_Wherein the Honourable Rupert Greppel shows Hidalgic_
In a large shed in the workmen’s quarter, on a platform, under
the flare of gas-jets high hung in the dim rafters of the great
place, there sat three men at a table; and before them, languid and
self-possessed, his frock-coat close-buttoned and his scented being
attired in the general air and pose of the dandy, stood a man of pale
countenance, who, with the calm measured accents that are the habit of
self-possession, spoke to the upturned faces of a dark mass of men that
swept in a vast attentive hush from before his feet.
He spoke with facile precision of thought and accent, holding himself
easily, airily, and with picturesque insolence. There was in the air
with which he spoke a quiet indifference as to whether he pleased his
hearers or not which had something of that strange distinction that
marked everything this man did or said--for Rupert Greppel, whatever
his faults, had a conspicuous and sincere belief in his own dignity. He
stood there calmly hidalgic, swaggering, self-reliant. He never forgot,
nor allowed others to forget, that his mother was a French countess,
and of the oldest of the old noblesse.
He was speaking the last words of an academic appeal to aristocratic
anarchy as the solution of the great human problem. He treated with
contempt the aspirations and the beliefs in all socialistic ideals,
laughed at the good of the largest number. The masses did not even
believe in themselves, said he. The strong man, strong in himself and
of the breed of those that had belief in themselves through the habit
of generations of tyranny and of rule, was alone fit to govern----
“Down with all aristocrats!” cried an ugly-looking fellow at the back
of the great seething mass of listening humanity.
Rupert Greppel never so much as frowned. A little smile played
about his eye-pits and lips. And he was greeted with a storm of
counter-cheers from a group of students and friends, amongst whom sat
Myre and Noll and others.
“You cannot put out the aristocrat with the breath of a mere shout,”
said he calmly. “What does the State know of justice or of equity?
There is one law for the strong and one for the weak--and there always
will be.”
There was some laughter; and again counter-cheers.
“The State is the triumph of the individual over his fellows, rank by
rank, until the poorer spirits labour for the free spirits. Tush! when
you have a strike in this so-called Republic, the troops are used for
those that are in the right, hein?” He laughed. “I tell you they are
drawn up to strike for those that are in power. And they are right. The
commonweal demands the public good. I am not for it. I demand rather
to play gaily with this life that is mine, as if it were mine, not
this one’s, nor another’s--I demand to play it like a gentleman, with
dignity, elegantly, artistically, free to serve my own sweet will,
lusting when I will, with whom I will, reading pleasant literature when
I would rest my body, sleeping when I would, strutting it abroad with
my clothes well-fitting, enjoying life, and looking well-dressed for
the part--I am aristocrat. As for the people let them be as happy as
they may, consistently with toil--let them have bread and amusement
on occasion--let them prate of the humanities--but do not rack their
grey minds with books. Shut the muddling schools to them. Do not
harass their vague minds and make them pale with thinking. We can do
all that for them. Let them be industrious and well-behaved. Thought
and the riot of living are only for the aristocrat. These things but
give the people a gross headache. The peasant has stolen our acres;
the burgess has bought our strongholds. And is the world gayer? Is
it cleaner in conduct? Is it stronger in men? I say the world is for
the aristocrat--and the aristocrat has fallen from the days when, the
stag being long in the finding, we hunted a lean peasant instead. The
aristocrat being dethroned, the Jew holds all France in his fat and
grubbing hands. Is France more splendid than it was? But one thing
they have not been able to buy--our countenance. They still have our
contempt. And we yet hold the reins of the glorious lordship of war. We
still know how to die. And until we die, when we walk abroad let the
people see to it that they give us the cleanest place if we condescend
to walk the same pavement.... But the dirty rogues encroach. The dirty
rabble ape our very vices. The people to-day have even the impertinence
to be bored--boredom is the privilege of the aristocrat. They would
leave us nothing.”
Amidst the laughter and the applause that rose above the swell of the
ugly growl which was the sullen voice of the great crowd before him, he
descended from the platform.
A restless silence fell upon the place.
But the massed crowd burst into a roar as a man leaped on to the
platform and stepped forward before the people--a rough workman,
energetic, vigorous, alert, dirty. This was one of those half-educated
men of action, bred by the academic unrest of the literary
anarchists--bred by the egoists, Nietzsche and other dainty-fingered
gentlemanly persons enough, who would have been alarmed to think that
their theories were breeding such volcanoes. Into his blood had eaten
their academic trifling with extreme individualism--his fanatic eyes
glowed at the very thought of his fingers about the throat of the
rich--and, innately criminal by every instinct, his nerves leaped
at the murderous impulse when he found logic was with him in his
histrionic dreams of killing.
The picture-loving eyes of the world are caught by the theatric glamour
of the unflinching courage that sent out the debonnair and scented
gentlemen of Versailles, beribboned and careless, to face, with clouded
canes for sole weapon, the blood-dripping and weaponed mob of the
Revolution--the romantic pulse of the grey world is thrilled at the
grim tale of the exquisites who continued their games of cards and
dice, regardless of the interruption of rude history and with all the
elaborate etiquette and fantastic ceremony of their accustomed habit,
until the command came from rough lips that it was the turn of each
to step into the jolting tumbrils that lumbered to the scaffold and
the guillotine. And indeed theirs was a splendid feminine defensive
courage, that dreaded only the indecencies. But courage is not the
privilege of a class--the sombre garb of the workman holds often enough
habitual acts of courage, persistent and grim as that which on occasion
sets the poets rhyming if it be shown by a prince of the blood; and
it covers thereby a more virile danger, if roused to it, of turning
aggressive hands to the rectifying of its grievances, injustices, and
years of sullenly borne insolences. And if the rousing be done by
a master wit, what vast significance may be there? or what ghastly
catastrophe?
