Italic represented by underscores surrounding the _italic text_.
Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
VOL. II.
OLIVER CONSTABLE
MILLER AND BAKER
BY
SARAH TYTLER
AUTHOR OF ‘CITOYENNE JACQUELINE’ ‘SCOTCH FIRS’ ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES_
VOL. II.
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1880
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
CHAPTER PAGE
XI. OLIVER CULTIVATES JACK DADD 1
XII. HARRY STANHOPE’S NOTION OF BEING A
YEOMAN 27
XIII. OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS
CLASS 56
XIV. THE FIRST ATTEMPT 76
XV. THE ANNUAL EXCURSION 101
XVI. THE MIDDLE AND END OF THE FEAST 127
XVII. AGNETA STANHOPE 147
XVIII. OLIVER’S LECTURE ON WORDSWORTH 165
XIX. AN ILLUSION 194
XX. OLIVER CAUSES A SPLIT IN THE CHAPEL
CONNECTION BECAUSE OF HIS DOGGED
OPPOSITION TO HARTLEY, NORRIS, AND
CO. 221
XXI. MUTINY IN THE MILL AND THE BAKEHOUSE 253
XXII. A REFORMER’S REWARD 272
OLIVER CONSTABLE,
_MILLER AND BAKER_.
CHAPTER XI.
OLIVER CULTIVATES JACK DADD.
Oliver was happy enough to discover, in the course of an evening call
which Jack Dadd paid at the mill-house, that Jack had turned his mind a
little in the direction of the rearing of vegetables, and the training
and bearing of fruit trees. He had a voice in making the best of his
father’s garden. His own name had appeared in the list of successful
competitors at the Horticultural Show.
‘Your blockhead of a gardener is making a mess of these artichokes, and
your medlar don’t carry half the crop it ought to;’ Jack found fault in
his free and easy style, as Oliver and he were strolling in the garden,
while Fan sat in solitary dignity within doors.
‘Very likely,’ Oliver answered, philosophically at first; and then he
proposed quickly, ‘Give us a lesson, Dadd?’
‘You ain’t above taking it,’ said Jack Dadd, nodding, ‘though your ass
of a man may be. But you don’t suppose I’m going to put a spoke in my
own wheel, by telling you how to be my successful rival at the show?’
Jack was not in earnest in his refusal, for he was naturally obliging
and good-natured, while dealing with customers who were mostly women
gave him a habit of civility. But he considered it smart and out of
shop to appear knowing, selfish, and blustering, just as he reckoned
it spirited and dashing to use bad language on occasions, without
entering much into the meaning of the words. Oliver had fallen out of
knowledge of the lad, and was not certain either of his simplicity or
his affectation, so he changed a little in his tack.
‘What would you say to setting up a field naturalists’ society in
Friarton, and having occasional excursions to furnish a correct
catalogue of the flora of this district of England—not a bad district
for the purpose?’ suggested Oliver.
Oliver’s mind had gone off to a version of the pursuit of herbs in
which there should be only the mildest species of rivalry. ‘If we were
to tramp whole days,’ he said to himself sanguinely, after what he half
hoped was an inspiration, ‘over pastures, through woods, and down the
centre of ditches, crying “Eureka!” with one consent, when we came upon
an outlying specimen of nettle, we should assuredly hob-nob together
before we had gone out three times.’
‘Oh! bother, no,’ said Jack, throwing a bucketful of cold water on the
first spark of the project. ‘There is some sense in growing vegetables
and fruit, and even garden flowers—though the breakjaw names of the
last is enough to stop the business—I mean, of course, the last things
out in the flower line, for nobody cares about the poor old things that
had no show along with their scent, like cottage bonnets and short
skirts, which mother will tell you were so modest and tidy. But to take
the trouble to hunt up and nickname weeds, I call sheer waste of body
and mind, fit only for pottering gentlefolks, schoolmasters, and fogies
of that kidney, or for your would be geniuses among the working-men.
You would have a pretty sprinkling of the lowest ruck wanting an excuse
to be off from a day’s work, and expecting you to pay them for joining
your society. I tell you, Constable, it don’t pay—either him or anyone
else—to take a working-man from his work and set him up as a genius.
