[Illustration:
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART
Fifth Series
ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832
CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)
NO. 129.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]
ARACHNE AND MELISSA.
When Anne was queen and ‘Mrs Freeman’ was her mistress, two ladies
known to fame as Arachne and Melissa came one day before the reading
public. Those who are up in the literature of the time will remember
their portraits, which expressed two well-defined and persistent types
of humanity—those who get good from everything like Melissa, and
those who draw only evil like Arachne. Now, each of these ladies has
left behind her a long train of descendants—a wide-spreading _gens_,
as the old Romans would have said—in the people who prefer to drink
vinegar out of a leaden cup or wine out of a golden; who are to their
surroundings as frost or as dew; who see the trodden backward path and
the unsurmounted hills in front through spectacles tinted in black or
in rose-colour; and who sing their Psalm of Life in the minor key,
discordantly, or in the major, with full harmonies. These are the
descendants of the Arachne (spider-born) and Melissa (honey-maker) who,
in Queen Anne’s time, sucked poison or gathered honey; and we meet them
at all four corners of our way.
The Arachnides are for the most part characterised by a strange and
chilling silence, when a few words would remove a painful impression
or enlighten a dangerous ignorance. When they do speak, their words
fall like vocal icicles which freeze and cut at the same time; and
they contrive to make their good advice more painful than other
people’s rebukes, and to give their information the form of a sarcastic
reproach in that you did not know it all before. Their presence in
society reminds one of the winter whose ‘Breath was a chain which
without a sound, The earth and the air and the water bound.’ Where
they are, freedom flags and gaiety declines; and only the most robust
of those moral pachyderms who oppose their thick insensitiveness to
all outside influences whatsoever, can withstand the lethal effect
of the Arachnides. Their small pale eyes wither; their pinched lips
paralyse; their very smiles are the fracture of a crystal more than the
visible sign of a living, friendly heart; and they are the veritable
‘freezing mixtures’ of life. They take strong and unreasoning dislikes
to quite innocent strangers and harmless acquaintances, and will not be
convinced that they have no occasion to do so; they quarrel for a mere
nothing with those who are so unfortunate as to be their friends and
relations, and cannot be induced to make nor to receive an explanation.
No one knows what has offended them, but all at once they become like
anthropomorphous polar bears to those to whom they had been moderately
human a little while before; and more intolerable than ever to those
to whom they had been intolerable enough when things were at their
best. Then they retreat into their own spiritual den to hammer away at
that leaden cup from which they drink the deadly acid that vitiates
all their life and destroys all their happiness. They make the worst
of things in every direction. If a cloud has come across the sky of
others’ friendships, they do what they can to increase the trouble and
to make that permanent which, by the nature of things and without their
evil offices, would have been evanescent. They kill all the tender
little sprouts of growing affection between two young people or two
likely comrades; and what they cannot do by straightforward means, they
do by crooked ones—which comes to the same thing in the end.
If any one is so ill advised as to take one of these Arachnides into
his confidence, he is sure to smart for it. Has he complained of a
common friend?—the grim confidant rasps the little abrasion till it
becomes a gangrened sore, and never lets it alone till it has lost all
power of healing. He does the same by the other—the one complained
of—till what was a mere nothing in the beginning becomes a cancer which
eats into the whole substance of their mutual love, and reduces it
to something worse than death. At no time is one of these Arachnides
a safe confidant; for so surely as the night follows on the day, so
surely will your secret be divulged in one of these moments of pique
and ill-temper for which the Spider-born are famous. Women of the
Spider-born _gens_ are great in this kind of small treachery. Have you
a false tooth?—a well-concealed twist of the poor weak spine?—a tress
of hair that never grew on your own head?—a blemish on your shoulder
beyond the line of the most _décolleté_ dress, and to the world
therefore as though it were not?—and has Arachne found out, or been
told in an impulse of misdirected confidence, one or all these things?
It is only a question of time. In time the whole of society will know
the fact; and that perfect bit of porcelain which the Generals and the
Colonels, the Bishops and the Archdeacons, admired so much, will ring
cracked for ever after. You might just as well have advertised your
secret in the _Times_; and so you find out when too late.
Egotist to their finger-tips, the Arachnides make their own small
annoyances the one great thought of their lives. They do not make much
account of their blessings, only of their misfortunes; and nothing is
so large as a microscopic speck on one of their most luscious fruits.
The fate of empires and the fall of nations are not so important as the
change of a servant or the ill arrangement of a dinner. The loss of a
hundred men in a battle does not touch them so much as the loss of a
row of cabbages in their garden; and a burnt duster out of a set is a
more serious affair in their eyes than a passenger-ship wrecked on the
Cornish coast or a merchant-steamer burnt to the water’s edge. On one
thing only can they be made loquacious—on their own small sufferings.
On these they will descant an hour by the clock, and more to come
after. But speak to them of the heart-anguish of others, and they are
unsympathetic, dumb, indifferent. Their fire burns for themselves
alone; to all the world beyond they have only slag and ice to give.
As a physiognomical sign, the Arachnides do not often look you in the
face. They glance rather than gaze with straight and level eyes; and
they prefer the corners of their eyes to the centres.
