“I’m suffering extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the
social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected,”
Poupin remarked, speaking French and rolling toward Hyacinth his
salient, excited-looking eyes, which always had the same declamatory,
reclamatory, proclamatory, the same universally inaugurative
expression, whatever his occupation or his topic. Hyacinth had seated
himself near his friend’s pillow, opposite the strange young man, who
had been accommodated with a chair at the foot of the bed.
“Ah yes; with their filthy politics the situation of the _pauvre monde_
is the last thing they ever think of!” his wife exclaimed from the
fire. “There are times when I ask myself how long it will go on.”
“It will go on till the measure of their imbecility, their infamy, is
full. It will go on till the day of justice, till the reintegration of
the despoiled and disinherited, is ushered in with a force that will
shake the globe.”
“Oh, we always see things go on; we never see them change,” said Madame
Poupin, making a very cheerful clatter with a big spoon in a saucepan.
“We may not see it, but _they’ll_ see it,” her husband returned.
“But what do I say, my children? I do see it,” he pursued. “It’s
before my eyes in its radiant reality, especially as I lie here—the
revendication, the rehabilitation, the rectification.”
Hyacinth ceased to pay attention, not because he had a differing
opinion about what M. Poupin called the _avènement_ of the
disinherited, but, on the contrary, precisely on account of his
familiarity with that prospect. It was the constant theme of his
French friends, whom he had long since perceived to be in a state of
chronic spiritual inflammation. For them the social question was always
in order, the political question always abhorrent, the disinherited
always present. He wondered at their zeal, their continuity, their
vivacity, their incorruptibility; at the abundant supply of conviction
and prophecy they always had on hand. He believed that at bottom he
was sorer than they, yet he had deviations and lapses, moments when
the social question bored him and he forgot not only his own wrongs,
which would have been pardonable, but those of the people at large, of
his brothers and sisters in misery. They, however, were perpetually
in the breach, and perpetually consistent with themselves and, what
is more, with each other. Hyacinth had heard that the institution of
marriage in France was lightly considered, but he was struck with the
closeness and intimacy of the union in Lisson Grove, the passionate
identity of interest: especially on the day when M. Poupin informed
him, in a moment of extreme but not indiscreet expansion, that the
lady was his wife only in a spiritual, affectional sense. There were
hypocritical concessions and debasing superstitions of which this
exalted pair had wholly disapproved. Hyacinth knew their vocabulary
by heart and could have said everything, in the same words, that on
any given occasion M. Poupin was likely to say. He knew that “they,”
in their phraseology, was a comprehensive allusion to every one in the
world but the people—though who, exactly, in their length and breadth,
the people were was less definitely established. He himself was of this
sacred body, for which the future was to have such compensations; and
so of course were his French friends, and so was Pinnie, and so were
most of the inhabitants of Lomax Place and the workmen in old Crook’s
shop. But was old Crook himself, who wore an apron rather dirtier
than the rest of them and was a master-hand at “forwarding,” yet who,
on the other side, was the occupant of a villa all but detached, at
Putney, with a wife known to have secret aspirations toward a page in
buttons? Above all was Mr. Vetch, who earned a weekly wage, and not
a large one, with his fiddle, but who had mysterious affinities of
another sort, reminiscences of a phase in which he smoked cigars, had
a hat-box and used cabs—besides visiting Boulogne? Anastasius Vetch
had interfered in his life, atrociously, at a terrible crisis; but
Hyacinth, who strove to cultivate justice in his own conduct, believed
he had acted conscientiously, and tried to esteem him, the more so as
the fiddler evidently felt he had something to make up to him for and
had ever treated him with marked benevolence. He believed in short that
Mr. Vetch took a sincere interest in him and if he should meddle again
would meddle in a different way: he used to see him sometimes look at
him with the kindest eyes. It would make a difference therefore if he
were of the people or not, inasmuch as on the day of the great revenge
it would only be the people who should be saved. It was for the people
the world was made: whoever was not of them was against them; and
all others were cumberers, usurpers, exploiters, _accapareurs_, as M.
Poupin used to say. Hyacinth had once put the question directly to Mr.
Vetch, who looked at him a while through the fumes of his eternal pipe
and then said: “Do you think I’m an aristocrat?”
