A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION
The young gentleman to whom Everard Romfrey transferred his combative
spirit despatched a letter from the Dardanelles, requesting his uncle
not to ask him for a spark of enthusiasm. He despised our Moslem
allies, he said, and thought with pity of the miserable herds of men in
regiments marching across the steppes at the bidding of a despot that
we were helping to popularize. He certainly wrote in the tone of a
jejune politician; pardonable stuff to seniors entertaining similar
opinions, but most exasperating when it runs counter to them: though
one question put by Nevil was not easily answerable. He wished to know
whether the English people would be so anxious to be at it if their man
stood on the opposite shore and talked of trying conclusions on their
green fields. And he suggested that they had become so ready for war
because of their having grown rather ashamed of themselves, and for the
special reason that they could have it at a distance.
“The rascal’s liver’s out of order,” Everard said.
Coming to the sentence: “Who speaks out in this crisis? There is one,
and I am with him”; Mr. Romfrey’s compassionate sentiments veered round
to irate amazement. For the person alluded to was indeed the infamous
miauling cotton-spinner. Nevil admired him. He said so bluntly. He
pointed to that traitorous George-Foxite as the one heroical Englishman
of his day, declaring that he felt bound in honour to make known his
admiration for the man; and he hoped his uncle would excuse him. “If we
differ, I am sorry, sir; but I should be a coward to withhold what I
think of him when he has all England against him, and he is in the
right, as England will discover. I maintain he speaks wisely—I don’t
mind saying, like a prophet; and he speaks on behalf of the poor as
well as of the country. He appears to me the only public man who looks
to the state of the poor—I mean, their interests. They pay for war, and
if we are to have peace at home and strength for a really national war,
the only war we can ever call necessary, the poor must be contented. He
sees that. I shall not run the risk of angering you by writing to
defend him, unless I hear of his being shamefully mishandled, and the
bearer of an old name can be of service to him. I cannot say less, and
will say no more.”
Everard apostrophized his absent nephew: “You jackass!”
I am reminded by Mr. Romfrey’s profound disappointment in the youth,
that it will be repeatedly shared by many others: and I am bound to
forewarn readers of this history that there is no plot in it. The hero
is chargeable with the official disqualification of constantly
offending prejudices, never seeking to please; and all the while it is
upon him the narrative hangs. To be a public favourite is his last
thought. Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to
stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and
rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind
of posturing. For Beauchamp will not even look at happiness to mourn
its absence; melodious lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite alien
to him. His faith is in working and fighting. With every inducement to
offer himself for a romantic figure, he despises the pomades and
curling-irons of modern romance, its shears and its labels: in fine,
every one of those positive things by whose aid, and by some adroit
flourishing of them, the nimbus known as a mysterious halo is produced
about a gentleman’s head. And a highly alluring adornment it is! We are
all given to lose our solidity and fly at it; although the faithful
mirror of fiction has been showing us latterly that a too superhuman
beauty has disturbed popular belief in the bare beginnings of the
existence of heroes: but this, very likely, is nothing more than a fit
of Republicanism in the nursery, and a deposition of the leading doll
for lack of variety in him. That conqueror of circumstances will, the
dullest soul may begin predicting, return on his cockhorse to favour
and authority. Meantime the exhibition of a hero whom circumstances
overcome, and who does not weep or ask you for a tear, who continually
forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own fortunes, must
run the chances of a novelty during the interregnum. Nursery
Legitimists will be against him to a man; Republicans likewise, after a
queer sniff at his pretensions, it is to be feared. For me, I have so
little command over him, that in spite of my nursery tastes, he drags
me whither he lists. It is artless art and monstrous innovation to
present so wilful a figure, but were I to create a striking fable for
him, and set him off with scenic effects and contrasts, it would be
only a momentary tonic to you, to him instant death. He could not live
in such an atmosphere. The simple truth has to be told: how he loved
his country, and for another and a broader love, growing out of his
first passion, fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no
giant of the Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull,
pummelled the obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic.
His indifferent England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The
greater power of the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does
not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp’s career
the boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts
besides, to the flat result of an optically discernible influence of
our hero’s character in the domestic circle; perhaps a faintly-outlined
circle or two beyond it. But this does not forbid him to be ranked as
one of the most distinguishing of her children of the day he lived in.
Blame the victrix if you think he should have been livelier.
