HOW THE FISH CAME TOGETHER.
Lady Lamerton did her utmost. She was lively, quite sprightly even. She
moved among her guests with a pleasant smile and a courteous word for
every one. The lawn-tennis courts were occupied by four sets of players.
A cluster of young men and girls were at a table blowing soap bubbles,
and finding fund for laughter in the process. A group of their seniors
were making a party for bowls. Some of the guests stood on the terrace
looking down at the lawn-tennis players and pretending to take interest
in the games. The majority of those present wandered about the gardens,
shrubberies, and conservatories.
A little hand was thrust into that of Lady Lamerton, and on looking down
she saw Giles.
“Mamma, where is papa? I want to go with him.”
“He has had to leave, dear, for a few minutes; he will return in perhaps
half an hour.”
“But I can run after him. Where is he?”
“You cannot follow him, Giles, he is walking fast, and is about
something that your presence would disturb. Are there no little boys
here for you to play with? Yes, there are the two Fountaynes. I invited
them expressly.”
“I do not want to play. I had rather walk with papa.”
“But he would wish you to take the little boys and show them your pony.
We cannot, my dear, always do what we like. We must bestir ourselves to
make our guests happy.”
“Very well, mamma, I will go with the Fountaynes as papa wishes it.”
He let go her hand, and went off. She looked affectionately after the
child for a moment, and then resumed her duties as hostess, with an
anxious heart but an untroubled brow.
From the first moment that our intelligence dawns, the first lessons
impressed on us, lessons never pretermitted, from which no holiday gives
release, relentlessly and systematically enforced, are those of
self-suppression. We are not allowed as children even to express our
opinions decidedly, to hate heartily any person or anything. We are
required, for instance, to say nothing more forcible than—we are not
devoted to our governess, and not partial to bread-and-butter pudding.
We are instructed either to keep silence altogether relative to our
feelings, which is best of all, a counsel of perfection; or if we cannot
do that, to give utterance to them in an inoffensive and unobjectionable
manner. We are taught to speak of a stupid person as amiable, and of a
disagreeable person as well-intentioned. Our faces are not suffered to
express what our tongues are not permitted to speak, consequently the
facial muscles are brought into as complete control as the tongue.
Consequently also when we are thoroughly schooled, we wear masks
perpetually and always go about with gloved tongues. At first, in the
nursery and in the schoolroom, there are kicks and sulks, when the mask
and the glove are fitted on, and yet, in time, we become so habituated
to them that we are incapable of conceiving of life as endurable without
the wearing of them.
I know that I have become so accustomed to a ring on my little finger,
that if perchance I have forgotten it, and gone into society, I have
blushed to the roots of my hair, and stammered and been distracted,
thinking myself insufficiently clothed, simply because I had left my
ring on the washhand-stand. And it is the same with our masks and
gloves, we grow to like them, to be uncomfortable without them, to be
afraid to show our faces or move our tongues when unprotected by mask
and glove.
A circus horse becomes so used to the bearing rein that even when he is
allowed to gallop without one, he runs with arched neck.
We are all harnessed from our cradle, with bearing reins, not only to
give our necks the proper curve, but also to prevent us from taking the
bit in our mouths, kicking out, plunging over the barriers, and
deserting the ring, and the saw-dust, the lights, and the crack of the
manager’s whip.
Round and round our ring we go, now at an amble, then at a canter, and
at last at a gallop, but always under restraint; the only liberty
allowed and taken is now and again to make our hoofs sound against the
barriers, and to send a little sawdust in the faces of the lookers-on,
who clap hands and laugh or scream. We dance in our arena to music, and
spin about, and balance ourselves on precarious bases, take a
five-barred gate at a leap and go over a score of white poles,
dexterously lowered to allow of a leap without accident. Then we fall
lame, and lie down, and allow a pistol to be exploded in our ears, and
permit ourselves to be carried out as dead. But whatever jump we make
has been pre-arranged and laboriously practised, and whatever
performance we be put through has been artificially acquired. We never
snap our bearing rein, never utter a defiant snort, toss our heads, kick
out at those who would detain us, and dash away to pastures green and
free moorside.
Possibly our happiness would be greater were we to burst away from the
perpetual mill-round, but I know very well what the result would be. We
would rapidly degenerate on the moorside into uncouth, shaggy creatures,
destitute of gloss and grace, and forget all our circus manners.
That which the grooming and breaking-in are to a horse, that culture is
to a man, a sacrifice of freedom. The lower classes of men, the great
undisciplined, or imperfectly disciplined bulk of mankind look on at the
easy motions and trained grace of the higher classes, with much the same
puzzlement as would a cluster of wild ponies stand and watch the passing
of a cavalcade of elaborately trained horses. Both would be equally
ignorant of the amount of self-abnegation and submission to rule which
go to give ease and gloss.