“I didn’t know but you were a bourgeois,” the young man answered.
“No, I’m neither. I’m a Bohemian.”
“With your evening dress, every night?”
“My dear boy,” said the fiddler, “those are the most confirmed.”
Hyacinth was only half satisfied with this, for it was by no means
definite to him that Bohemians were also to be saved; if he could be
sure perhaps he would become one himself. Yet he never suspected Mr.
Vetch of being a governmental agent, though Eustache Poupin had told
him that there were a great many who looked a good deal like that: not
of course with any purpose of incriminating the fiddler, whom he had
trusted from the first and continued to trust. The governmental agent
in extraordinary disguises, the wondrous _mouchard_ of M. Poupin’s
view, became a very familiar type to Hyacinth, and though he had never
caught one of the infamous brotherhood in the act there were plenty of
persons to whom, on the very face of the matter, he had no hesitation
in attributing the character. There was nothing of the Bohemian,
at any rate, about the Poupins, whom Hyacinth had now known long
enough not to be surprised at the way they combined the socialistic
passion, a red-hot impatience for the general rectification, with
an extraordinary decency of life and a worship of proper work. The
Frenchman spoke habitually as if the great swindle practised upon the
people were too impudent to be endured a moment longer, and yet he
found patience for the most exquisite “tooling” and took a book in hand
with the deliberation of one who should believe that everything was
immutably constituted. Hyacinth knew what he thought of priests and
theologies, but he had the religion of conscientious craftsmanship and
he reduced the boy, on his side, to a kind of prostration before his
delicate wonder-working fingers. “What will you have? _J’ai la main
parisienne_,” M. Poupin would reply modestly when Hyacinth’s admiration
broke out; and he was good enough, after he had seen a few specimens
of what our hero could do, to inform him that _he_ had the same happy
conformation. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be a good workman,
_il n’y a que ça_”; and his own life was practically governed by this
conviction. He delighted in the use of his hands and his tools and the
exercise of his taste, which was faultless, and Hyacinth could easily
imagine how it must torment him to spend a day on his back. He ended
by perceiving, however, that consolation was on this occasion in some
degree conveyed by the presence of the young man who sat at the foot of
the bed and with whom M. Poupin exhibited such signs of acquaintance as
to make our hero wonder why he had not seen him before, nor even heard
of him.
“What do you mean by force that will shake the globe?” the young
man inquired, leaning back in his chair with raised arms and his
interlocked hands, behind him, supporting his head. M. Poupin had
spoken French, which he always preferred to do, the insular tongue
being an immense tribulation to him; but his visitor spoke English,
and Hyacinth immediately took in that there was nothing French about
_him_—M. Poupin could never tell him he had _la main parisienne_.
“I mean a force that will make the bourgeois go down into their cellars
and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps
of gold!” cried M. Poupin, rolling terrible eyes.
“And in this country, I hope, in their coal-bins. _La-la_, we shall
find them even there,” his wife remarked.
“’89 was an irresistible force,” said M. Poupin. “I believe you would
have thought so if you had been there.”
“And so was the entrance of the Versaillais, which sent you over here
ten years ago,” the young man returned. He saw Hyacinth was watching
him and he met his eyes, smiling a little, in a way that added to our
hero’s interest.
“_Pardon, pardon_, I resist!” cried Eustache Poupin, glaring, in his
improvised nightcap, out of his sheets; and Madame repeated that they
resisted—she believed well that they resisted! The young man burst out
laughing; whereupon his host declared with a dignity which even his
recumbent position didn’t abate that it was really frivolous of him to
ask such questions as that, knowing as he did—what he did know.
“Yes, I know—I know,” said the young man good-naturedly, lowering his
arms and thrusting his hands into his pockets while he stretched his
long legs a little. “But everything is yet to be tried.”
“Oh the trial will be on a great scale—_soyez tranquille_! It will be
one of those experiments that constitute a proof.”
Hyacinth wondered what they were talking about, and perceived that
it must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who
would take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck
with him, could see he was remarkable, and felt slightly aggrieved
that he should be a stranger: that is that he should be apparently a
familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought
his young friend from Lomax Place worthy up to this time to be made
acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the
other chair discovered these reflexions in Hyacinth’s face, but after a
moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly
diffident way, a way our hero liked: “And do you know too?”