Nevil soon had to turn his telescope from politics. The torch of war
was actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what
surrounded him. Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of
stilts, gravely resigned the gift of motion. Our dauntless Lancastrian
thundered like a tempest over a gambling tent, disregarded. Our worthy
people, consenting to the doctrine that war is a scourge, contracted
the habit of thinking it, in this case, the dire necessity which is the
sole excuse for giving way to an irritated pugnacity, and sucked the
comforting caramel of an alliance with their troublesome next-door
neighbour, profuse in comfits as in scorpions. Nevil detected that
politic element of their promptitude for war. His recollections of
dissatisfaction in former days assisted him to perceive the nature of
it, but he was too young to hold his own against the hubbub of a noisy
people, much too young to remain sceptical of a modern people’s
enthusiasm for war while journals were testifying to it down the length
of their columns, and letters from home palpitated with it, and
shipmates yawned wearily for the signal, and shiploads of red coats and
blue, infantry, cavalry, artillery, were singing farewell to the girl
at home, and hurrah for anything in foreign waters. He joined the
stream with a cordial spirit. Since it must be so! The wind of that
haughty proceeding of the Great Bear in putting a paw over the neutral
brook brushed his cheek unpleasantly. He clapped hands for the fezzy
defenders of the border fortress, and when the order came for the fleet
to enter the old romantic sea of storms and fables, he wrote home a
letter fit for his uncle Everard to read. Then there was the sailing
and the landing, and the march up the heights, which Nevil was
condemned to look at. To his joy he obtained an appointment on shore,
and after that Everard heard of him from other channels. The two were
of a mind when the savage winter advanced which froze the attack of the
city, and might be imaged as the hoar god of hostile elements pointing
a hand to the line reached, and menacing at one farther step. Both
blamed the Government, but they divided as to the origin of
governmental inefficiency; Nevil accusing the Lords guilty of foulest
sloth, Everard the Quakers of dry-rotting the country. He passed with a
shrug Nevil’s puling outcry for the enemy as well as our own poor
fellows: “At his steppes again!” And he had to be forgiving when
reports came of his nephew’s turn for overdoing his duty:
“show-fighting,” as he termed it.
“Braggadocioing in deeds is only next bad to mouthing it,” he wrote
very rationally. “Stick to your line. Don’t go out of it till you are
ordered out. Remember that we want _soldiers_ and _sailors_, we don’t
want _suicides_.” He condescended to these italics, considering
impressiveness to be urgent. In his heart, notwithstanding his
implacably clear judgement, he was passably well pleased with the
congratulations encompassing him on account of his nephew’s gallantry
at a period of dejection in Britain: for the winter was dreadful; every
kind heart that went to bed with cold feet felt acutely for our
soldiers on the frozen heights, and thoughts of heroes were as good as
warming-pans. Heroes we would have. It happens in war as in wit, that
all the birds of wonder fly to a flaring reputation. He that has done
one wild thing must necessarily have done the other; so Nevil found
himself standing in the thick of a fame that blew rank eulogies on him
for acts he had not performed. The Earl of Romfrey forwarded hampers
and a letter of praise. “They tell me that while you were facing the
enemy, temporarily attaching yourself to one of the regiments—I forget
which, though I have heard it named—you sprang out under fire on an
eagle clawing a hare. I like that. I hope you had the benefit of the
hare. She is our property, and I have issued an injunction that she
shall not go into the newspapers.” Everard was entirely of a contrary
opinion concerning the episode of eagle and hare, though it was a case
of a bird of prey interfering with an object of the chase. Nevil wrote
home most entreatingly and imperatively, like one wincing, begging him
to contradict that and certain other stories, and prescribing the form
of a public renunciation of his proclaimed part in them. “The hare,” he
sent word, “is the property of young Michell of the _Rodney_, and he is
the humanest and the gallantest fellow in the service. I have written
to my Lord. Pray help to rid me of burdens that make me feel like a
robber and impostor.”
Everard replied:
“I have a letter from your captain, informing me that I am unlikely to
see you home unless you learn to hold yourself in. I wish you were in
another battery than Robert Hall’s. He forgets the force of example,
however much of a dab he may be at precept. But there you are, and
please clap a hundredweight on your appetite for figuring, will you. Do
you think there is any good in helping to Frenchify our army? I loathe
a fellow who shoots at a medal. I wager he is easy enough to be caught
by circumvention—put me in the open with him. Tom Biggot, the boxer,
went over to Paris, and stood in the ring with one of their dancing
pugilists, and the first round he got a crack on the chin from the
rogue’s foot; the second round he caught him by the lifted leg, and
punished him till pec was all he could say of peccavi. Fight the
straightforward fight. Hang flan! Battle is a game of give and take,
and if our men get elanned, we shall see them refusing to come up to
time. This new crossing and medalling is the devil’s own notion for
upsetting a solid British line, and tempting fellows to get invalided
that they may blaze it before the shopkeepers and their wives in the
city. Give us an army!—none of your caperers. Here are lots of circusy
heroes coming home to rest after their fatigues. One was spouting at a
public dinner yesterday night. He went into it upright, and he ran out
of it upright—at the head of his men!—and here he is feasted by the
citizens and making a speech upright, and my boy fronting the enemy!”
Everard’s involuntary break-down from his veteran’s roughness to a
touch of feeling thrilled Nevil, who began to perceive what his uncle
was driving at when he rebuked the coxcombry of the field, and spoke of
the description of compliment your hero was paying Englishmen in
affecting to give them examples of bravery and preternatural coolness.
