THE DELUGE.
'The drivelling of politicians!'
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
It is said that the unexpected always happens, and therefore one may
deplore without surprise the fact that schemes set on foot by a
charitable government to relieve the necessities of their starving
fellow-countrymen should frequently have a diametrically opposite
effect. Into the Ministerial cheers that followed the Premier's last
statement broke a sound outside the House, a sound as of much wailing,
the howling of innumerable newsboys, the cries of 'Woe, woe!' the dirge
of an empire _qui s'en va_! With those now familiar noises was mingled,
but at a greater distance, a strain of martial music.
'What is this?' said the Prime Minister through the increasing tumult,
with a vague idea of legions of the able-bodied unemployed coming in
person to state their views on the debate. 'A riot?'
'No,' shouted the member below the gangway, promptly divining, by a
prophetic instinct, the real nature of the case. 'It is a Revolution.'
'Heavens!' said the leader of the Opposition helplessly. 'I hope not. I
had no idea!'
It was too true. The Army was advancing to the House—the broken-down,
ragged, wasted remnant of an Army of Heroes. Sent forth, too late, to
'smash' Prester John, and relieve the Equator, they had all but
overcome the Desert, and had only been defeated by space. Too many of
them lay like the vanished legions of Cambyses, swathed by the sand and
lulled by the music of the night wind. The remnant had returned of
their own motion. It was an impressive spectacle, and the British
public, finding no more appropriate action, cheered vociferously, while
the newsboys, hundreds of them, continued to howl one against another.
For the newspapers had got wind of Something, and it only remained for
them to find out what the Something was. At present they had confused
the facts—an accident which will happen sometimes with the
best-regulated newspapers. But all of them had made shots at the truth,
more or less un-veracious. 'The Banner' asserted that Sir Charles Dilke
and the Democrat, arrayed in costumes of the beginning of the
seventeenth century for effect, were parading the cellars under the
House of Lords, after the manner of Guy Fawkes, laying trains of
gunpowder and singing the well-known lines about the fifth of November.
The 'Daily Pulpit,' on the other hand, declared that Lord Randolph
Churchill had set the Thames on fire with native genius and a lighted
fusee, which, on the face of it, seemed so extremely probable, that all
of the British public that was not cheering the Army's arrival rushed
to the bridges to investigate the river. Delegates from the 'Holywell
Street Gazette,' in the meantime, were madly interviewing everything
and everybody with such celerity that the British public probably
arrived at the truth of matters somewhere about that journal's fifth
edition. Up to this time, unfortunately, the 'Gazette' had only been
able to contradict flatly all the statements of all its contemporaries
in language, to say the least of it, most emphatic. But at a national
crisis one is nothing if not emphatic. And this was a national crisis.
And while the crowd was rushing and swaying hither and thither, and the
light-fingered brigade was taking advantage of the crowd's
absent-mindedness to borrow its watches and pocket-handkerchiefs, the
General, just returned from the Desert, with the demeanour of a second
Cromwell, was marching on the House of Commons. In the House itself
reigned confusion much worse confounded. There was no time for lengthy
recrimination, for in another moment the General, alone, and with a
mien of indignant resolution that struck a chill to the hearts of the
most irrepressible members, was striding boldly up to the table. The
Speaker looked at the Serjeant-at-Arms, and the Serjeant-at-Arms looked
at the Speaker, but neither of them said a word. This was worse than
Mr. Bradlaugh at his worst.
'Behold in this handful of broken and wasted men, returned, not by
_your_ order, but by _mine_, to their native shore,' exclaimed the
General in a voice of stern thunder that reverberated through the
building, 'the result of your imbecile, idiotic, ignominious,
incomprehensible policy and of your absurd "Intelligence" and
"Righteousness!" Call yourselves a Parliament? I tell you, your
Constitution is rotten to the core. Do you think we are to shed our
blood for you, to perish of famine, sword and pestilence, while you sit
here, talking the most delirious nonsense that ever was talked since
the Confusion of Tongues? You never have anything fresh to say; but
there you are, and nothing stops you. If it was the Day of Judgment you
would go on moving resolutions; and you have the insolence to maunder
over your gallant band of heroes, sacrificed to a whim of party rancour
or a struggle for place. We put you here to maintain law and order, to
give justice to your fellow-countrymen, and you sit listening to your
own melodious voices raving of the welfare of the nation, of Political
Economy, Budgets, and Ballots; but so much as the meaning of true
justice the bulk of you never guess. _You_, you turn Parliament into a
club, and your ambition is satisfied by invitations to dinner. But we
have borne enough, and marched enough; now you must march. We have
trudged at your bidding thousands of weary miles, for an end you made
impossible by your word-splitting cowardice. _Your_ turn has come. The
troops are in readiness; we are drilling the unemployed in event of
civil war, and you had better look out. "Obey me,"' added the General,
insensibly sliding into a popular quotation, '"and my nature's ile:
disobey me, and it's still ile, but it's ile of vitriol."'