“Do I know what?” asked Hyacinth in wonder.
“Oh, if you did you would!” the young man exclaimed and laughed again.
Such a rejoinder from any one else would have irritated our sensitive
hero, but it only made him more curious about his interlocutor, whose
laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay.
“_Mon ami_, you ought to present _ces messieurs_,” Madame Poupin
remarked.
“_Ah ça_, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?” her husband
cried without heeding her. Then he went on in a different tone: “M.
Hyacinthe is a gifted child, _un enfant très-doué_, in whom I take a
tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping
big one! Isn’t it so, _mon petit_?”
This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without
knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly: “Oh, I only want them
to let me alone!”
“He’s very young,” said Eustache Poupin.
“He’s the person we have seen in this country whom we like best,” his
wife added.
“Perhaps you’re French,” suggested the strange young man.
The trio seemed to Hyacinth to be waiting for his answer to this; it
was as if a listening stillness had fallen. He found it a difficult
pass, partly because there was something exciting and embarrassing in
the attention of the other visitor, and partly because he had never yet
had to decide that important question. He didn’t really know if he were
French or were English, or which of the two he should prefer to be.
His mother’s blood, her suffering in an alien land, the unspeakable,
irremediable misery that consumed her in a place and among a people she
must have execrated—all this made him French; yet he was conscious at
the same time of qualities that didn’t mix with it. He had spun to the
last fineness, long ago, a legend about his mother, built it up slowly,
adding piece to piece, in passionate musings and broodings, when his
cheeks burned and his eyes filled; but there were times when it wavered
and faded, when it ceased to console him and he ceased to trust it.
He had had a father too, and his father had suffered as well, and had
fallen under a blow, and had paid with his life; and him also he felt
in his spirit and his senses, when the effort to think it out didn’t
simply end in darkness and confusion, challenging still even while they
baffled, and inevitable freezing horror. At any rate he seemed rooted
in the place where his wretched parents had expiated, and he knew
nothing of any other. Moreover when old Poupin said “M. Hyacinthe,” as
he had often done before, he didn’t altogether enjoy it; he thought it
made his name, which he liked well enough in English, sound like the
name of a hairdresser. Our young friend was under a cloud and a stigma,
but he was not yet prepared to admit he was ridiculous. “Oh, I daresay
I ain’t anything,” he replied in a moment.
“_En v’là des bêtises!_” cried Madame Poupin. “Do you mean to say
you’re not as good as any one in the world? I should like to see!”
“We all have an account to settle, don’t you know?” said the strange
young man.
He evidently meant this to be encouraging to Hyacinth, whose quick
desire to avert M. Poupin’s allusions had not been lost on him; but our
hero could see that he himself would be sure to be one of the first
to be paid. He would make society bankrupt, but he would be paid. He
was tall and fair and good-natured looking, but you couldn’t tell—or
at least Hyacinth couldn’t—if he were handsome or ugly, with his large
head and square forehead, his thick, straight hair, his heavy mouth and
rather vulgar nose, his admirably clear steady eyes, light-coloured
and set very deep; for despite a want of fineness in some of its
parts his face had a marked expression of intelligence and resolution,
spoke somehow, as if it had showed you his soul drawing deep and even
breaths, of a state of moral health. He was dressed as a workman in
his Sunday toggery, having evidently put on his best to call in Lisson
Grove, where he was to meet a lady, and wearing in particular a necktie
which was both cheap and pretentious and of which Hyacinth, who noticed
everything of that kind, observed the crude false blue. He had very
big shoes—the shoes almost of a country labourer—and spoke with a
provincial accent which Hyacinth believed to be that of Lancashire.
This didn’t suggest cleverness, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from
feeling sure he was the reverse of stupid, that he probably indeed
had a large easy brain quite as some people had big strong fists.
Our little hero had a great desire to know superior persons, and he
interested himself on the spot in this quiet stranger whose gravity, by
any fine balance, showed, like that of a precious metal, in the small
piece as well as in the big. He had the complexion of a ploughboy and
the glance of a commander-in-chief, and might have been a distinguished
young _savant_ in the disguise of an artisan. The disguise would have
been very complete, for he had several brown stains on his fingers.
