One day shortly after this, at the bindery, his friend Poupin, absent,
had failed to send the explanation customary in case of illness or
domestic accident. There were two or three men employed in the place
whose non-appearance, usually following close upon pay-day, was better
unexplained, was in fact an implication of moral feebleness; but as a
general thing Mr. Crookenden’s establishment was a haunt of punctuality
and sobriety. Least of all had Eustache Poupin been in the habit of
asking for a margin. Hyacinth knew how little indulgence he had ever
craved, and this was part of his admiration for the extraordinary
Frenchman, an ardent stoic, a cold conspirator and an exquisite
artist, who was by far the most interesting person in the ranks of
his acquaintance and whose conversation, in the workshop, helped him
sometimes to forget the smell of leather and glue. His conversation!
Hyacinth had had plenty of that and had endeared himself to the
passionate refugee by the solemnity and candour of his attention.
Poupin had come to England after the Commune of 1871, to escape the
reprisals of the government of M. Thiers, and had remained there in
spite of amnesties and rehabilitations. He was a Republican of the
old-fashioned sort, of the note of 1848, humanitary and idealistic,
infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality and inexhaustibly
surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in
the land of his exile. He had a marked claim upon Hyacinth’s esteem and
gratitude, for he had been his _parrain_, his protector at the bindery.
When Anastasius Vetch found something for Miss Pynsent’s young charge
to do, it was through the Frenchman, with whom he had accidentally made
acquaintance, that he found it.
When the boy was about fifteen years of age Mr. Vetch made him a
present of the essays of Lord Bacon, and the purchase of this volume
had important consequences for Hyacinth. Anastasius Vetch was a poor
man, and the luxury of giving was for the most part denied him; but
when once in a way he tasted it he liked the sensation to be pure.
No man knew better the difference between the common and the rare,
or was more capable of appreciating a book which opened well—of which
the margin was not hideously chopped and of which the lettering on the
back was sharp. It was only such a book that he could bring himself
to offer even to a poor little devil whom a fifth-rate dressmaker
(he knew Pinnie was fifth-rate) had rescued from the workhouse. So
when it became a question of fitting the great Elizabethan with a
new coat—a coat of full morocco discreetly, delicately gilt—he went
with his little cloth-bound volume, a Pickering, straight to Mr.
Crookenden, whom every one who knew anything about the matter knew to
be a prince of binders, though they also knew that his work, limited
in quantity, was mainly done for a particular bookseller and only
through the latter’s agency. Anastasius Vetch had no idea of paying the
bookseller’s commission, and though he could be lavish (for him) when
he made a present, he was capable of taking an immense deal of trouble
to save sixpence. He made his way into Mr. Crookenden’s workshop,
which was situated in a small superannuated square in Soho and where
the proposal of so slender a job was received at first with chilling
calm. Mr. Vetch, however, insisted; he explained with irresistible
frankness the motive of his errand: the desire to obtain the best
possible binding for the least possible money. He made his conception
of the best possible binding so vivid, so exemplary, that the master
of the shop at last confessed to that disinterested sympathy which, in
favouring conditions, establishes itself between the artist and the
connoisseur. Mr. Vetch’s little book was put in hand as a particular
service to an eccentric gentleman whose visit had been a smile-stirring
interlude (for the circle of listening workmen) in a merely mechanical
day; and when he went back three weeks later to see if the job were
done he had the pleasure of finding that his injunctions, punctually
complied with, had even been bettered. The work had been accomplished
with a perfection of skill which made him ask whom he was to thank for
it (he had been told that one man should do the whole of it) and in
this manner he made the acquaintance of the most brilliant craftsman
in the establishment, the incorruptible, the imaginative, the unerring
Eustache Poupin.
In response to an appreciation which he felt not to be _banal_ M.