How different it is with those others—those Melissides who drink their
wine of life in deep draughts from golden cups; those singers of glad
melodies; those lovers of their kind and rejoicers in the sunshine;
those whose own jocund nature tints the whole outlook with roseate
hues, eloquent of the fresh morning and the young day’s hope! Wherever
they are, things go more easily. They do not suffer troubles to arise,
but put their broad backs to the work when strength is required—handle
the difficulty with their delicate fingers where tact is needed—and
by the marvellous power of their genial tempers, smooth all ruffled
feathers and still all angry seas. Seeing life as a mixed web, where
rare silks are shot through with the coarse fibres of roughened hemp
or common cotton, they prefer not to linger on the hemp nor to fret
over the cotton. They think the good is as true as the bad; and where
they cannot cure they do not contemplate. When two friends fall apart,
they do their level best to bring them together again; and when the
skin of the over-sensitive shows signs of abrasion and inflammation,
they treat it with an anodyne, not an irritant. They are too frank to
be untruthful; but they are too genial to be parsimonious of praise or
pinched in the matter of verbal accuracy. If a little embroidery can
hide the poverty of the original stuff, well, they do embroider; and
they think it no sin to expound a text already given. Thus they make
a grudging admission on the part of A. that B. is not quite such a
ruffian after all as Mr A. imagined, do as much good work as a positive
statement that B. is a very fine fellow indeed, and A. has no fault to
find with him anyhow. By which they knit up that weak bit of the rope,
and the two friends, who had strayed so far apart, are hauled up into
line as before.
When these workers in gold are, what common parlance calls friends,
with the workers in lead, the former have a hard time of it. They are
always at the point where the Arachnides are backing and the Melissides
are pulling—where the one are trying to break and the other doing their
best to hold. The Arachnite takes offence at a word, a look, a gesture,
a thing done or not done; and the Melissite will not have it. ‘Come,
old fellow, what’s up now?’ he says in that round cheery voice of his
which suggests honey and sunshine, or a strong west wind, or anything
else you like both sweet and wholesome. Probably the Arachnite pinches
his lips and says ‘Nothing;’ but ‘nothing’ does not answer the purpose,
and an explanation is forced—if indeed that poor chilled soul can be
forced into anything frank and human. If he cannot, then the other does
his best to laugh away the cloud and to go on as before; but it all
depends on the mood of the Spider-born whether this frankness will be
an offence or a clearance—whether it will win the day or lose it for
ever. Unlike the Arachnite, whose analogue is that liquid which, when
it is struck or stirred ever so lightly, breaks at once into crystals,
the Melissite is almost impossible to freeze. Even his anger has a
touch of generous pity in it, in that a man should be such a fool or so
wrong-headed; and where the one will not forgive the smallest mistake,
the other will forget the gravest wrong and trust to better things
in the future. Tender of heart, he nourishes all good impulses in
himself, and recognises them with gladness in others; and essentially
peace-loving, as the really strong ever are, he is slow to ‘wash his
spears,’ and only when forced by self-respect, goes out to fight his
foes. Generous as a master and genial as an administrator, he puts
up with the worries and disappointments inevitable to his business,
whatever it may be; not troubling the gods with his complaints because
men are made of clay, and every now and then break in the handling
and fly in the firing. On the contrary, he makes the best of things
even when they are bad; and looks to the perfected work rather than
to the abortive, which cannot now be mended. He believes in the
doctrine of encouragement rather than in the theory of repression,
and thinks when men know that they are trusted to do well, they do
better than when they know that they are expected to do ill—with the
handcuffs to follow. He has no great faith in gags and bearing-reins,
whips and spurs, for any kind of team that he may have to manage.
He trusts rather to the cheering voice and the guiding hand; and
his choice of method is justified by its results. In all troublous
times, the Melissite—he who looks at a man’s circumstances from that
man’s own standpoint, and not from one external, unintelligent and
unsympathetic—escapes the doom accorded to the Arachnides, and lives
in peaceful security where these others are not safe, however well
protected. If such as he did not form what Matthew Arnold calls the
remnant, society would stand still like the clogged wheels of a
watch, and men would perish in the moral desert as they perish in the
material. The righteous men who save cities are they who do good to
their brother-men as well as they who pray to God; and ‘he prayeth best
who loveth best’ is a phrase we all know by head, and some of us by
heart and head as well.
In hours of doubt and danger, the Arachnite despairs; but the Melissite
buckles to for the work of decision and deliverances, hoping while a
ray of light remains, or a plank whole out of the wreck. The one cannot
spell success; the other will not learn to say defeat; the one does
not hold on, the other cannot be beaten off. Hence we seldom find the
working Arachnides successful in life; and the bread which they have
to bake for themselves is apt to be both scant in quantity and sour
in quality. The others, on the contrary, for the most part succeed.