Hyacinth’s curiosity on this occasion was both excited and gratified;
for after two or three allusions, which he didn’t understand, had
been made to a certain place where Poupin and their friend had met and
expected to meet again, Madame Poupin exclaimed that it was a shame not
to take in M. Hyacinthe, who, she would answer for it, had in him the
making of one of the pure.
“All in good time, in good time, _ma bonne_,” the worthy invalid
replied. “M. Hyacinthe knows I count on him, whether or no I make him
an _interne_ to-day or only wait a little longer.”
“What do you mean by an _interne_?” Hyacinth asked.
“_Mon Dieu_, what shall I say!”—and Eustache Poupin stared at him
solemnly from his pillow. “You’re very sympathetic, but I’m afraid
you’re too young.”
“One is never too young to contribute one’s _obole_,” said Madame
Poupin.
“Can you keep a secret?” asked the other guest, but not as if he
thought it probable.
“Is it a plot—a conspiracy?” Hyacinth broke out.
“He asks that as if he were asking if it’s a plum-pudding,” said M.
Poupin. “It isn’t good to eat, and we don’t do it for our amusement.
It’s terribly serious, my child.”
“It’s a group of workers to which he and I and a good many others
belong. There’s no harm in telling him that,” the young man went on.
“I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she’s quite in the old
ideas,” Madame Poupin suggested to Hyacinth, tasting her _tisane_.
Hyacinth sat baffled and wondering, looking from his fellow-labourer in
Soho to his new acquaintance opposite. “If you’ve some plan, something
to which one can give one’s self, I think you might have told me,” he
remarked in a moment to Poupin.
The latter merely viewed him a little as if he were a pleasing object
and then said to the strange young man: “He’s a little jealous of you.
But there’s no harm in that; it’s of his age. You must know him, you
must like him. We’ll tell you his history some other day; it will make
you feel that he belongs to us of necessity. It’s an accident that he
hasn’t met you here before.”
“How could _ces messieurs_ have met when M. Paul never comes? He
doesn’t spoil us!” Madame Poupin cried.
“Well, you see I’ve my little sister at home to take care of when I
ain’t at the works,” M. Paul explained. “This afternoon it was just a
chance; there was a lady we know came in to sit with her.”
“A lady—a real lady?”
“Oh yes, every inch,” smiled M. Paul.
“Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like
that because you’ve the _désagrément_ of being poor? It seems to be
the custom in this country, but it wouldn’t suit me at all,” Madame
Poupin continued. “I should like to see one of _ces dames_—the real
ones—coming in to sit with me!”
“Oh, you’re not a cripple; you’ve got the use of your legs!”
“Yes, and of my arms!” cried the Frenchwoman.
“This lady looks after several others in our court and she reads to my
sister.”
“Oh, well, you’re patient, you other English.”
“We shall never do anything without that,” said M. Paul with
undisturbed good-humour.
“You’re perfectly right; you can’t say that too often. It will be a
tremendous job and only the strong will prevail,” his host murmured
a little wearily, turning his eyes to Madame Poupin, who approached
slowly, holding the _tisane_ in rather a full bowl and tasting it again
and yet again as she came.
Hyacinth had been watching his fellow-visitor with deepening interest;
a fact of which M. Paul apparently became aware, for he volunteered
presently, giving a little nod in the direction of the bed, “He says we
ought to know each other. I’m sure I’ve nothing against it. I like to
know folk if they’re likely to be worth it.”
Hyacinth was too pleased with this even to take it up; it seemed to him
for a moment that he couldn’t touch it gracefully enough. But he said
with sufficient eagerness: “Will you tell me all about your plot?”
“Oh, it’s no plot. I don’t think I care much for plots.” And with his
mild, steady, light-blue English eye, M. Paul certainly had not much
the appearance of a conspirator.
“Isn’t it a new era?” asked Hyacinth, rather disappointed.
“Well, I don’t know; it’s just a taking of a stand on two or three
points.”
“_Ah bien, voilà du propre_; between us we’ve thrown him into a fever!”
cried Madame Poupin, who had put down her bowl on a table near her
husband’s bed and was bending over him with her hand on his forehead.