Poupin remarked that he had at home a small collection of experiments
in morocco, russia, parchment, of fanciful specimens with which, for
the love of the thing itself, he had amused his leisure hours and which
he should be happy to show his interlocutor if the latter would do him
the honour to call upon him at his lodgings in Lisson Grove. Mr. Vetch
made a note of the address and, for the love of the thing itself, went
one Sunday afternoon to see the binder’s esoteric studies. On this
occasion he made the acquaintance of Madame Poupin, a small, fat lady
with a bristling moustache, the white cap of an _ouvrière_, a knowledge
of her husband’s craft that was equal to his own, and not a syllable
of English save the words “What you think, what you think?” which she
introduced with indefatigable frequency. He also discovered that his
new acquaintance had been a political proscript and that he regarded
the iniquitous fabric of Church and State with an eye scarcely more
reverent than the fiddler’s own. M. Poupin was an aggressive socialist,
which Anastasius Vetch was not, and a constructive democrat (instead of
being a mere scoffer at effete things) and a theorist and an optimist
and a collectivist and a perfectionist and a visionary; he believed the
day was to come when all the nations of the earth would abolish their
frontiers and armies and custom-houses, and embrace on both cheeks and
cover the globe with boulevards, radiating from Paris, where the human
family would sit in groups at little tables, according to affinities,
drinking coffee (not tea, _par exemple!_) and listening to the music of
the spheres. Mr. Vetch neither prefigured nor desired this organised
beatitude; he was fond of his cup of tea and only wanted to see the
British constitution a good deal simplified; he thought it a much
overrated system, but his heresies rubbed shoulders sociably with those
of the little bookbinder, and his friend in Lisson Grove became for him
the type of the intelligent foreigner whose conversation gives wings
to our heavy-footed culture. Poupin’s humanitary zeal was as unlimited
as his English vocabulary was the reverse, and the new friends agreed
with each other enough, and not too much, to discuss, which was much
better than an unspeakable harmony. On several other Sunday afternoons
the fiddler went back to Lisson Grove, and having, at his theatre, as
a veteran, a faithful servant, an occasional privilege, he was able
to carry thither, one day in the autumn, an order for two seats in
the second balcony. Madame Poupin and her husband passed a lugubrious
evening at the English comedy, where they didn’t understand a word
that was spoken and consoled themselves by hanging on the agitated
fiddlestick of their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure failed
to arrest the development of a friendship into which, eventually,
Amanda Pynsent was drawn. Madame Poupin, among the cold insularies,
lacked female society, and Mr. Vetch proposed to his amiable friend
in Lomax Place to call upon her. The little dressmaker, who in the
course of her life had known no Frenchwoman but the unhappy Florentine
(so favourable a specimen till she began to go wrong) adopted his
suggestion in the hope that she should get a few ideas from a lady
whose appearance would doubtless exemplify (as Florentine’s originally
had done) the fine taste of her nation; but she found the bookbinder
and his wife a bewildering mixture of the brilliant and the relaxed,
and was haunted long afterwards by the memory of the lady’s camisole in
some hideous print, her uncorseted overflow and her carpet slippers.