They have not only a larger volume of life to bear them on, but they
have also the art of making friends, such as those poor starved
prison-pinched souls do not know. They are thus backed by their own
strength, and given a helping hand by the strength of others; where the
Arachnides get no extraneous aid, and soon come to the end of their own
power. Then they complain of their ill-luck, or speak of secret enemies
who work in the dark against them; and, if women, they go into the
sunless labyrinth of ‘nerves,’ by which they excuse their jealousy and
ill-temper, their sourness and crossness. They say severely that no one
knows what they suffer, save those who are in like manner afflicted,
and that they alone can measure the pain they endure. Perhaps the
good-tempered interlocutor thinks to himself: ‘A little honey mixed in
with all thy vinegar, O Arachnite, would soften much of thy misery and
reduce thy misfortunes to zero; and the milk of human kindness set to
make cream is a better spiritual drink than the poison thou distillest
and the vinegar which makes thee thin; and the poor thin whey, which is
but serum with all the cream and cheese and butter taken out, is bad
nourishment for men or babes.’
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Delgado had fixed ‘the great and terrible day’ for Wednesday evening.
On Monday afternoon, Harry and Nora, accompanied by Mr Dupuy, went for
a ride in the cool of dusk among the hills together. Trinidad that day
was looking its very best. The tall and feathery bamboos that overhung
the serpentine pathways stood out in exquisite clearness of outline,
like Japanese designs, against the tender background of pearl-gray sky.
The tree ferns rose lush and green among the bracken after yesterday’s
brief and refreshing thunder-shower. The scarlet hibiscus trees beside
the negro huts were in the full blush of their first flowering season.
The poinsettias, not, as in England, mere stiff standard plants from
florists’ cuttings, but rising proudly into graceful trees of free and
rounded growth, with long drooping branches, spread all about their
great rosettes of crimson leaflets to the gorgeous dying sunlight.
The broad green foliage of the ribbed bananas in the negro gardens
put to shame the flimsy tropical make-believes of Kew or Monte Carlo.
For the first time, it seemed to Harry Noel he was riding through the
true and beautiful tropics of poets and painters; and the reason was
not difficult to guess, for Nora—Nora really seemed to be more kindly
disposed to him. After all, she was not made of stone, and they had an
interest in common which the rest of the house of Dupuy did not share
with Nora—the interest in Edward and Marian Hawthorn. You can’t have a
better introduction to any girl’s heart—though I daresay it may be very
wicked indeed to acknowledge it—than a common attachment to somebody or
something tabooed or opposed by the parental authorities.
Mr Dupuy rode first in the little single-file cavalcade, as became
the senior; and Mr Dupuy’s cob had somehow a strange habit of keeping
fifty yards ahead of the other horses, which gave its owner on this
particular occasion no little trouble. Harry and Nora followed behind
at a respectful distance; and Harry, who had bought a new horse of
his own the day before, and who brought up the rear on his fresh
mount, seemed curiously undesirous of putting his latest purchase
through its paces, as one might naturally have expected him to do
under the circumstances. On the contrary, he hung about behind most
unconscionably, delaying Nora by every means in his power; and Mr
Dupuy, looking back from his cob every now and again, grew almost weary
of calling out a dozen times over: ‘Now then, Nora, you can canter up
over this little bit of level, and catch me up, can’t you, surely?’
‘If it weren’t for the old gentleman,’ Harry thought to himself
more than once, ‘I really think I should take this opportunity of
speaking again to Nora’—he always called her ‘Nora’ in his own heart—a
well-known symptom of the advanced stages of the disease—though she was
of course ‘Miss Dupuy’ alone in conversation. ‘Or even if we were on a
decent English road, now, where you can ride two abreast, and have a
_tête-à-tête_ quite as comfortably as in an ordinary drawing-room! But
it’s clearly impossible to propose to a girl when she’s riding a whole
horse’s length in front of you on a one-horse pathway. You can’t shout
out to her: “My beloved, I adore you,” at the top of your voice, as
they do at the opera, especially with her own father—presumably devoted
to the rival interest—hanging ahead within moderate earshot.’ So Harry
was compelled to repress for the present his ardent declaration, and
continue talking to Nora Dupuy about Edward and Marian, a subject
which, as he acutely perceived, was more likely to bring them into
sympathy with one another than any alternative theme he could possibly
have hit upon.
Presently, they descended again upon the plain, and Mr Dupuy was just
about to rejoin them in a narrow lane, almost wide enough for three
abreast, and bordered by a prickly hedge of cactus and pinguin, when,
to Nora’s great surprise, Tom Dupuy, on his celebrated chestnut mare
Sambo Gal, came cantering up in the opposite direction, as if on
purpose to catch and meet them. Tom wasn’t often to be found away from
his canes at that time of day, and Nora had very little doubt indeed
that he had caught a glimpse of Harry and herself from Pimento Valley,
on the zigzag mountain path, without noticing her father on in front of
them, and had ridden out with the express intention of breaking in upon
their supposed _tête-à-tête_.
Mr Dupuy unconsciously prevented him from carrying out this natural
design. Meeting his nephew first in the narrow pathway, he was just
going to make him turn round and ride alongside with him, when Nora,
seized with a sudden fancy, half whispered to Harry Noel: ‘I’m not
going to ride with Tom Dupuy; I can’t endure him; I shall turn and ride
back in the opposite direction.’
‘We must tell your father,’ Harry said, hesitating.