For the most part honourable members sat stunned and silent; but from
the more rebellious came a few cries of 'Order!' 'Turn him out!' and
the Speaker slowly rose. 'I would remind the gallant General of the
Mutiny Act,' he said.
'An obsolete restriction of free contract,' said the General. He
stamped his foot, and in a second a file of soldiers had appeared.
'Take away that bauble!' exclaimed the General to his aide-de-camp in a
severe and terrible tone, as he pointed to the mace. But as he gazed
upon the venerable emblem his frown melted, and his eyes grew dim. For
one instant the victorious warrior, the inexorable avenger of his
country's wrongs, was the dreamy worshipper of Blue China, the
æsthetic adorer of marquetry, and Chippendale.
'Take away that bauble,' he repeated in a low voice of ineffable
sweetness, 'and deposit it in the upper compartment of my bureau. You
know the spot. The bauble has a Chippendale feeling about it.'
Then his fortitude returned; he was once more the dauntless General,
the saviour of society.
'A passing weakness,' he said, smiling sadly. '"Richard's himself
again!"'
Into the lull that followed his words fell the familiar accents of the
future Dictator, the Member for Woodstock, as he said in a cool aside
to Mr. Goschen:
'The Hour has come.'
And Mr. Goschen, with his usual calm impartiality, replied:
'Yes, Randolph, and the Man!'
Through all the uproar Queen Mab and the Owl had looked on with
breathless interest; but now, at a reiterated mandate from the General,
the members were compelled to disperse, some furious, some alarmed, and
all discomfited. There only remained one policeman, the General, and
the Democrat to fight it out between themselves, and decide whether a
European war would be advisable, or whether they should disband the
army and devote themselves to Home Reform. But by this time Queen Mab
and the Owl had had enough, for the din which still continued outside
the windows was giving them neuralgia. They therefore left the House
and flew away westward over the crowd, where differences of opinion,
expressed in the British public's own graceful and forcible manner, had
become the order of the day. They met Mr. Bradlaugh at a little
distance, hurrying to the scene of combat with the air of 'Under which
king, Bezonian?' and if the locality had not been so extremely noisy
they could not have but turned back to see the fun. The Prime Minister
had unaccountably (though not unexpectedly) disappeared from the arena,
and his adherents were under the impression that he had been
treacherously stowed away in the Tower or some subterranean dungeon.
The fact was, that, as eloquence could have no effect on the House in
its present state of delirium, the temptation to study Hittite
inscriptions in their native home became too strong for him, and he was
on his peaceful way to the shores of the Orontes and the ruins of
Megiddo.
Shortly after, the Owl and the Fairy met the Bishop, who had heard of
the catastrophe, and was torn by conflicting emotions; personal anxiety
about his prospects being overclouded by the fear that the new
Government might proceed to pass the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill
immediately. 'And a man who marries his Deceased Wife's Sister,' he
exclaimed pathetically to the air, 'may very soon end in the swamps of
Rationalism!' Only Queen Mab and the Owl heard the words as they flew
overhead. Next they met Mr. Matthew Arnold, smiling a happy smile, and
concocting a 'childlike and bland' article for the 'Nineteenth Century'
on the present crisis. So they flew on westward till, gaining a freer
and fresher neighbourhood, they came upon a wide green lawn, and on the
lawn three old acquaintances, the Poet, the Palæonto-theologist,
and—wholly altered from the pale and dreamy boy of their
recollection—Walter, the Professor's child.