The acquaintance, none the less, was sealed three months later by a
supper, one Sunday night, in Lisson Grove, to which Mr. Vetch brought
his fiddle, at which Amanda presented to her hosts her adoptive
son, and which also revealed to her that Madame Poupin could dress a
Michaelmas goose if she couldn’t dress a fat Frenchwoman. This lady
confided to the fiddler that she thought Miss Pynsent exceedingly
_comme il faut—dans le genre anglais_; and neither Amanda nor Hyacinth
had ever passed an evening of such splendour. It took its place, in
the boy’s recollection, beside the visit, years before, to Mr. Vetch’s
theatre. He drank in the remarks exchanged between that gentleman
and M. Poupin. M. Poupin showed him his bindings, the most precious
trophies of his skill, and it seemed to Hyacinth that on the spot he
was initiated into a fascinating mystery. He handled the books for half
an hour; Anastasius Vetch watched him without giving any particular
sign. When therefore, presently, Miss Pynsent consulted her friend for
the twentieth time on the subject of Hyacinth’s “career”—she spoke
as if she were hesitating between the diplomatic service, the army
and the church—the fiddler replied with promptitude: “Make him, if
you can, what the Frenchman is.” At the mention of a handicraft poor
Pinnie always looked very solemn, yet when Mr. Vetch asked her if she
were prepared to send the boy to one of the universities, or to pay
the premium required for his being articled to a solicitor, or to make
favour on his behalf with a bank director or a merchant prince, or, yet
again, to provide him with a comfortable home while he should woo the
muse and await the laurels of literature—when, I say, he put the case
before her with this cynical, ironical lucidity she only sighed and
said that all the money she had ever saved was ninety pounds, which, as
he knew perfectly well, it would cost her his acquaintance for evermore
to take out of the bank. The fiddler had in fact declared to her in
a manner not to be mistaken that if she should divest herself, on the
boy’s account, of this sole nest-egg of her old age, he would wash his
hands of her and her affairs. Her standard of success for Hyacinth
was vague save on one point, as regards which she was passionately,
fiercely firm: she was perfectly determined he should never go into
a small shop. She would rather see him a bricklayer or a costermonger
than dedicated to a retail business, tying up candles at a grocer’s or
giving change for a shilling across a counter. She would rather, she
declared on one occasion, see him articled to a shoemaker or a tailor.
A stationer in a neighbouring street had affixed to his window a
written notice that he was in want of a smart errand-boy, and Pinnie,
on hearing of it, had presented Hyacinth to his consideration.
The stationer was a dreadful bullying man with a patch over his
eye, who seemed to think the boy would be richly remunerated with
three shillings a week; a contemptible measure, as it seemed to the
dressmaker, of his rare abilities and acquirements. His schooling had
been desultory, precarious, and had had a certain continuity mainly
in his early years, while he was under the care of an old lady who
combined with the functions of pew-opener at a neighbouring church the
manipulation, in the Place itself, where she resided with her sister,
a monthly nurse, of such pupils as could be spared (in their families)
from the more urgent exercise of holding the baby and fetching the
beer. Later, for a twelvemonth, Pinnie had paid five shillings a
week for him at an “Academy” in a genteel part of Islington, where
there was an “instructor in the foreign languages,” a platform for
oratory and a high social standard, but where Hyacinth suffered from
the fact that almost all his mates were the sons of dealers in edible
articles—pastry-cooks, grocers and fishmongers—and in this capacity
subjected him to pangs and ignominious contrasts by bringing to school,
for their exclusive consumption or for exchange and barter, various
buns, oranges, spices and marine animals, which the boy, with his hands
in his empty pockets and the sense of a savourless home in his heart,
was obliged to see devoured without his participation. Miss Pynsent
would not have pretended he was highly educated in the technical sense
of the word, but she believed that at fifteen he had read almost every
book in the world. The limits of his reading had been in fact only the
limits of his opportunity. Mr. Vetch, who talked with him more and more
as he grew older, knew this, and lent him every volume he possessed
or could pick up for the purpose. Reading was his extravagance, while
the absence of any direct contact with a library represented for him
mainly the hard shock of the real; the shock, that is, he could most
easily complain of. Mr. Vetch believed him subtly intelligent, and
therefore thought it a woeful pity that he couldn’t have furtherance in
some liberal walk; but he would have thought it a greater pity still
that a youth with that expression in his eyes should be condemned to
measure tape or cut slices of cheese. He himself had no influence he
could bring into play, no connexion with the great world of capital or
the market of labour. That is he touched these mighty institutions at
but one very small point—a point which, such as it was, he kept well in
mind.
When Pinnie replied to the stationer round the corner, after he had
mentioned the “terms” on which he was prepared to receive applications
from errand-boys, that, thank her stars, she hadn’t sunk so low as
that—so low as to sell her darling into slavery for three shillings
a week—he felt that she only gave more florid expression to his own
sentiment. Of course if Hyacinth didn’t begin by carrying parcels he
couldn’t hope to be promoted, through the more refined nimbleness
of tying them up, to a position as accountant or manager; but both
the fiddler and his friend—Miss Pynsent indeed only in the last
resort—resigned themselves to the forfeiture of this prospect. Mr.