‘Of course,’ Nora answered decidedly.—‘Papa,’ she continued, raising
her voice, ‘we’re going to ride back again and round by Delgado’s hut,
you know—the mountain-cabbage palm-tree way is so much prettier, and
I want to show it to Mr Noel. You and Tom Dupuy can turn and follow
us.—The cob always goes ahead, you see, Mr Noel, if once he’s allowed
to get in front of the other horses.’
They turned back once more in this reversed order, Nora and Harry Noel
leading the way, and Mr Dupuy, abreast with Tom, following behind
somewhat angrily, till they came to a point in the narrow lane where a
gap in the hedge led into a patch of jungle on the right-hand side. An
old negro had crept out of it just before them, carrying on his head,
poised quite evenly, a big fagot of sticks for his outdoor fireplace.
The old man kept the middle of the lane, just in front of them, and
made not the slightest movement to right or left, as if he had no
particular intention of allowing them to pass. Harry had just given
his new horse a tap with the whip, and they were trotting along to get
well in front of the two followers, so he didn’t greatly relish this
untoward obstacle thrown so unexpectedly in his way. ‘Get out of the
road, will you, you there!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Don’t you see a lady’s
coming? Stand aside this minute, my good fellow, and let her pass, I
tell you.’
Delgado turned around, almost as the horse’s nose was upon him, and
looking the young man defiantly in the face, answered with an obvious
sneer: ‘Who is you, sah, dat you speak to me like-a dat? Dis is de
Queen high-road, for naygur an’ for buckra. You doan’t got no right at
all to turn me off it.’
Harry recognised his man at once, and the hot temper of the
Lincolnshire Noels boiled up within him. He hit out at the fellow
with his riding-whip viciously. Delgado didn’t attempt to dodge the
blow—a negro never does—but merely turned his head haughtily, so that
the bundle of sticks pushed hard against the horse’s nose, and set it
bleeding with the force of the sudden turn. Delgado knew it would:
the sticks, in fact, were prickly acacia. The horse plunged and reared
a little, and backed up in fright against the cactus hedge. The sharp
cactus spines and the long aloe-like needles of the pinguin leaves
in the hedgerow goaded his flank severely as he backed against them.
He gave another plunge, and hit up wildly against Nora’s mount. Nora
kept her seat bravely, but with some difficulty. Harry was furious.
Forgetting himself entirely, he knocked the bundle of sticks off the
old man’s head with a sudden swish of his thick riding-crop, and then
proceeded to lay the whip twice or three times about Delgado’s ears
with angry vehemence. To his great surprise, Delgado stood, erect and
motionless, as if he didn’t even notice the blows. Appeased by what
he took to be the man’s submissiveness, Harry dug his heel into his
horse’s side and hurried forward to rejoin Nora, who had ridden ahead
hastily to avoid the turmoil.
‘He’s an ill-conditioned, rude, bad-blooded fellow, that nigger there,’
he said apologetically to his pretty companion. ‘I know him before.
He’s the very same man I told you of the other evening, that wouldn’t
pick my whip up for me the first day I came to Trinidad. I’m glad he’s
had a taste of it to-day for his continual impudence.’
‘He’ll have you up for assault, you may be sure, Mr Noel,’ Nora
answered earnestly. ‘And if Mr Hawthorn tries the case, he’ll give it
against you, for he’ll never allow any white man to strike a negro.
That man’s name is Delgado; he’s an African, you know—an imported
African—and a regular savage; and he had a fearful quarrel once with
papa and Tom Dupuy about the wages, which papa has never forgiven. But
Mr Hawthorn _does_ say’—and Nora dropped her voice a little—‘that he’s
really had a great deal of provocation, and that Tom Dupuy behaved
abominably, which of course is very probable, for what can you expect
from Tom Dupuy, Mr Noel?—But still’—and this she said very loudly ‘all
the negroes themselves will tell you that Louis Delgado’s a regular
rattlesnake, and you must put your foot firmly down upon him if you
want to crush him.’
‘If you put your foot on rattlesnake,’ Louis Delgado cried aloud from
behind, in angry accents, ‘you crush rattlesnake; but rattlesnake sting
you, so you die.’ And then he muttered to himself in lower tones: ‘An’
de rattlesnake has got sting in him tail dat will hurt dat mulatto man
from Englan’, still, dat tink himself proper buckra.’
Tom Dupuy and his uncle had just reached the spot when Louis Delgado
said angrily to himself, in negro soliloquy, this offensive sentence.
Tom reined in and looked smilingly at his uncle as Delgado said it. ‘So
you know something, too, about this confounded Englishman, you wretched
nigger you!’ he said condescendingly. ‘You’ve found out that our friend
Noel’s a woolly-headed mulatto, have you, Delgado?’
Louis Delgado’s eyes sparkled with gratified malevolence as he answered
with a cunning smile: ‘Aha, Mistah Tom Dupuy, you glad to hear dat,
sah! You want to get some information from de poor naygur dis ebenin’,
do you! No, no, sah; de Dupuys an’ me, we is not fren’; we is at
variance one wit de odder. I doan’t gwine to tell you nuffin’ at all,
sah, about de buckra from Englan’. But when mule kick too much, I say
to him often: “Ha, ha, me fren’, you is too proud. You tink you is
horse. I s’pose you doan’t rightly remember dat your own fader wasn’t
nuffin’ but a common jackass!”’