Just you see how it would answer with your bakers. Besides, I, for one,
don’t care for being mixed up with every blacksmith and carter who
takes it into his conceited noddle that he has a turn for gathering
weeds and storing trash.’ And Jack strutted a little as he walked, and
puffed out his pink and white cheeks.
‘You are wrong,’ maintained Oliver, ‘and more’s the pity for the other
ways in which a working-man spends his holiday. But look here, Jack,
you meet him in the cricket-field?’
‘Oh! that is different,’ said young Dadd, carelessly. ‘That is an
understood thing. But as for my club, we have only a young weaver and
a shoemaker or two able to bat and bowl at our evening practice. The
working-man who lives by his cart-horse sinews is mostly too tired for
any place save the alehouse, after six o’clock.’
In spite of the slightness of the encouragement he had received,
Oliver did feel his way to originating a field naturalists’ society.
He sounded his own millers and bakers, and discovered no Robert Dick
among them; none went in for weeds. However, in his search, Oliver hit
on a stalwart journeyman in his service, who had a small taste for
butterflies. Oliver himself had no elegant scientific bent in this
direction, but he introduced his baker to the ancient keeper of an
ancient, dusty, mouldy, and well-nigh forgotten museum in the town.
True, the keeper, in the neglect and oblivion which had fallen upon his
charge, had lapsed into hopeless indifference and absolute infidelity
to his trust: but he was sufficiently moved by the strange event of a
visitor—a pupil—however humble, to the museum, not only to furbish up
the remains of what had once been a creditable display of native and
foreign butterflies, in the entomological cases, he showed a salutary
sense of shame, by volunteering to make a report to the survivors of
the committee, who had mismanaged the affairs of the museum, for the
purpose of inducing them to employ a portion of the small fund which
still remained at their disposal, to pay the young baker to replace the
native ‘peacocks’ and ‘emperors,’ that had dropped and crumbled from
their pins.
Oliver fondly flattered himself that he had done some good in
this quarter. But unfortunately, the big young baker was of a
self-conscious, sensitive disposition. He was abashed by the sudden
favourable notice of a pursuit, which, though he had fallen into it,
he had always been accustomed to look upon as very much the childish
folly his companions held it to be. He allowed himself to be overcome
by the half-jealous chaff which went on in the shop at the result of
the jeering information which some of the men had volunteered to give
their master. The unfortunate admirer of butterflies began to hate the
mention even of a beetle or a bumble-bee. He doggedly declined to
have anything to do with refilling the cases in the museum. He showed
Oliver, in a nervous but unmistakable manner, that the man would have
none of the master’s sympathy, and took refuge in the skittle-ground
nearest to his lodgings, that he might not be tempted into the
fields, and betrayed into the absurdity of butterfly-hunting, thus
destroying the _esprit de corps_ between him and his brother-bakers,
and alienating them from his side. Oliver’s small amount of good
done effervesced in harm. And when a letter in the ‘Friarton News’
only bore the fruit of several more or less cordial and enthusiastic
replies from those ‘pottering gentlefolks,’ schoolmasters, and a
working-man or two, of whom Jack Dadd had spoken, Oliver withdrew
from the scheme, leaving the members who had suggested themselves to
render it an accomplished fact and to include in the society—if they
had the wisdom to extend their bounds in that direction, all the idle
young ladies in the neighbourhood—who were not too fastidious, or
too delicate, or too lazy to enter the ranks, and to take to making
herbariums, in place of playing incessant games of croquet, badminton,
or lawn-tennis, whichever happened to be in the ascendant, alternately
with district-visiting under the last fascinating curate. They were
very well qualified to do this work without him. Oliver was sensible
that he might incur the reproach of not knowing his own mind. But he
did know it well enough not to be diverted, by a specious and rather
agreeable prospect, from his proper purpose. If none of the Dadd and
Polley set could be drawn out to study botany, he would let it alone
for the present.
The next bright idea which struck Oliver was to join Jack Dadd’s
company of volunteers—not that Jack was their captain, but he was an
influential member of the corps. He was a tolerably smart soldier, a
fair shot, proud of his uniform and of what he had learnt of drill. He
might be a greater man in the volunteer ball-room than at a sham fight,
but he was honestly possessed with the notion that he was serving his
country and forming part of her martial bulwark. For that matter he
occasionally terrified his mother by swaggering and threatening, after
a tiff with his father, to join any reserved force which should be
called abroad.
