, my Loo! If you die, Iʼll go to [Hades]
after you.”
Excuse me for washing out this speech to regulation weakness; perhaps
it was entered in white on high, as the turn of a life of blackness.
Cradock turned away, and trembled. Who can see a rugged man split
to the bottom of his nature, and not himself be splintered? I donʼt
believe that any can: not even the cold iron scoundrels whom modern
plays delight in.
“Now come up with me, Mr. Jupp,” said Crad, taking care not to look at
him, “out at this door, in at the other. Poor little soul! she has
been so good. You canʼt think how good she has been. And she has taken
her medicine so nicely.”
“Pray God Almighty not to [condemn] me, for not [condemning] myself
enough,” said Issachar Jupp, below his breath, as he leaned on
Cradockʼs arm.
It was his form of prayer; and it meant more than most of ours do.
Though I may be discarded by turtle–dove quill–drivers for daring to
record it, will he ever be worse for uttering it? Of course, it was
very shocking; but far more so to men than to angels.