He loved to play with both his intended victims at once, as a cat plays
with a captured mouse before she kills it. Keep him in suspense as long
as you can—that’s the point of the game. Dandle him, and torture him,
and hold him off; but never tell him the truth outright, for good or
for evil, as long as you can possibly help it.
‘Do you really know anything,’ Tom Dupuy asked eagerly, ‘or are you
only guessing, like all the rest of us? Do you mean to tell me you’ve
got any proof that the fellow’s a nigger?—Come, come, Delgado, we may
have quarrelled, but you needn’t be nasty about it. I’ve got a grudge
against this man Noel, and I don’t mind paying you liberally for
anything you can tell me against him.’
But Delgado shook his head doggedly. ‘I doan’t want your money, sah,’
he answered with a slow drawl; ‘I want more dan your money, if I want
anyting. But I doan’t gwine to help you agin me own colour. Buckra for
buckra, an’ colour for colour! If you want to find out about him, why
doan’t you write to de buckra gentlemen over in Barbadoes?’
He kept the pair of white men there, dawdling and parleying, for twenty
minutes nearly, while Harry and Nora went riding away alone towards
the mountain cabbage-palms. It pleased Delgado thus to be able to hold
the two together on the tenter-hooks of suspense—to exercise his power
before the two buckras. At last, Tom Dupuy condescended to direct
entreaty. ‘Delgado,’ he said with much magnanimity, ‘you know I don’t
often ask a favour of a nigger—it ain’t the way with us Dupuys; it
don’t run in the family—but still, I ask you as a personal favour to
tell me whatever you know about this matter: I have reasons of my own
which make me ask you as a personal favour.’
Delgado’s eyes glistened horribly. ‘Buckra,’ he answered with a hideous
grin, dropping all the usual polite formulas, ‘I will tell you for true
den; I will tell you all about it. Dat man Noel is son ob brown gal
from ole Barbadoes. Her name is Budleigh, an’ her fam’ly is brown folks
dat lib at place dem call de Wilderness. I hear all about dem from
Isaac Pourtalès. Pourtalès an’ dis man Noel, dem is bot’ cousin. De man
is brown just same like Isaac Pourtalès!’
‘By George, Uncle Theodore!’ Tom Dupuy cried exultantly, ‘Delgado’s
right—right to the letter. Pourtalès is a Barbadoes man: his father
was one of the Pourtalèses of this island who settled in Barbadoes,
and his mother must have been one of these brown Budleighs. Noel
told us himself the other day his mother was a Budleigh—a Budleigh
of the Wilderness. He’s been over in Barbadoes looking after their
property.—By Jove, Delgado, I’d rather have a piece of news like that
than a hundred pounds!—We shall stick a pin, after all, Uncle Theodore,
in that confounded, stuck-up, fal-lal mulatto-man.’
‘It’s too late to follow them up by the mountain-cabbages,’ Mr Theodore
Dupuy exclaimed with an anxious sigh—how did he know but that at that
very moment this undoubted brown man might be proposing (hang his
impudence) to his daughter Nora?—‘it’s too late to follow them, if we
mean to dress for dinner. We must go home straight by the road, and
even then we won’t overtake them before they’re back at Orange Grove,
I’m afraid, Tom.’
Delgado stood in the middle of the lane and watched them retreating
at an easy canter; then he solemnly replaced the bundle of sticks on
the top of his head, spread out his hands and fingers in the most
expressively derisive African attitudes, and began to dance with
wild glee a sort of imaginary triumphal war-dance over his intended
slaughter. ‘Ha, ha,’ he cried aloud, ‘Wednesday ebenin’—Wednesday
ebenin’! De great and terrible day ob de Lard comin’ for true on
Wednesday ebenin’! Slay, slay, slay, an’ leave not one libbin’ soul
behind in de land ob de Amalekites. Dat is de first an’ de last good
turn I ebber gwine to do for Tom Dupuy, for certain. I doan’t want his
money, I tell him, but I want de blood ob him. On Wednesday night, I
gwine to get it. Ha, ha! We gwine to slay de remnant ob de Amalekites.’
He paused a moment, and poised the bundle more evenly on his head; then
he went on, walking homewards more quietly, but talking to himself
aloud, in a clear, angry, guttural voice, as negroes will do, under
the influence of powerful excitement. ‘What for I doan’t tell dat man
Noel himself dat he is mulatto when him hit me?’ he asked himself with
rhetorical earnestness. ‘Becase I doan’t want to go an’ spoil de fun ob
de whole discovery. If _I_ tell him, dat doan’t nuffin’—even before de
missy. Tom Dupuy is proper buckra: he hate Noel, an’ Noel hate him! He
gwine to tell it so it sting Noel. He gwine to disgrace dat proud man
before de buckras an’ before de missy!’