Nevil sent home humble confessions of guilt in this respect, with fresh
praises of young Michell: for though Everard, as Nevil recognized it,
was perfectly right in the abstract, and generally right, there are
times when an example is needed by brave men—times when the fiery
furnace of death’s dragon-jaw is not inviting even to Englishmen
receiving the word that duty bids them advance, and they require a
leader of the way. A national coxcombry that pretends to an
independence of human sensations, and makes a motto of our dandiacal
courage, is more perilous to the armies of the nation than that of a
few heroes. It is this coxcombry which has too often caused disdain of
the wise chief’s maxim of calculation for winners, namely, to have
always the odds on your side, and which has bled, shattered, and
occasionally disgraced us. Young Michell’s carrying powder-bags to the
assault, and when ordered to retire, bearing them on his back, and
helping a wounded soldier on the way, did surely well; nor did Mr.
Beauchamp himself behave so badly on an occasion when the sailors of
his battery caught him out of a fire of shell that raised jets of dust
and smoke like a range of geysers over the open, and hugged him as
loving women do at a meeting or a parting. He was penitent before his
uncle, admitting, first, that the men were not in want of an example of
the contempt of death, and secondly, that he doubted whether it was
contempt of death on his part so much as pride—a hatred of being seen
running.
“I don’t like the fellow to be drawing it so fine,” said Everard. It
sounded to him a trifle parsonical. But his heart was won by Nevil’s
determination to wear out the campaign rather than be invalided or
entrusted with a holiday duty.
“I see with shame (admiration of _them_) old infantry captains and
colonels of no position beyond their rank in the army, sticking to
their post,” said Nevil, “and a lord and a lord and a lord slipping off
as though the stuff of the man in him had melted. I shall go through
with it.” Everard approved him. Colonel Halkett wrote that the youth
was a skeleton. Still Everard encouraged him to persevere, and said of
him:
“I like him for holding to his work _after_ the strain’s over. That
tells the man.”
He observed at his table, in reply to commendations of his nephew:
“Nevil’s leak is his political craze, and that seems to be going: I
hope it is. You can’t rear a man on politics. When I was of his age I
never looked at the newspapers, except to read the divorce cases. I
came to politics with a ripe judgement. He shines in action, and he’ll
find that out, and leave others the palavering.”
It was upon the close of the war that Nevil drove his uncle to avow a
downright undisguised indignation with him. He caught a fever in the
French camp, where he was dispensing vivers and provends out of English
hampers.
“Those French fellows are every man of them trained up to
snapping-point,” said Everard. “You’re sure to have them if you hold
out long against them. And greedy dogs too: they’re for half our
hampers, and all the glory. And there’s Nevil down on his back in the
thick of them! Will anybody tell me why the devil he must be poking
into the French camp? They were ready enough to run to him and beg
potatoes. It’s all for humanity he does it—mark that. Never was a word
fitter for a quack’s mouth than ‘humanity.’ Two syllables more, and the
parsons would be riding it to sawdust. Humanity! Humanitomtity! It’s
the best word of the two for half the things done in the name of it.”
A tremendously bracing epistle, excellent for an access of fever, was
despatched to humanity’s curate, and Everard sat expecting a hot
rejoinder, or else a black sealed letter, but neither one nor the other
arrived.
Suddenly, to his disgust, came rumours of peace between the mighty
belligerents.
The silver trumpets of peace were nowhere hearkened to with
satisfaction by the bull-dogs, though triumph rang sonorously through
the music, for they had been severely mangled, as usual at the outset,
and they had at last got their grip, and were in high condition for
fighting.
The most expansive panegyrists of our deeds did not dare affirm of the
most famous of them, that England had embarked her costly cavalry to
offer it for a mark of artillery-balls on three sides of a square: and
the belief was universal that we could do more business-like deeds and
play the great game of blunders with an ability refined by experience.
Everard Romfrey was one of those who thought themselves justified in
insisting upon the continuation of the war, in contempt of our allies.
His favourite saying that constitution beats the world, was being
splendidly manifested by our bearing. He was very uneasy; he would not
hear of peace; and not only that, the imperial gentleman soberly
committed the naïveté of sending word to Nevil to let him know
immediately the opinion of the camp concerning it, as perchance an old
Roman knight may have written to some young aquilifer of the
Praetorians.
Allies, however, are of the description of twins joined by a membrane,
and supposing that one of them determines to sit down, the other will
act wisely in bending his knees at once, and doing the same: he cannot
but be extremely uncomfortable left standing. Besides, there was the
Ottoman cleverly poised again; the Muscovite was battered; fresh guilt
was added to the military glory of the Gaul. English grumblers might
well be asked what they had fought for, if they were not contented.
Colonel Halkett mentioned a report that Nevil had received a slight
thigh-wound of small importance. At any rate, something was the matter
with him, and it was naturally imagined that he would have double cause
to write home; and still more so for the reason, his uncle confessed,
that he had foreseen the folly of a war conducted by milky
cotton-spinners and their adjuncts, in partnership with a throned
gambler, who had won his stake, and now snapped his fingers at them.
Everard expected, he had prepared himself for, the young naval
politician’s crow, and he meant to admit frankly that he had been wrong
in wishing to fight anybody without having first crushed the cotton
faction. But Nevil continued silent.
“Dead in hospital or a Turk hotel!” sighed Everard; “and no more to the
scoundrels over there than a body to be shovelled into slack lime.”
Rosamund Culling was the only witness of his remarkable betrayal of
grief.