Mr Henry Gowan and the dog were established frequenters of the cottage,
and the day was fixed for the wedding. There was to be a convocation of
Barnacles on the occasion, in order that that very high and very large
family might shed as much lustre on the marriage as so dim an event was
capable of receiving.
To have got the whole Barnacle family together would have been
impossible for two reasons. Firstly, because no building could have held
all the members and connections of that illustrious house. Secondly,
because wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation
under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post
was a Barnacle. No intrepid navigator could plant a flag-staff upon any
spot of earth, and take possession of it in the British name, but
to that spot of earth, so soon as the discovery was known, the
Circumlocution Office sent out a Barnacle and a despatch-box. Thus the
Barnacles were all over the world, in every direction--despatch-boxing
the compass.
But, while the so-potent art of Prospero himself would have failed in
summoning the Barnacles from every speck of ocean and dry land on
which there was nothing (except mischief) to be done and anything to be
pocketed, it was perfectly feasible to assemble a good many Barnacles.
This Mrs Gowan applied herself to do; calling on Mr Meagles frequently
with new additions to the list, and holding conferences with that
gentleman when he was not engaged (as he generally was at this period)
in examining and paying the debts of his future son-in-law, in the
apartment of scales and scoop.
One marriage guest there was, in reference to whose presence Mr Meagles
felt a nearer interest and concern than in the attendance of the most
elevated Barnacle expected; though he was far from insensible of the
honour of having such company. This guest was Clennam. But Clennam had
made a promise he held sacred, among the trees that summer night, and,
in the chivalry of his heart, regarded it as binding him to many implied
obligations. In forgetfulness of himself, and delicate service to her on
all occasions, he was never to fail; to begin it, he answered Mr Meagles
cheerfully, ‘I shall come, of course.’
His partner, Daniel Doyce, was something of a stumbling-block in Mr
Meagles’s way, the worthy gentleman being not at all clear in his own
anxious mind but that the mingling of Daniel with official Barnacleism
might produce some explosive combination, even at a marriage breakfast.
The national offender, however, lightened him of his uneasiness by
coming down to Twickenham to represent that he begged, with the freedom
of an old friend, and as a favour to one, that he might not be invited.
‘For,’ said he, ‘as my business with this set of gentlemen was to do a
public duty and a public service, and as their business with me was to
prevent it by wearing my soul out, I think we had better not eat and
drink together with a show of being of one mind.’ Mr Meagles was much
amused by his friend’s oddity; and patronised him with a more protecting
air of allowance than usual, when he rejoined: ‘Well, well, Dan, you
shall have your own crotchety way.’
To Mr Henry Gowan, as the time approached, Clennam tried to convey
by all quiet and unpretending means, that he was frankly and
disinterestedly desirous of tendering him any friendship he would
accept. Mr Gowan treated him in return with his usual ease, and with his
usual show of confidence, which was no confidence at all.
‘You see, Clennam,’ he happened to remark in the course of conversation
one day, when they were walking near the Cottage within a week of the
marriage, ‘I am a disappointed man. That you know already.’
‘Upon my word,’ said Clennam, a little embarrassed, ‘I scarcely know
how.’
‘Why,’ returned Gowan, ‘I belong to a clan, or a clique, or a family, or
a connection, or whatever you like to call it, that might have provided
for me in any one of fifty ways, and that took it into its head not to
do it at all. So here I am, a poor devil of an artist.’
Clennam was beginning, ‘But on the other hand--’ when Gowan took him up.
‘Yes, yes, I know. I have the good fortune of being beloved by a
beautiful and charming girl whom I love with all my heart.’
[‘Is there much of it?’ Clennam thought. And as he thought it, felt
ashamed of himself.)
‘And of finding a father-in-law who is a capital fellow and a liberal
good old boy. Still, I had other prospects washed and combed into my
childish head when it was washed and combed for me, and I took them to
a public school when I washed and combed it for myself, and I am here
without them, and thus I am a disappointed man.’