He paused again, and chewed violently for a minute or two at a piece of
cane he pulled out of his pocket; then he spat out the dry refuse with
a fierce explosion of laughter, and went on again: ‘But I doan’t gwine
to punish Noel like I gwine to punish de Dupuys an’ de missy. Noel is
fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn, de fren’ ob de naygur: dat gwine to be imputed
to him for righteousness. In de great and terrible day, de angel gwine
to pass ober Noel, same as him pass ober de house ob Israel; but de
house ob de Dupuy shall perish utterly, like de house ob Pharaoh, an’
like de house ob Saul, king ob Israel, whose seed was destroyed out ob
de land, so dat not one ob dem left.’
THE MODERN PRIZE SYSTEM.
It may be accepted as a principle that the education question admits of
no final settlement in a state of progressive civilisation. Methods and
forms, possibly the outcome of much thought and effort, established in
one age, become cumbrous or altogether valueless in the next. They are
found unsuited to the requirements of the later period, during which a
demand has arisen for other kinds of knowledge, or for more advanced
teaching in subjects previously treated in an elementary manner only.
Hence it follows that the minds of enlightened nations become directed
to educational matters with a certain degree of periodicity: from time
to time the education question becomes a burning one.
The most superficial reader of the daily papers or magazines cannot
fail to have been struck latterly by the increasing attention bestowed
on such matters by the people of these countries. So decided an
influence is exerted by these considerations on the public just now,
that we find them furnishing a test in some districts for parliamentary
or other representatives. At social and literary gatherings, such
questions as the following are warmly discussed: Should the State
provide and maintain schools for the people, or should these be largely
left to individual enterprise, as at present?—Should State interference
take the form it has done in recent educational experiments, wherein
two universities and one gigantic scheme of intermediate education have
been framed on the lines of mere examining boards, disbursing public
prize-money?—What is the relative value of the kinds of instruction
ordinarily given in schools?—How may the desire for information be
aroused among the masses, and in what way may the stimulus be best
applied?
These and other questions of a kindred nature occupy the thoughts of
many at this time. It is not our present purpose to deal with the whole
question of education, but to consider very briefly one aspect of
it—namely, prizes and their distribution.
If we inquire what inducements are offered to pupils to excel in
special subjects or to proceed to higher branches of them, we find
that the same general plan is followed in all our institutions, from
the most elementary to the highest—namely, money prizes or their
equivalent in books or medals, the obtaining of which presupposes a
competitive examination. In most instances, the prize-money is paid in
cash to the successful candidate. The age in which we live is eminently
competitive, a fact early recognised by children at school, and still
better understood in after-life. In comparing ourselves with our
neighbours, may it not be a fact that we are an over-examined people?
We may further ask, are examinations always fair tests of ability? Is
the reward system, as we have it, the best means of promoting a higher
culture?
Those who have had any experience at all of examinations must have been
over and over again surprised at the order in which candidates known
to them are placed on the Honour list. There is a certain element of
chance about examinations rapidly conducted that cannot be eliminated,
and which may lead to the disappointment of the most confident hopes.
A diligent student, who has perhaps overtaxed himself physically in
preparation for, or who is over-anxious about the examination, fails
utterly, or is surpassed by some one of very superficial attainments.
It seems to us that the verdict of a teacher, or, to prevent
favouritism, of several teachers, as to the relative merits of the
pupils long under their training and observation, has some advantages
over the examination method at present in vogue, success in which is
as often attained by an unhealthy effort of ‘cramming,’ as by patient
and honest study. Doubtless, examinations for some purposes cannot be
entirely dispensed with, but must remain as necessary evils. Still,
their frequency could be reduced considerably with decided benefit to
the physical, and possibly also to the intellectual, condition of the
rising generation.
The second part of our question remains to be considered: Is the
present reward system the best means of promoting higher culture? Let
us suppose a case. There is a class of twenty pupils engaged upon a
subject for which a valuable prize is offered. Possibly seventeen of
these, from their former experience of their class-fellows, conclude
that the prize lies between the remaining three, and that there is
no use trying for it. The prize and perhaps the subject also have no
longer any interest for them; they cease to study, or at all events do
little. The three amongst whom the prize lies are the most diligent,
who probably like the subject, or learning generally for its own sake,
or who, from vanity or ambition, are anxious to excel. These are they
to whom the stimulus is applied; but they are the very pupils that
need no further stimulus. The spur is virtually withheld from those
requiring it, and applied to those who need it not.
If it be conceded that the need of reform is indicated in such
cases, we must avoid rushing to the opposite extreme in trying to
effect it. No one will suggest that the method of reward as applied
to donkey-races would meet the case. With our present light, we
are not prepared to recommend a thorough-going remedy. Much may,
however, be done for the cause of true culture by modifying the
distribution of prizes. The current notion of a prize is, that it
is a reward for something well done, due as soon as the meritorious
act is accomplished. Etymologically considered, the word conveys
nothing more than that. A higher estimate of the function of a prize
might advantageously be substituted for the one implied in the above
definition. If it were regarded as not merely a reward for something
past and done, but also as a stimulus to further effort in the same
direction, more lasting good might be effected, and a modification
of the present system of distribution would become a necessity. For
example: a large money prize obtained in a junior school, instead of
being paid directly to the successful candidate, might be divided into
two unequal sums, the smaller to provide a medal or book, &c., as a
tangible evidence of distinction; the larger, to be applied as fees
at a neighbouring high-school or college where the favourite subjects
could be studied for a longer period free of cost to the pupil. The
payment of the larger instalment could be made contingent upon the
successful candidate desiring to prosecute his studies further. In the
event of the pupil electing to abandon study in favour of trade or
business, or from mere disinclination, the medal, book, &c., showing
the position attained, might alone be presented, and the balance of the
prize-money be forfeited.