According to a Mussulman legend, the Queen of Sheba had some smack of
savagery about her; she had goats’ hair on her ankles. King Solomon
heard this by report, and being desirous of ascertaining the truth, he
had water poured over the pavement of his court when she came to visit
him. As she approached she raised her skirt, and Solomon detected the
goats’ hair.
There are a good many men as well as women who appear in the best courts
nowadays with hair about their hocks; they have been insufficiently
groomed. But in this they differ from the Queen of Sheba, that they
persistently show us their hocks, and even thrust them in our faces.
Merciful powers! how many half-broken, ill-trimmed cobs I have met with,
kicking up their undocked heels, showing us that they can jump over
poles and overleap hurdles, that they can balance themselves on chairs,
and dance and rear on their hind legs, and paw the air, and whinny for
applause. We politely pat our palms, and look all the while, not at
their antics, but at their hocks, not at all impressed with their silver
and spangled trappings, but very conscious of the hair about their
hoofs.
It is the fashion for moralists to hold up their hands, and shake their
heads, and declaim against the artificialities, the disguises of social
life, and to say that every word spoken and look given should be
sincere; that men and women should scorn concealment and hate
subterfuge. But—would the world be tolerable were it so constituted? I
mean the world of men. Is it so in the world of nature? Is that above
screens and disguises? Is that ruthlessly true, and offensively genuine
in its operations? Where is there not manifest a desire to draw the veil
over what is harsh and unbecoming? The very earth covers her bald places
with verdure, obscures her wounds and drapes her ragged edges. So the
function of culture is the softening of what is rough, the screening of
what is unseemly, the disguising of all that may occasion pain. It is
nothing else but charity in its most graceful form, that spares another
at the cost of self.
I have been in a volcanic region where there were innumerable craters,
great and small. Those on the plain, hardly rising above a few feet out
of it, showed all their bare horror, their torn lips, their black
throats, their sides bristling with the angular lava that had boiled out
of their hot and angry hearts, long ago, but ever showing. They were
perfectly genuine, expressing their true nature in ugly nakedness. But
there were other volcanoes rising to mountain heights, and these had
mantled themselves in snow, had choked and smoothed over their clefts,
and hung garlands of silver, and dropped gauzy veils over their vitreous
precipices; the very craters, the sources of the fire, were filled to
the brim and heaped up to overflow with unsullied snow, rising white,
rounded, innocent, as a maiden’s bosom. Which was best? I know which was
the pleasantest to see.
So is it with humanity. We are all volcanoes with fire in our hearts.
Some have broken forth and torn themselves to pieces, some are in a
chronic state of fume, and dribble lava and splutter cinders
perpetually, and others are exhausted. Surely it is best to hide our
fires, and drape our savagery, and bury our snags and dust the white
snow over all that is rugged and gloomy and ungentle.
Or—to revert to our former illustration, if we have hair on our heels,
which is best, to expose it, or, like the Queen of Sheba, let down our
skirts over it?
When our temper is ruffled, we do not fret with it those we meet—when
our heart is bitter, we do not spit our gall in the faces of our
friends—when our blood boils in our veins we are careful to let none of
it squirt on and blister the hand that is extended to us. A man may
smile, and smile, and be a villain—that is true, but a man or a woman
may smile, and smile, and be exceedingly sorrowful, may dance and laugh
with an aching heart. Who does not remember Andersen’s story of the
little mermaid, who obtained from the witch power to shed her squamous
tail at the cost of feeling knives pierce her soles every footstep she
took? And the little mermaid danced at the prince’s wedding—at the
wedding of the prince whom she had once held to her heart, and for the
love of whom she had shed her fish’s tail, and danced with a rosy face,
though every step was a mortal agony. Do we not love and venerate the
little mermaid, because, instead of howling or whining, and holding up
her bleeding soles to extract commiseration from all, she dropped her
skirts over them, and danced and warbled, and flushed as the rose, so
that none supposed she leaped with pain, and sang to still her heart,
and flushed with stress of anguish? So is it with all who have gone
through the great discipline of culture, they no more expose their
wounds and cry out for sympathy than they expose deformities.
I remember the bridge over the Gave at Pau, on each side of which
through its entire length sat beggars exhibiting sores and soliciting
alms. But these were men and women in rags, and those who wear only the
rags of culture do the same, they draw aside their tatters and expose
their wounds to our shocked eyes.