Her patient was flushed, he had closed his eyes, and it was evident
there had been more than enough conversation. Madame Poupin announced
as much, with the addition that if the young men wished to make
acquaintance they must do it outside; their friend must be perfectly
quiet. They accordingly withdrew with apologies and promises to return
for further news on the morrow, and two minutes later Hyacinth found
himself standing face to face with his companion on the pavement in
front of M. Poupin’s residence, under a street-lamp which struggled
ineffectually with the brown winter dusk.
“Is that your name, M. Paul?” he asked as he looked up at him.
“Oh bless you, no; that’s only her Frenchified way of putting it. My
name _is_ Paul, though—Paul Muniment.”
“And what’s your trade?” Hyacinth demanded with a jump into
familiarity; for his friend seemed to have told him a great deal more
than was usually conveyed in that item of information.
Paul Muniment looked down at him from above broad shoulders. “I work
for a firm of wholesale chemists at Lambeth.”
“And where do you live?”
“I live over the water too; in the far south of London.”
“And are you going home now?”
“Oh yes, I’m going to toddle.”
“And may I toddle with you?”
Mr. Muniment considered him further and then gave a laugh. “I’ll carry
you if you like.”
“Thank you; I expect I can walk as far as you,” said Hyacinth.
“Well, I admire your spirit and I daresay I shall like your company.”
There was something in his face, taken in connexion with the idea
that he was concerned in the taking of a stand—it offered our quick
youth the image of a rank of bristling bayonets—which made Hyacinth
feel the desire to go with him till he dropped; and in a moment they
started away together and took the direction Muniment had mentioned.
They discoursed as they went, exchanging a great many opinions and
anecdotes; but they reached the south-westerly court in which the
young chemist lived with his infirm sister before he had told Hyacinth
anything definite about the “points” of his reference or Hyacinth,
on his side, had detailed the circumstances involved in his being,
according to M. Poupin, one of the disinherited. Hyacinth didn’t
wish to press, wouldn’t for the world have appeared indiscreet, and
moreover, though he had taken so great a fancy to Muniment, was not
quite prepared as yet to be pressed himself. Therefore it failed to
become very clear how his companion had made Poupin’s acquaintance and
how long he had enjoyed it. Paul Muniment nevertheless was to a certain
extent communicative, especially on the question of his living in a
very poor little corner. He had his sister to keep—she could do nothing
for herself; and he paid a low rent because she had to have doctors and
doses and all sorts of little comforts. He spent a bob a week for her
on flowers. It was better too when you got upstairs, and from the back
windows you could see the dome of Saint Paul’s. Audley Court, with its
pretty name, which reminded Hyacinth of Tennyson, proved to be a still
dingier nook than Lomax Place; and it had the further drawback that you
had to penetrate a narrow alley, a passage between high black walls,
to enter it. At the door of one of the houses the young men paused,
lingering a little, and then Muniment said: “I say, why shouldn’t you
come up? I like you well enough for that, and you can see my sister;
her name’s Rosy.” He spoke as if this would be a great privilege and
added, for the joke, that Rosy enjoyed a call from a gentleman of
all things. Hyacinth needed no urging, and he groped his way at his
companion’s heels up a dark staircase which appeared to him—for they
stopped only when they could go no further—the longest and steepest he
had ever ascended. At the top Paul Muniment pushed open a door, but
exclaimed “Hullo, have you gone to roost?” on perceiving the room on
the threshold of which they stood to be unlighted.
“Oh dear, no; we’re sitting in the dark,” a small bright voice
instantly replied. “Lady Aurora’s so kind; she’s here still.”
The voice came out of a corner so pervaded by gloom that the speaker
was indistinguishable. “Well now, that’s beautiful!” Paul Muniment
rejoined. “You’ll have a party then, for I’ve brought some one else.
We’re poor, you know, but honest, and not afraid of showing up, and I
daresay we can manage a candle.”
At this, in the dim firelight, Hyacinth saw a tall figure erect
itself—a figure angular and slim, crowned with a large vague hat and
a flowing umbrageous veil. This unknown person gave a singular laugh
and said: “Oh I brought some candles; we could have had a light if we
had wished.” Both the tone and the purport of the words announced to
Hyacinth that they proceeded from Lady Aurora.