Among other benefits resulting from this scheme we might instance—that
cramming would be diminished to an appreciable extent. A common
practice nowadays with many who enter for prize examinations is
to hurriedly prepare a large number of subjects, selected more
with reference to their maximum of marks than to the tastes of the
pupil, then to obtain the coveted prize, and subsequently to forget
the mass of undigested information with which their memories have
been surfeited, possibly never to return without disgust to the
consideration of them.
We fancy such a modification as sketched above would influence
favourably those who select a subject for its own sake and are desirous
of knowing it perfectly. If successful in the elementary schools, the
means are gained for following it up in a more advanced one till it is
finally mastered, the information having been gradually imparted and
more perfectly assimilated. On the other hand, the scheme would rather
repel those alluded to before, who study hurriedly particular branches
solely for the sake of the money to be gained, only so long as this is
at once paid to them in the form of cash.
The plan recommended appears to be inconsistent with separate or
private educational enterprises, many of which depend for their
maintenance and efficiency on large fees. The want of uniformity in
constitution and management of elementary schools, and the want of
harmonious action resulting from the rivalry between them, scarcely
offer the proper conditions for the full development of the plan. In
a few large towns, where the relations between schools have rendered
its introduction possible, it has been eminently successful. Pupils of
marked intellectual power, belonging to the less opulent classes, have
been induced by the operation of this system to proceed from primary to
intermediate schools, and ultimately to the attainment of the highest
distinctions at the English universities; following specially at each
advancement the subjects of their choice.
Undoubtedly, a complete State-controlled educational scheme embracing
all grades would render possible the general adoption of this method of
applying large money prizes. In offering this suggestion as a plea in
favour of State education we must bear in mind that the State system
depends for its favourable reception on considerations of much greater
moment, which cannot in our present limits be discussed.
TREASURE TROVE.
A STORY IN FOUR CHAPTERS.—CHAP. III.
After a sleepless night of suspense and dread, Bertha, who was always
up first in the little household, lingered in her room until long after
her usual time, not daring to descend, for fear of meeting Jasper
Rodley, and only did so at the personal summons of her father, who
assured her that their visitor had gone.
Contrary to his usual habit, the captain was silent during breakfast;
and the girl’s heart, which had been brightened partly by the departure
of Jasper Rodley, and partly by the thought that it was Wednesday,
interpreted the silence of her father as ominous. After breakfast,
she began to prepare as usual for her weekly visit to Saint Quinians’
market.
‘Bertha,’ said her father, who had lighted his pipe and was stumping up
and down the room, ‘don’t hurry to-day. An hour or so cannot make much
difference. I want to speak to you.’
Pale and trembling, the girl took her seat at the open window, through
which streamed the early sunshine.
‘Jasper Rodley was talking to me for a long time last night,’ continued
the old man. ‘I think he is a nice young fellow, and I am sure you have
made an impression on him.’
Another person better versed in the art of approaching a delicate
subject would have chosen a more circuitous mode of procedure; but the
simple, blunt, old sailor knew very little about conversational wile
and artifice, and could only go straight to the point.
Bertha did not answer, but sat motionless, with her eyes fixed on the
shining rocks and the tumbling sea beyond.
So her father continued: ‘And I don’t think you could do better, in
case he should make any proposal to you about—about marriage, than
accept him. In fact, it is my wish that you should do so.’
Bertha remained silent for some moments; then she moved from her seat,
placed herself on the stool by her father’s side, took his hand in
hers, and said: ‘Father, my dearest wish is to please you and to do all
that you wish. I have but one other friend in the world besides you,
and no other relation. You have been the best of fathers to me, and I
have tried to be a good daughter to you; but I cannot, oh, I cannot
obey you in this!’
‘But, my lass,’ continued the old man, who was evidently moved by the
earnest manner in which the girl spoke, ‘Jasper Rodley is a man of a
thousand—good-looking, of respectable birth, and doing well. He would
make you happy, and another important thing—he would not take you from
me.’
‘Oh, it is not that, father—no, no!’ exclaimed the girl.
‘But you must have some reason for not liking him?’
‘Yes; I have the best of reasons, father. In the first place, you know
very little about him, or you could not speak so highly of him as you
do. He is a man of doubtful character, as you may find out by asking
any one in Saint Quinians. In the second place, I—I don’t love him, and
could never get to love him, or even like him. And in the third place’——
‘Well, lass, well?’
‘In the third place, I am betrothed to another.’
‘Betrothed to another!’ exclaimed her father in amazement. ‘Why, that
is impossible! You never see any one; no one ever comes here; and
I cannot believe that all this time you have been deceiving me by
carrying on a secret acquaintance, when you have so often protested
that you live for me, and me only.’
‘I have never dared tell you, father,’ cried the girl. ‘But it is a
weight off my mind, now that you know. And, father, remember that I am
not a child, and that, fond as I am of you and the old home, I could
not go through life without some love of another kind than that I feel
for you.’