But it is not so with such as have gone through the school and learnt
its lessons. They are not for ever obtruding themselves, their worries,
their distresses on every one they meet, their own proper self with its
torn veins, and festering grief, and distilling blood is folded over
with silk, and a jewelled brooch clasps the lace over the swelling,
suffering bosom, and all who see it admire the jewels and are kept in
ignorance of what is beneath. In the primitive Church the _disciplina
arcani_ was enforced, the doctrine of holy reserve taught; for there
were certain mysteries of which the faithful were required to keep the
secret; and culture, modern culture, has also its _disciplina arcani_,
its doctrine of reserve, a reserve to be observed on all selfish pains
and sorrows, a mantling over with a cloak of mystery everything which
can jar with the pleasure and the cheerfulness and the brightness of the
day to others.
So, with a heart quivering with apprehension and racked with grief for
Arminell, Lady Lamerton moved about the terrace with a placid face, and
with her thoughts apparently engrossed wholly in making her guests at
home and happy. She insisted on Sir Bosanquet Gammon and the rector
playing at aunt Sally, whilst Lady Gammon looked on with a face green
with horror. She brought a garden chair herself to old and tottery Mrs.
Calwoodleigh, who was standing looking on at her daughter playing lawn
tennis. She found a timid little cluster of husband and wife and
daughters, fresh arrivals in the neighbourhood, and knowing no one, and
introduced them to a dozen nice families. She broke up a flirtation with
a young officer, which she thought undesirable, by sweeping away with
her the young lady into the orchid house to admire a clump of _Dissa
grandiflora_. She interrupted a political discussion in the nick of
time, before the parties became angry and personal. She singled out a
little old maid outrageously dressed, who was prowling about the
flowers, and delighted her by presents of cuttings and little pots of
bulbs, more than she could carry, but which the gardener was bidden
convey to Miss Bligh’s carriage. She galvanised into life a drooping
cluster of young and smooth parsons, and set them playing La Crosse with
as many charming girls. She pointed out the tables where were claret and
champagne cups, strawberries and cream, to certain thirsty and heavy
souls which had been gravitating sideways in that direction for some
time. She caught an antiquary, and carried him off to the end of the
garden to show him a Romano-British stone with ogams nicked at the
angle, which had been discovered used as a footbridge, and set up by
Lord Lamerton to save it from destruction.
“Here, Mr. Fothergill, I must leave you to copy the inscription. Lady
Gammon is anxious to have the polarisation of light explained, and I
must take her to the library for an encyclopædia—fortunately the study
to-day is not invaded by the public.”
Behind her back many a remark was made on her excellence as a hostess,
her cheerfulness, her amiability. Every one liked Lady Lamerton; they
could not fail to do so, she took such pains to make herself agreeable.
Only Arminell despised her, and despised her for those very qualities
which won to her the hearts of her acquaintances. Arminell thought her
lacking in depth and sincerity. It was true that she was without
intensity of conviction, but that was characteristic of breadth; it was
true that she was unreal, and that was part of her culture; so to some
folks everything is unreal but Zolaism, the Morgue, discourtesy, breach
of good manners, the refuse heap. Man is unreal clothed in skin, the
only genuine man is he who has been excoriated, with every nerve and
muscle and vein exposed; the canvas only is real, not the Madonna di San
Sisto looking with her ineffably earnest eyes out of it; lamp-black and
treacle and old rags are the reality, not the Book of Psalm and Song,
printed out of the former on the transubstantiated latter; catgut and
deal and brass only are real, not the symphony of Beethoven, not the
march from the Kemenate in “Lohengrin,” played on the instruments
manufactured out of these vulgar materials. The pelting rain is real,
not the gilded evening cloud that contains the stored moisture; in a
word, that only is real, and commendable, and to be observed, which is
gross material, offensive. I know that the sweetness and fragrance of
that old culture which was but another name, as I have already said, for
charity, is passing away, like the rising incense, perhaps again to be
caught and scented only in the courts of heaven. I know that it is in
fashion now to be rude and brusque, and to deny oneself no freedom, and
exercise on oneself no restraint, so as to be quite natural. But what is
that save to revert to social Adamanism and Bosjesmanism—to savagery in
its basest and nastiest form—to renounce the form as well as the power
of culture.
Phædrus tells in one of his fables of an old woman who found an empty
amphora of old Falernian wine; she put her nose to the mouth and snuffed
and said, “If you smell so sweet when void, how sweet you must be when
full.”
Well! let us say that half the politeness and grace and charm of society
is unreal. It is the aroma of the old Falernian. How much better, no
doubt, if the vessel be full of that most precious old Falernian, that
perfect courtesy of heart which suffereth long and is kind; vaunteth not
itself, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, believeth all things,
loveth all things, endureth all things. But, I ask, is not an empty
amphora of Falernian more grateful than one full of asafœtida?