Oliver was perfectly aware that he could never be what Jack called ‘a
dab’ of a soldier, but he was not sure that Jack would not like him
the better for his defects. It would be a great nuisance and fatigue
to Oliver to walk and hold himself straight and still, like other
men, and not to be perpetually in disgrace, but he might try what he
could accomplish in bodily self-restraint. It would be what moralists
would call ‘good discipline’ for him, at any rate. At the same time
he remembered, and even reminded Fan of what he had said to her on the
evening of his coming home, as to his being out of place in a barrack
yard.
Fan was not too generous to refrain from assenting with grave irony,
though she had no particular objection to his joining the company
of volunteers, which included men of all ranks, if only Oliver had
asserted his claims and got a commission—not put himself on a level
with young Dadd. ‘Jack Dadd is odious,’ Fan had said with effusion to
Oliver one day, as she recalled the young draper’s loud trousers, tight
boots, and ‘light kids,’ when he figured as a ‘Sunday swell.’ Fan also
cherished lively recollections of what she had suffered from Jack Dadd
on the occasion of a party at the Polleys, which she had been forced to
attend soon after leaving school. Jack would not be kept at a distance
by any effort of girlish majesty, and when he had happened to sit next
to her, he had presumed to administer sundry nudges with his elbow
to emphasise points in his conversation, without regard to her stony
disregard of the signals.
‘Not a bit,’—Oliver denied the odiousness stoutly; ‘Dadd is not half a
bad fellow; he is manly in his way, and though that way may not be good
form,’ reflected Oliver, falling inadvertently into school slang, ‘it
is not altogether his fault, poor beggar.’
Oliver paid heavy penalties for his ambition, in the Masonic
Hall—converted for the nonce into a drill hall—and in the
five-acre field, where the volunteers went through their exercise.
Discipline alone prevented Jack Dadd and his cronies from roaring and
rolling about with laughter at the recruit’s disqualifications and
misdemeanours. After many evenings’ enforced attendance and irksome
drudgery, at the hall and in the field, and a journey along with some
scores of excited men cooped up in the insufficient accommodation of
a limited number of railway carriages, followed by a march of several
miles through clouds of dust in order to perform a series of wildly
entangled evolutions, before a general officer, who smiled grimly at
the performance, and marked out Oliver for particular reprobation,
Oliver counted disconsolately his gains from the extensive sacrifice
of his leisure. He was on easier terms with Jack Dadd and the rest,
since they had at least one more subject in common. He was invited as a
matter of course, and had, indeed, a right, to join the others in what
Jack called their ‘watering,’ and which might more appropriately have
been styled their ‘beering,’ and their occasional little suppers at
the inns they affected after drill. These young men of the people were
not dissipated fellows farther than what was implied by the fact that
certain members, like Jack, were inclined to aspire to a flavour of
dissipation as an element in manliness. Their gambling was to a very
limited extent, though it might reach to the bottom of their slenderly
lined purses, in stakes of small silver at the billiard table, which
an enterprising Friarton innkeeper had provided for them, as well as
for their betters, in addition to cribbage boards and packs of cards.
The noise and riot into which the high spirits of the company broke out
at times might be a little coarse, but it was not more outrageous than
the mad nonsense which Oliver had witnessed, and, sober-minded as he
was for the most part, had joined in, occasionally, when well-bred lads
met in each other’s rooms on the banks of the Isis. For that matter,
its utterance served in both cases as a safety-valve for the exuberance
of life, the joy in existence, which soon enough expends itself and is
replaced by a burden of care, worry and weariness, even when men stop
short of bitterness of heart and despair of spirit.
The pity was that though there were no deans and proctors at Friarton,
and though the intervention of the rural Charlies or Bobbies might not
be called for, the public of the little town was at once more lynx-eyed
and sterner in its judgments. There was far less allowance made for
the young plebeians than for the young patricians. Unaccountably and
inconsistently, much more was expected from the former than from the
latter. Old heads on young shoulders were unhesitatingly demanded in
many quarters in the case of the embryo tradesmen, with their poor
education, and their slender resources by comparison for occupying
their leisure hours. It was hard to say why this inequality of opinion
existed, unless the early call of these young shopmen to earn their
bread by the sweat of their brow, and the hand-to-hand struggle of
some of them with poverty and privation from their cradles upwards,
might be supposed, by an austere necessity, to steady and dignify the
lads betimes, not to drive them desperate and impel them to snatch
greedily at any small indulgence, however base and fatal, which came
within their reach. If this were the explanation, an exceptional though
perilous honour was conferred on ‘the counter-jumpers’ when they were
expected to be wiser than their fellows.