Bertha had never spoken to her father in this style before, and the old
man looked at her with mingled astonishment and reproach. Then he said:
‘Bertha, I have particular reasons for wishing you to marry Jasper
Rodley: I am in his power.’
The girl recalled what Rodley had said to her on the previous
Wednesday, and knew now that there was a mystery in which her father
and Rodley were involved, a mystery which instinctively filled her
with dread that, during all these years of peace and quiet, something
had been enacted between them which had been carefully kept from her,
and that the interview of the previous evening was but the climax of a
long-gathering storm. Many little changes in her father’s manner and
habits during the past four years had mystified her; now they were
partially accounted for, and yet, to her recollection, she had never
seen Jasper Rodley before the present month.
‘In his power, father!’ she exclaimed. ‘How can you be in his power?’
‘That I cannot even tell you, my loved one.’
‘If you went out into the world, and had business dealings with
other men, I could perhaps understand that you, being so simple and
good-minded, might be drawn into the power of bad men, father,’ cried
Bertha. ‘But you see none but me; you get no letters; you never go even
into Saint Quinians, and yet you are in the power of a stranger!’
The old man shook his head, and continued: ‘It is kind of you, Bertha,
to say that I am good-minded; but I am a rogue.’
‘_You_ a rogue—my own, good, dear father!’ exclaimed the girl. ‘No, no!
Were a hundred Rodleys to swear on their knees that you were a rogue, I
would tell them they lied!’
‘Yet, it is true, lass,’ said the old man sadly; ‘and it is to save me
from the consequences of being a rogue, that I ask you to accept Jasper
Rodley’s offer of marriage. You have a week in which to decide.’
‘A week! Seven short days!’ cried his daughter, springing from her
seat. ‘But there is time. I must go, father, now; don’t keep me, for
every minute is of value.’
The old man would have said something; but she hurried from the room,
and in a few minutes had started.
Never before had the four miles between home and Saint Quinians
seemed so long to Bertha; never before had she trod the familiar road
unmindful of the beauties of nature around her, and on this April
morning nature was very beautiful; but she had no eyes for the majestic
green waves splintering into clouds of spray on the shining rocks,
for the white-winged birds riding on the swell, for the sweet-scented
herbage, or the blue sky glimmering between the dark branches of the
pines. Simply she gazed on the gray-walled, red-roofed old town ahead
of her, at the entrance of which some one would be waiting to greet
her with open arms and glad smile. And her heart felt a little sinking
as she gained the sandy eminence whence she generally got a first
sight of his figure coming to meet her, and saw no one! She was later
than usual, certainly; but he would have waited for her, she felt
assured. He was not under the archway, nor coming up the street from
the market-place; nor, when she arrived at the market-place, could she
descry him anywhere.
‘Ah, Miss Bertha!’ said one of her market-friends. ‘And how’s the poor
young gentleman gettin’ on?’
‘The poor young gentleman!’ repeated Bertha. ‘Why, Mrs Hardingson, who
do you mean?’
‘Why, who should I mean but Mr Symonds! Sure-ly you’ve heard of his
a-bein’ picked out of the South Fossy, half-dead and’——
Bertha almost dropped her baskets, and her blood ran cold within her;
then, without waiting to hear further details, she hurried away to
the office in which Harry was. The head partner received her with the
utmost urbanity, and corroborated what the market-woman had said,
stating, that when Harry did not appear at the office at the usual
hour, a messenger was sent to his lodgings, who returned with the
answer that nothing was known about him. Later in the day he was found
lying insensible in the Old Town Ditch. The gentleman added, that
although Harry had had a narrow escape, he was out of danger.
From the office, Bertha went to her lover’s lodgings. The servant told
her that Harry was in bed, very weak and excitable, but that the doctor
spoke hopefully.
She sent him up a long written message, reproaching him with having
kept the facts from her, and bidding him lose no precautions for
getting better, as she had urgent need of him, but avoiding all direct
allusion to what had taken place at home. A painfully scrawled answer
came back to her to the effect that the doctor had assured him that
within a week he ought to be able to get out, and sending her all sorts
of loving messages.
Brief as all this is to tell, Bertha found that she had spent nearly
two hours since her arrival in the town in finding out about Harry,
so that, when she turned again into the market-place to begin her
purchases, it was the usual hour when she was due at home; and by the
time she had finished, the church bells were chiming three o’clock. As
she turned out of the arch on to the homeward road, she felt bewildered
and upset by the events of the past few hours as she had never felt
before, and the central figure in the midst of her mental confusion was
that of Jasper Rodley. Instinctively, she associated him with what had
happened to Harry. All the circumstances pointed to him as being the
author of the harm—the anger in which the two young men had parted,
Harry’s avowed intention of getting an explanation from Rodley, and the
discovery of the former in the Town Ditch a few hours later. To such an
extent were her feelings worked up, that she dreaded arriving at home,
for fear that Jasper Rodley should be there to meet her and to push
his suit; and so, resolving to linger as long as possible, she turned
from the direct road over the sandhills, and struck into a more devious
path, which led amongst the rocks on the edge of the sea.