The evening light slanted over the park, making the grass yellow as
corn, and casting purple shadows behind the elms. The front of the house
toward the terrace was glorified, the plate glass windows gleamed as if
rolled out of sunlight. The terrace was alive with people in their
gayest dresses, in light summer colours, pink and turquoise, strawberry,
spring green, crimson and cream. The band was playing, and the scarlet
uniforms of the military formed a brilliant patch of colour at the end
of the terrace against a bank of yews.
Below the terrace was the tennis-court, reached by a flight of several
steps, and against the wall that upheld the terrace roses were trained,
and were in masses of flower, scenting the air.
The lawn-tennis ground formed a second terrace banked up from the park
which sloped away rapidly thence to the winding river Ore.
In the midst of the flower-beds and moving coloured kaleidoscope of
figures on the gravelled terrace was a fountain and a basin. In the
latter floated water-lilies, and gold fish darted, and carried off the
crumbs cast to them. The water that leaped out of a triton’s shell was
turned in the evening sun as it fell, into amethysts.
Away, across the valley, stood the little church with its tower peeping
out of limes, now all alight with the western sun; and the cock on its
top was turned to a bird of fire.
“Hark!” exclaimed the rector, “I hear our bell. Good heaven! Surely I’ve
not forgotten—I did not know there was to be a funeral. I did not know
any one was ill—in danger. It is tolling.”
Then the band, which had rested for a moment and shaken the moisture out
of their wind instruments, and cleared their throats with iced ale, came
to attention as the conductor rattled his staff on the music-stand, and
beat, one, two, three, four! Then with a blast and crash and rattle—
“Se-e-e the conquer-ing her-er-er-er-er-o comes,
Sou-ou-ound the trum-pets,
Be-e-eat the drums.”
At that moment, again, a little hand was thrust into that of Lady
Lamerton, and again she saw her boy, Giles, at her side. He was looking
pale, and was crying.
“What is the matter, Giles? You are shivering. Have you taken a chill?
Go indoors, dear.”
“Mamma,” said the boy, “I want papa. I have shown the Fountayne boys my
pony and the horses, and my goat, and rabbits, whatever I thought papa
would like them to see, and now I want papa. Where is papa?”
“My dear, you must go indoors. What is that? In pity—what is going on?
Surely the public are not going to invade the terrace.”
Yes—they were.
A large party had been shown the state apartments, had looked at the
pictures, tried the sofas, made jokes over the family portraits,
attempted to finger the china, and then had assembled at the
drawing-room windows which commanded the terrace and the lawn-tennis
courts.
“Seeing the ’ouse without the master, is like ’Amlet with the part of
’Amlet left out,” observed one of the sight-seers. “I say, flunkey,
point us out the noble lord, and I’ll tip you a copper.”
“Gentlemen and ladies,” said the august butler, “I must request that you
will not press to the windows. It is time to move on. There is another
party waiting to go over the house.”
“Ah! but suppose we don’t choose to move on, Old Heavy? Ain’t the place
open to us? Was any time specified for us to be trotted out? Show us the
statute,” laughed a lawyer’s clerk.
However, after some urging and remonstrance, the throng was got outside
the state drawing-room, into the entrance hall.
“I say, you coves!” shouted the young man from the bespoke department of
Messrs. Skewés, “Follow me, and I will get you a sight of his lordship
and all the blue-blooded aristocrats below.”
He led the way, and was followed at a run to the glass door opening upon
the steps that descended to the terrace; the rush was so sudden that the
butler had not time or thought to interpose.
“Hark!” called the lawyer’s clerk. “By George, if the band ain’t doing
us the compliment by anticipation of striking up ‘See the conquering
hero comes!’ which means us—the British public. Lend a shove, Tommy, and
we’ll be down among them and have some ices and sherry cobbler too, and
take a squint at the noble lord himself.”
A united thrust against the double glass doors drove them apart, and
down the steps, and out upon the terrace poured the Public.
At that same moment the iron gates were swung apart, and another party
entered through them—not of the sight-seers, but villagers in their
working clothes and shirt-sleeves.
“See-e-e the conquer-ing her-er-er-er-er-o comes,
Sou-ou-ound the trum-pets,
Be-e-eat the drums.”
The conductor of the band looked round, and what he saw made him hold up
his staff. The music instantly ceased.
Also, simultaneously, all talking among the guests ceased.
Also, instantaneously, the sight-seers who had been jostling one
another, and laughing loudly, and egging one another on, and were
pouring down the steps, halted and ceased to be heard.
Nothing, indeed, was heard but the toll of the distant bell, and the
crunch of the gravel under the feet of the advancing party of villagers.
The fish of the three ponds had mixed for once, and were silent in the
presence of the all-conquering hero to whom all submit—Death.