For Oliver was certain of one thing, that if any draper’s assistant, or
saddler or ironmonger’s apprentice, in Friarton happened to be simply
intoxicated, not so much with strong drink as with the restless energy
and furious mirth of youth in an ebullition that would be treated with
tolerant tenderness at a university, and punished by nothing worse
than the mild reproof or the nominal fine, which was a trifle light
as air to the privileged undergraduate, the young tradesman would be
generally set down as drunk with less ethereal liquor. If caught in
the act of creating a disturbance so heinous as waking the silent
night with hideous clamour, giving chase to a surprised, surrounded,
and hustled guardian of the public peace, smashing wantonly a street
lamp, or wrenching off ‘maliciously’ a bell or knocker, he would be
hailed before a bench of magistrates, and mulcted of a sum out of
all proportion to his exchequer. And that was not all. He would have
to pay what was for him a far heavier penalty. His character, which
was his capital, his chief dependence for work and livelihood, would
suffer. His employer, though he had been young himself once, would be
so influenced by the magisterial verdict as to begin to lose confidence
in his assistant. The inspector of the Sunday or night school in which
the lad might have been religiously enough inclined, and sufficiently
benevolent to take an interest and have a class, would sharply signify
to the offender that he was no credit to the institution, and had
better give up his connection with it. The clergyman, receiving
the report of the inspector, would not think himself justified in
interfering; on the contrary, he, too, would commence to look coldly
on his young parishioner. The lad, sunk in his own estimation by the
judgment of those he had respected and who ought to know best, slinking
away from their condemnation to seek refuge with his fellow-sinners,
who could not at least set their faultlessness against his errors,
might become the dog with a bad name in a fair way to be hung.
Oliver Constable did not see how the unequal dispensation of justice
was to be made even, but he smarted under the sense of it. The smart
tempted him to act very much after the fashion of the great Dr. Johnson
when the young bucks for whom he had a kindly regard invaded his room
at midnight and summoned him to a lark. In like manner and with less
solicitation, Oliver remained many an evening in the society of Jack
Dadd, and of lads with even fewer hostages to respectability than Jack,
and went with them—careless of what people said of his, Oliver’s,
taste—in the young tradesmen’s senseless but harmless enough raids
through the town, because Oliver Constable believed that his presence
was a protection to the others, even more than a check on their erratic
proceedings; yet in return for the double support, Oliver’s _protégés_
to a great extent fought shy of him.
In these boyish demonstrations in which he chose to bear a part,
Oliver had not the relief of cultured cleverness, some development
of which had usually been intermingled with the ‘great fun’ and
‘awful jolliness’ of a gathering of university lads, whose rollicking
propensities had not been altogether toned down by blue china and
sage-green _portières_. If at a certain stage of the entertainment,
missiles would fly about, howls be resorted to, and batterings of the
door indulged in, at another there would occur lively mimicry of the
Union speeches; parodies of old classic odes would carry the mind back
to Greek and Roman feasts; viewiest of views—transcending the most
extravagant speculations of ancient and modern philosophy—would be
aired, and would serve at least to show that the young revellers had
inherited thoughts and fancies, however crude, as well as the rampant
spirits of their years.
But here among the youth of Friarton, which was not golden, or even
gilded, a bad style of practical joking and buffoonery—gone out
elsewhere save in the worst style of regiment; the boisterous rendering
of the mock heroic and still more excruciating comic songs of the
lower order of theatres; and a good deal of rude wrangling for lack of
a better mode of argument, traversing the horse-play and threatening
now and then to terminate in the rowdyism of a free fight, formed the
sole alternatives to sheer noise. These young shopmen, who were very
ordinary lads, were nearly a century behind their social superiors in
superficial civilisation. Oliver used to compare his class sorrowfully
to those nations in Europe like the Poles and Hungarians kept back to
do the needful work of repelling the hordes of Eastern barbarians, and
apparently never able to make up for lost time.