Clennam thought (and as he thought it, again felt ashamed of himself),
was this notion of being disappointed in life, an assertion of station
which the bridegroom brought into the family as his property, having
already carried it detrimentally into his pursuit? And was it a hopeful
or a promising thing anywhere?
‘Not bitterly disappointed, I think,’ he said aloud.
‘Hang it, no; not bitterly,’ laughed Gowan. ‘My people are not worth
that--though they are charming fellows, and I have the greatest
affection for them. Besides, it’s pleasant to show them that I can do
without them, and that they may all go to the Devil. And besides, again,
most men are disappointed in life, somehow or other, and influenced by
their disappointment. But it’s a dear good world, and I love it!’
‘It lies fair before you now,’ said Arthur.
‘Fair as this summer river,’ cried the other, with enthusiasm, ‘and by
Jove I glow with admiration of it, and with ardour to run a race in it.
It’s the best of old worlds! And my calling! The best of old callings,
isn’t it?’
‘Full of interest and ambition, I conceive,’ said Clennam.
‘And imposition,’ added Gowan, laughing; ‘we won’t leave out the
imposition. I hope I may not break down in that; but there, my being
a disappointed man may show itself. I may not be able to face it out
gravely enough. Between you and me, I think there is some danger of my
being just enough soured not to be able to do that.’
‘To do what?’ asked Clennam.
‘To keep it up. To help myself in my turn, as the man before me helps
himself in his, and pass the bottle of smoke. To keep up the pretence
as to labour, and study, and patience, and being devoted to my art, and
giving up many solitary days to it, and abandoning many pleasures for
it, and living in it, and all the rest of it--in short, to pass the
bottle of smoke according to rule.’
‘But it is well for a man to respect his own vocation, whatever it is;
and to think himself bound to uphold it, and to claim for it the respect
it deserves; is it not?’ Arthur reasoned. ‘And your vocation, Gowan,
may really demand this suit and service. I confess I should have thought
that all Art did.’
‘What a good fellow you are, Clennam!’ exclaimed the other, stopping
to look at him, as if with irrepressible admiration. ‘What a capital
fellow! _You_ have never been disappointed. That’s easy to see.’
It would have been so cruel if he had meant it, that Clennam firmly
resolved to believe he did not mean it. Gowan, without pausing, laid his
hand upon his shoulder, and laughingly and lightly went on:
‘Clennam, I don’t like to dispel your generous visions, and I would give
any money (if I had any), to live in such a rose-coloured mist. But what
I do in my trade, I do to sell. What all we fellows do, we do to
sell. If we didn’t want to sell it for the most we can get for it, we
shouldn’t do it. Being work, it has to be done; but it’s easily enough
done. All the rest is hocus-pocus. Now here’s one of the advantages, or
disadvantages, of knowing a disappointed man. You hear the truth.’
Whatever he had heard, and whether it deserved that name or another, it
sank into Clennam’s mind. It so took root there, that he began to fear
Henry Gowan would always be a trouble to him, and that so far he had
gained little or nothing from the dismissal of Nobody, with all his
inconsistencies, anxieties, and contradictions. He found a contest still
always going on in his breast between his promise to keep Gowan in
none but good aspects before the mind of Mr Meagles, and his enforced
observation of Gowan in aspects that had no good in them. Nor could he
quite support his own conscientious nature against misgivings that he
distorted and discoloured himself, by reminding himself that he never
sought those discoveries, and that he would have avoided them with
willingness and great relief. For he never could forget what he had
been; and he knew that he had once disliked Gowan for no better reason
than that he had come in his way.