Vetch saw clearly that a charming handicraft was a finer thing than a
vulgar “business,” and one day after his acquaintance with Eustache
Poupin had gone a considerable length he inquired of the fervid
Frenchman if there were a chance of the lad’s obtaining a footing,
under his own wing, in Mr. Crookenden’s workshop. There could be no
better place for him to acquire a knowledge of the most elegant of
the mechanical arts; and to be received into such an establishment
and at the instance of such an artist would be a real start in life.
M. Poupin meditated, and that evening confided his meditations to
the companion who reduplicated all his thoughts and understood him
better even than he understood himself. The pair had no children
and had felt the deficiency; moreover they had heard from Mr. Vetch
the dolorous tale of the boy’s entrance into life. He was one of
the disinherited, one of the expropriated, one of the exceptionally
interesting; and moreover he was one of themselves, a child, as it
were, of the inexhaustible France, an offshoot of the sacred race.
It is not the most authenticated point in this veracious history, but
there is strong reason to believe that tears were shed that night, in
Lisson Grove, over poor Hyacinth Robinson. In a day or two M. Poupin
replied to the fiddler that he had now been several years in _le vieux_
“Crook’s” employ; that during that time he had done work for him which
he would have had _bien du mal_ to get done by another, and had never
asked for an indulgence, an allowance, a remission, an augmentation.
It was time, if only for the dignity of the thing, he should ask for
something, and he would make their little friend the subject of his
demand. “_La société lui doit bien cela_,” he remarked afterwards,
when, Mr. Crookenden proving dryly hospitable and the arrangement
being formally complete, Mr. Vetch thanked him in his kindly, casual,
bashful English way. He was paternal when Hyacinth began to occupy a
place in the malodorous chambers in Soho; he took him in hand, made
him a disciple, the recipient of a precious tradition, discovered
in him a susceptibility to philosophic, to cosmic, as well as to
technic truth. He taught him French and socialism, encouraged him
to spend his evenings in Lisson Grove, invited him to regard Madame
Poupin as a second, or rather as a third, mother, and in short made
a very considerable mark on the boy’s mind. He fostered and drew out
the latent Gallicism of his nature, and by the time he was twenty
Hyacinth, who had completely assimilated his influence, regarded him
with a mixture of veneration and amusement. M. Poupin was the person
who consoled him most when he was miserable; and he was very often
miserable.
His staying away from his work was so rare that, in the afternoon,
before he went home, Hyacinth walked to Lisson Grove to see what
ailed him. He found his friend in bed with a plaster on his chest
and Madame Poupin making _tisane_ over the fire. The Frenchman took
his indisposition solemnly but resignedly, like a man who believed
that all illness was owing to the imperfect organisation of society,
and lay covered up to his chin with a red cotton handkerchief bound
round his head. Near his bed sat a visitor, a young man unknown to
Hyacinth. Hyacinth naturally had never been to Paris, but he always
supposed that the _intérieur_ of his friends in Lisson Grove gave
rather a vivid idea of that city. The two small rooms constituting
their establishment contained a great many mirrors as well as
little portraits (old-fashioned prints) of revolutionary heroes. The
chimney-piece in the bedroom was muffled in some red drapery which
appeared to Hyacinth extraordinarily magnificent; the principal
ornament of the salon was a group of small and highly-decorated cups,
on a tray, accompanied by gilt bottles and glasses, the latter still
more diminutive—the whole intended for black coffee and liqueurs. There
was no carpet on the floor, but rugs and mats of various shapes and
sizes disposed themselves at the feet of the chairs and sofas; and in
the sitting-room, where stood a wonderful gilt clock of the Empire,
surmounted with a “subject” representing Virtue receiving a crown of
laurel from the hands of Faith, Madame Poupin, with the aid of a tiny
stove, a handful of charcoal and two or three saucepans, carried on a
triumphant _cuisine_. On the windows were curtains of white muslin much
fluted and frilled and tied with pink ribbon.