Oliver Constable did not for a moment imagine that the upper classes
enjoyed a monopoly or even a predominance of moral and intellectual
gifts. But the truth was pressed home upon him painfully, that while
genius, which is above all accident of circumstances, and which is
its own teacher, is rare, cultivation tells in producing a higher
average of second-rate ability, or the specious appearance of it, in
the better educated grades of society. And where the _matter_ is not
of the best, the _manner_ always plays an overweening part. There did
not happen to be a ‘mute inglorious Milton’ in Friarton in those days,
so Oliver missed the intelligent echoes of the Marvels and Butlers of
the period, which he had been accustomed to hear at Oxford. Even with
their aid he had been apt to get tired of youthful gaieties, and to
call them intolerably flippant and shallow, but, in contrast with his
former experience, the clumsy gambols of the Friarton lads were dull
as ditch water. Oliver could not have stood them long, had it not been
for the strength of his purpose and that higher humanity which awoke in
him such sympathy with his kind, above all with the class in which it
seemed to Oliver his chief responsibilities were to be found.
It was slow uphill work to win influence and lull antagonism. Jack Dadd
had made use, more than once in Oliver’s hearing, of bad language.
Happily for Jack himself, he had no real relish for it; he employed it
as an evidence of knowingness and spirit in the light in which many
swearers indulged in profane swearing in the great swearing age. Some
melancholy prophets report there are ominous symptoms, in high places,
of the return of this epoch, but we must humbly trust that the blooming
time of blasphemy was a century ago.
At last Oliver interfered: ‘Dadd, will you do me the favour not to say
that again in my hearing?’ Oliver requested, quietly.
‘Oh! hang it, Constable, we are not to have any preaching or dictating
from you,’ cried young Dadd, colouring up and blustering. ‘If you don’t
like our ways, leave ’em alone. We shan’t cringe for your company, of
which you have made us a gift, without our asking for it, I may say.’
‘I have not preached or dictated; I appeal to the rest of you fellows,’
said Oliver, without much loss of temper; while the fellows, who had
their share of the old English passion for fair play, felt constrained
to mumble an assent to the appeal even though it was against the
deliverance of their comrade. ‘I asked you to drop that expression as
a favour to me,’ repeated Oliver; ‘if you cannot grant the favour, at
least you may refuse civilly.’
‘Oh! if you choose to put it in that fashion,’ said Jack, a little
sulkily, ‘there is no more to be said; all I meant to object to was any
fine fellow’s thinking to come it over us, which I never heard he was
invited to do, and taking it upon him to bid us mince our words to suit
his delicate stomach.’
But Jack soon forgot his pique, and he made the concession of not
repeating the offence within sound of Oliver’s ears, whatever he
might utter beyond their reach. Possibly the censure had sunk so far
into Jack’s somewhat obtuse mind, that he was rather shaken in the
conviction of the embellishment, supplied to his conversation by his
sporting the grossest form of oath with which he was acquainted. He
might even fall into the innocent delusion of supposing that ugly
expletives had ceased to be hurled right and left, in moments of
excitement, by choice specimens—according to Jack Dadd’s ideas—of
young swells at the universities.
And Jack, with all his pertness and swagger, was not original. He
secretly imitated the social superiors he admired and envied in his
heart of hearts, while, on the one hand, he was professing among his
own set supreme indifference to their claims, and on the other, he knew
his own interest too well not to solicit their custom and attend to
their needs with the utmost civility.
For poor Jack played a double, nay, a quadruple part. In place of
simply regarding his more aristocratic patrons with that combination
of proper official outward respect, and individual inward contempt,
which his father and mother entertained for them, Jack’s mind was
farther divided between the two emotions of loving and loathing equally
smothered and nearly equally balanced.
He appreciated keenly, he was impelled to ape, the alluring
practices of the very gentlefolks who galled him by making use of
him, and, in the case of the younger generation, regarding him with
the easy carelessness and laughing scorn, which had replaced the
tyranny and arrogance of one decade, and the stately countenance
and elaborate benevolence of another. But in the middle of Jack’s
small applause and the compliment of his taking his antagonists for
models, his good-nature did not keep him from grinding his teeth at
their disparaging treatment culminating in the mocking epithet of
‘counter-jumper.’