Harassed by these thoughts, he now began to wish the marriage over,
Gowan and his young wife gone, and himself left to fulfil his promise,
and discharge the generous function he had accepted. This last week was,
in truth, an uneasy interval for the whole house. Before Pet, or before
Gowan, Mr Meagles was radiant; but Clennam had more than once found him
alone, with his view of the scales and scoop much blurred, and had often
seen him look after the lovers, in the garden or elsewhere when he was
not seen by them, with the old clouded face on which Gowan had fallen
like a shadow. In the arrangement of the house for the great occasion,
many little reminders of the old travels of the father and mother
and daughter had to be disturbed and passed from hand to hand; and
sometimes, in the midst of these mute witnesses, to the life they had
had together, even Pet herself would yield to lamenting and weeping.
Mrs Meagles, the blithest and busiest of mothers, went about singing
and cheering everybody; but she, honest soul, had her flights into store
rooms, where she would cry until her eyes were red, and would then
come out, attributing that appearance to pickled onions and pepper, and
singing clearer than ever. Mrs Tickit, finding no balsam for a wounded
mind in Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, suffered greatly from low spirits,
and from moving recollections of Minnie’s infancy. When the latter was
powerful with her, she usually sent up secret messages importing
that she was not in parlour condition as to her attire, and that she
solicited a sight of ‘her child’ in the kitchen; there, she would bless
her child’s face, and bless her child’s heart, and hug her child, in a
medley of tears and congratulations, chopping-boards, rolling-pins, and
pie-crust, with the tenderness of an old attached servant, which is a
very pretty tenderness indeed.
But all days come that are to be; and the marriage-day was to be, and it
came; and with it came all the Barnacles who were bidden to the feast.
There was Mr Tite Barnacle, from the Circumlocution Office, and Mews
Street, Grosvenor Square, with the expensive Mrs Tite Barnacle _nee_
Stiltstalking, who made the Quarter Days so long in coming, and the
three expensive Miss Tite Barnacles, double-loaded with accomplishments
and ready to go off, and yet not going off with the sharpness of flash
and bang that might have been expected, but rather hanging fire. There
was Barnacle junior, also from the Circumlocution Office, leaving the
Tonnage of the country, which he was somehow supposed to take under
his protection, to look after itself, and, sooth to say, not at all
impairing the efficiency of its protection by leaving it alone. There
was the engaging Young Barnacle, deriving from the sprightly side of the
family, also from the Circumlocution Office, gaily and agreeably helping
the occasion along, and treating it, in his sparkling way, as one of the
official forms and fees of the Church Department of How not to do it.
There were three other Young Barnacles from three other offices, insipid
to all the senses, and terribly in want of seasoning, doing the marriage
as they would have ‘done’ the Nile, Old Rome, the new singer, or
Jerusalem.
But there was greater game than this. There was Lord Decimus Tite
Barnacle himself, in the odour of Circumlocution--with the very smell of
Despatch-Boxes upon him. Yes, there was Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle, who
had risen to official heights on the wings of one indignant idea, and
that was, My Lords, that I am yet to be told that it behoves a Minister
of this free country to set bounds to the philanthropy, to cramp the
charity, to fetter the public spirit, to contract the enterprise, to
damp the independent self-reliance, of its people. That was, in other
words, that this great statesman was always yet to be told that it
behoved the Pilot of the ship to do anything but prosper in the private
loaf and fish trade ashore, the crew being able, by dint of hard
pumping, to keep the ship above water without him. On this sublime
discovery in the great art How not to do it, Lord Decimus had long
sustained the highest glory of the Barnacle family; and let any
ill-advised member of either House but try How to do it by bringing in
a Bill to do it, that Bill was as good as dead and buried when Lord
Decimus Tite Barnacle rose up in his place and solemnly said, soaring
into indignant majesty as the Circumlocution cheering soared around
him, that he was yet to be told, My Lords, that it behoved him as the
Minister of this free country, to set bounds to the philanthropy,
to cramp the charity, to fetter the public spirit, to contract the
enterprise, to damp the independent self-reliance, of its people. The
discovery of this Behoving Machine was the discovery of the political
perpetual motion. It never wore out, though it was always going round
and round in all the State Departments.