This fellow swung back his head to speak--and a shout greeted him from
the back of the great hall, where some ugly-looking fellows stood:
“Gavroche!” cried they--“silence for Gavroche!”
The greeting touched the man’s conceit, and he smiled. He laughed:
“That scented fellow is not without eyes,” said he; and a shout of
laughter greeted him.
His eyes settled on his theme; and when the silence came he burst
roughly into his harangue:
“Nietzsche has spoken the last word,” said he. “Man has arrived
above the world’s shambles by struggle alone--he is the fittest to
survive. There is no other law. The strongest shall succeed. Existence
is an anarchy; and they alone have rights who make them. Yet man,
forsooth, arriving at the top of things by mastery, decides Nature to
be brutal, forgets that he is where he is by the ruthless selection of
the fittest, and being arrived at supremacy in Nature, he thinks to
hold Nature back by overthrowing her supreme law--he refuses to let
the weak go to the wall, refuses to leave the sick to die, hangs the
strong man who slays the weakling, and flouts the very nature which
put him a-top of the brutalities to bestride the world! But Nature is
not to be flouted. She proceeds, with contempt of all opposition, to
evolve the ultimate over-man, the Beyond-Man--the healthy, strong,
ruthless, vigorous overlord. Man is the most splendid brute--at the
base of him is the scarlet lust of war. The cultured and the effete
and the timid quake, frightened at the vision of the Beyond-Man, not
daring to acknowledge that the ruthless survive. And to what do they
appeal? to art and civilization and religion. Well! these be pleasant
toys--but in what manner have these things been of use to make man
stronger, better equipped for the ruthless struggle for mastery, and
to produce a more ruthless breed? The day and life of the whole modern
state is a lie--it swarms with churches, mouths its creed of loving
your neighbour as yourself. But what are its _acts_? I tell you it
is moved by an aristocratic morality--a code which has no slightest
intention of loving his neighbour. There is no democracy--men are not
equal, but wholly unequal. But there is cheer for you, my comrades of
the corduroy breeches--you of the hard hands and the vigorous life. The
Beyond-Man is not of the nerveless race of puppet kings, indeed what
hath a king to-day but his robes and his fal-lals and his fineries? The
Beyond-Man is not of the enervated crowd of hereditary nobles--like
that scented apparition that has just spoken. He is not the fat-bellied
flabby burgess, grown soft behind a counter. He is of the master-wits
amongst the workers--men whose bodies are hardened by toil, whose
vigour is a live thing from the habit of a strenuous life. It is our
turn.” He paused, and added hoarsely: “Up, then, and change the face
of the world! Up and seize the good things the gods dangle before your
eyes for the seizing. Take them as these others have taken them--by
sinew and strength of arm. Pluck from kings their magnificence--not
to give it to the aristocracy whom feudalism created lords paramount
to usurp kingship--not to the smug burgess whom you enfranchised with
your blood at the Revolution--nay, the nobles were more picturesque and
not a whit more brutal than the trader, for the sweating-dens are many
and each hath a thousand victims for one that knew the rack, each den
more populous than the Bastille! Pluck their riches from the burgess
and hang him where he hanged the nobles--the lamp-post is still an
emblem of civilization. And if you fail a time or so, do the prison
and the frozen road of winter leave your belly more empty than the
humanitarian State? Has the felon’s cell a harder task than such as
many a worker lives in the _free air_--God help us--the free air of
this Rien-publique! Danger is the strong man’s plaything--the whetstone
of mastery. Vive l’Anarchie!”
He stepped forward as he ended his fierce apostrophe, and shouted it
hoarsely:
“Vive l’Anarchie!”
The great throats of the workmen flung back the cry with a mighty
shout; and the students cried applause, setting their canes rapping
upon the floor.
The cheers set Gavroche’s conceit jigging. He stood, his heavy face
glowing in the down-flung light. The shadows played about his eye-pits
and high cheek-bones and broad nostrils and heavy chin, and ran down
the deep throat; and the light revealed the strong jaw of the man who
carries out his contentions.
But even as he stood, a big man arose in the midst of the bohemians and
students, and said in loud clear accents:
“Thou fool!”
The students shouted with laughter; and the mood of the workmen
changed, as a Frenchman’s quick subtle mind will change at a ridiculous
situation. The vast crowd burst into merriment.
Gavroche came down the platform, and suddenly lost the command of
himself that had given him a strange dignity during his oration--he
gave way to wild gesticulation and his voice rose to a shrill scream,
and at once became as the ravings of a maniac to the judgment of the
vast multitude. Loss of temper lost him the ear of the house.
The big man, Eustace Lovegood, remained standing in calm
self-reliance--a dignity that appeals always to the essential dignity
that lies beneath the wits of all workers.
One of the solemn Three at the table leaned forward, rang a bell, and
asked the pleasure of the house; and when the din had ceased he called
out to the big man to go up and speak--Gavroche, said he, had had his
say and must go down.
Gavroche, recovering his calm, shrugged his shoulders and descending
from the platform made his way to a group of workmen at the back of the
hall--as Lovegood worked his way up to the tribune....
“Come, comrades,” growled Gavroche to his fellows--“pass the word--this
fellow will speak for a full hour--he is like to be on the side of the
moralities--and they require some explaining. We can be back here soon
after. Slip away and meet by the broken river-lamp. The watchword is
_Rien-publique_--and the countersign _Beyond-man_.”
As Lovegood made his huge way to the platform, there also left the hall
the engrossed figure of Quogge Myre. A great idea had come to him.