And there, with his noble friend and relative Lord Decimus, was
William Barnacle, who had made the ever-famous coalition with Tudor
Stiltstalking, and who always kept ready his own particular recipe for
How not to do it; sometimes tapping the Speaker, and drawing it fresh
out of him, with a ‘First, I will beg you, sir, to inform the House what
Precedent we have for the course into which the honourable gentleman
would precipitate us;’ sometimes asking the honourable gentleman to
favour him with his own version of the Precedent; sometimes telling
the honourable gentleman that he (William Barnacle) would search for a
Precedent; and oftentimes crushing the honourable gentleman flat on
the spot by telling him there was no Precedent. But Precedent and
Precipitate were, under all circumstances, the well-matched pair of
battle-horses of this able Circumlocutionist. No matter that the unhappy
honourable gentleman had been trying in vain, for twenty-five years, to
precipitate William Barnacle into this--William Barnacle still put it to
the House, and (at second-hand or so) to the country, whether he was to
be precipitated into this. No matter that it was utterly irreconcilable
with the nature of things and course of events that the wretched
honourable gentleman could possibly produce a Precedent for
this--William Barnacle would nevertheless thank the honourable gentleman
for that ironical cheer, and would close with him upon that issue, and
would tell him to his teeth that there Was NO Precedent for this. It
might perhaps have been objected that the William Barnacle wisdom was
not high wisdom or the earth it bamboozled would never have been made,
or, if made in a rash mistake, would have remained blank mud. But
Precedent and Precipitate together frightened all objection out of most
people.
And there, too, was another Barnacle, a lively one, who had leaped
through twenty places in quick succession, and was always in two or
three at once, and who was the much-respected inventor of an art
which he practised with great success and admiration in all Barnacle
Governments. This was, when he was asked a Parliamentary question on
any one topic, to return an answer on any other. It had done immense
service, and brought him into high esteem with the Circumlocution
Office.
And there, too, was a sprinkling of less distinguished Parliamentary
Barnacles, who had not as yet got anything snug, and were going through
their probation to prove their worthiness. These Barnacles perched upon
staircases and hid in passages, waiting their orders to make houses
or not to make houses; and they did all their hearing, and ohing, and
cheering, and barking, under directions from the heads of the family;
and they put dummy motions on the paper in the way of other men’s
motions; and they stalled disagreeable subjects off until late in the
night and late in the session, and then with virtuous patriotism cried
out that it was too late; and they went down into the country, whenever
they were sent, and swore that Lord Decimus had revived trade from a
swoon, and commerce from a fit, and had doubled the harvest of corn,
quadrupled the harvest of hay, and prevented no end of gold from flying
out of the Bank. Also these Barnacles were dealt, by the heads of the
family, like so many cards below the court-cards, to public meetings and
dinners; where they bore testimony to all sorts of services on the part
of their noble and honourable relatives, and buttered the Barnacles on
all sorts of toasts. And they stood, under similar orders, at all sorts
of elections; and they turned out of their own seats, on the shortest
notice and the most unreasonable terms, to let in other men; and they
fetched and carried, and toadied and jobbed, and corrupted, and ate
heaps of dirt, and were indefatigable in the public service. And there
was not a list, in all the Circumlocution Office, of places that might
fall vacant anywhere within half a century, from a lord of the Treasury
to a Chinese consul, and up again to a governor-general of India, but as
applicants for such places, the names of some or of every one of these
hungry and adhesive Barnacles were down.
It was necessarily but a sprinkling of any class of Barnacles that
attended the marriage, for there were not two score in all, and what
is that subtracted from Legion! But the sprinkling was a swarm in the
Twickenham cottage, and filled it. A Barnacle (assisted by a Barnacle)
married the happy pair, and it behoved Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle
himself to conduct Mrs Meagles to breakfast.
The entertainment was not as agreeable and natural as it might have
been. Mr Meagles, hove down by his good company while he highly
appreciated it, was not himself. Mrs Gowan was herself, and that did not
improve him. The fiction that it was not Mr Meagles who had stood in the
way, but that it was the Family greatness, and that the Family greatness
had made a concession, and there was now a soothing unanimity, pervaded
the affair, though it was never openly expressed. Then the Barnacles
felt that they for their parts would have done with the Meagleses when
the present patronising occasion was over; and the Meagleses felt the
same for their parts. Then Gowan asserting his rights as a disappointed
man who had his grudge against the family, and who, perhaps, had allowed
his mother to have them there, as much in the hope it might give them
some annoyance as with any other benevolent object, aired his pencil and
his poverty ostentatiously before them, and told them he hoped in time
to settle a crust of bread and cheese on his wife, and that he begged
such of them as (more fortunate than himself) came in for any good
thing, and could buy a picture, to please to remember the poor painter.
Then Lord Decimus, who was a wonder on his own Parliamentary pedestal,
turned out to be the windiest creature here: proposing happiness to the
bride and bridegroom in a series of platitudes that would have made the
hair of any sincere disciple and believer stand on end; and trotting,
with the complacency of an idiotic elephant, among howling labyrinths of
sentences which he seemed to take for high roads, and never so much
as wanted to get out of. Then Mr Tite Barnacle could not but feel that
there was a person in company, who would have disturbed his life-long
sitting to Sir Thomas Lawrence in full official character, if such
disturbance had been possible: while Barnacle junior did, with
indignation, communicate to two vapid gentlemen, his relatives, that
there was a feller here, look here, who had come to our Department
without an appointment and said he wanted to know, you know; and that,
look here, if he was to break out now, as he might you know (for you
never could tell what an ungentlemanly Radical of that sort would be up
to next), and was to say, look here, that he wanted to know this moment,
you know, that would be jolly; wouldn’t it?
The pleasantest part of the occasion by far, to Clennam, was the
painfullest. When Mr and Mrs Meagles at last hung about Pet in the room
with the two pictures (where the company were not), before going with
her to the threshold which she could never recross to be the old Pet and
the old delight, nothing could be more natural and simple than the three
were. Gowan himself was touched, and answered Mr Meagles’s ‘O Gowan,
take care of her, take care of her!’ with an earnest ‘Don’t be so
broken-hearted, sir. By Heaven I will!’
And so, with the last sobs and last loving words, and a last look to
Clennam of confidence in his promise, Pet fell back in the carriage,
and her husband waved his hand, and they were away for Dover; though not
until the faithful Mrs Tickit, in her silk gown and jet black curls, had
rushed out from some hiding-place, and thrown both her shoes after
the carriage: an apparition which occasioned great surprise to the
distinguished company at the windows.
The said company being now relieved from further attendance, and the
chief Barnacles being rather hurried (for they had it in hand just
then to send a mail or two which was in danger of going straight to its
destination, beating about the seas like the Flying Dutchman, and to
arrange with complexity for the stoppage of a good deal of important
business otherwise in peril of being done), went their several ways;
with all affability conveying to Mr and Mrs Meagles that general
assurance that what they had been doing there, they had been doing at a
sacrifice for Mr and Mrs Meagles’s good, which they always conveyed to
Mr John Bull in their official condescension to that most unfortunate
creature.
A miserable blank remained in the house and in the hearts of the father
and mother and Clennam. Mr Meagles called only one remembrance to his
aid, that really did him good.
‘It’s very gratifying, Arthur,’ he said, ‘after all, to look back upon.’
‘The past?’ said Clennam.
‘Yes--but I mean the company.’
It had made him much more low and unhappy at the time, but now it really
did him good. ‘It’s very gratifying,’ he said, often repeating the
remark in the course of the evening. ‘Such high company!’