The Professor was a man given to promptitude of speech and action, and,
once awakened to the serious state of Walter's health, physical and
mental, he had resolved, at whatever discomfort to himself, to check
the boy's undue mental precocity and substitute for it mere physical
vigour. He was content with no half-measures, and he sent the lad at
once to a preparatory school for Eton. At Eton he knew Walter's brain
would have a rest. The effect was miraculous. The boy, whom the
Palæonto-theologist had rashly invited to spend a holiday at his home,
was a different creature. He had become sturdy and robust; he had
forgotten his new religion of Dala, with his science primers, and could
no more have composed a hymn to a fairy than he could have endured a
false quantity. He had forgotten the Goona stones; he had forgotten the
dates of the Kings of England. He said that bogies were all bosh; he
said that Cardinal Wolsey was imprisoned in the Tower for thirteen
years and wrote 'Robinson Crusoe' there, and that the Nile rose in
Mungo Park. He had forgotten his father's instructions, and regarded
birds, not as products of Evolution, but as things suitable to shy
stones at, and to be treated with contempt, and catapults. He was
incorrigible at Euclid, but he was excellent at cricket, and on this
occasion he had fagged the Poet and the Palæonto-theologist to bowl to
and field out for him. It was beyond human nature to expect them to
enjoy it. The Poet was in the midst of a sublime stanza when he was
peremptorily ordered to come and bowl, and he went dreamily and
reluctantly, to be greeted with a further mandate of 'Look sharp
there!' The Palæonto-theologist was deep in an exhaustive inventory of
the animals in Noah's Ark, and was discussing the probability of the
Mammoth's having been one of its residents. If so, there came the
knotty point of how Noah contrived to stow him and the Megatherium in
comfortably, and whether they never wanted to do away with the other
animals, in which case the Patriarch must have had stirring times. The
Palæonto-theologist was just about to begin the grand chain of evidence
in which he proves conclusively, from careful study of the original
Hebrew manuscripts, and from examination of the soil of Mount Ararat,
whose fossils are abraded to this day where the Ark rested on them,
that the dimensions of the Ark were anything but what they are said to
be, when Walter ordered him to come and field. There was no help for
it; he went and fielded; 'he ran, he fell, he fielded well.'
While he and the Poet were thus occupied, Mab and the Owl rested on a
great horse-chestnut and watched the game, and Mab, under the
impression that the boy, at sight of her, would be filled with wonder
and delight, slipped off her invisible cloak. For some time he was too
much absorbed in 'crumping the Poet's slows,' as he said, to notice
her; but at last, when the Poet and the Palæonto-theologist were
utterly 'collared' (as Walter put it) and exhausted, and the
perspiration stood thick on their intellectual foreheads, the advent of
refreshments gained them a momentary respite. Walter attacked the fruit
and cakes so vigorously that Queen Mab grew impatient, and descended to
a lower branch of the huge tree, where at last the boy, raising his
eyes, beheld her.
'Hi!' he cried, rushing indiscriminately at his companions. 'Get me a
catapult, lower boy, I say! Stones, peashooter, anything. Look alive!
Here goes!'
And he assailed the astonished Mab with a cricket-ball, and next 'it
came to pleats,' as Mrs. Major O'Dowd said; and then he hurled a jampot
and a fruit-knife. Fortunately for the fairy, who at the moment was too
much astonished to move, his aim was rendered inaccurate by his
excitement, and the missiles flew wide. The unhappy fags had started
up, and the Poet, looking round bewildered, with a volley of desperate
expletives unuttered in his soul, caught sight of Mab.
'Celestial being!' he exclaimed rapturously. 'I again behold thee.
Bright inmate! How did it run?'
'Bother your verses!' cried the boy with utter contempt. 'Shy at it,
you duffer! Oh, what a Butterfly! Get her into the teapot. Blockhead!'
This last disdainfully to himself, for he had hurled the ancient and
valuable teapot at Mab, who was flying to a higher branch, and the
teapot had missed.
'Rash boy!' cried the Palæonto-theologist, shaking him angrily, 'you
have broken my grandfather's teapot.'
'Run for the butterfly-net,' returned the boy unabashed. 'By George,
I'll give you the jolliest licking!'
'Hi, there she goes! Seize her!' he shouted distractedly, and the
unlucky Palæonto-theologist rushed after a butterfly-net, while Queen
Mab, in unutterable indignation, rose slowly into the air, followed by
the bewildered Owl, who had not had time to explain the boy's 'new
departure' to himself on scientific principles. It was not till they
were fully half a mile from the ill-starred spot that the Owl opened
his beak to murmur, with an air of long-suffering melancholy but
scientific delight, the word—
'Reaction!'
But Queen Mab, after this crowning insult, was fain to depart from
Britain and renounce the higher civilisation. In the Councils of the
New Democracy she had no place. Church and State abjured her: the
rising generation needed no fairies, but was content with football and
cricket, 'Treasure Island,' and the Latin Grammar. Education,
Philosophy, and the Philistines had made of the island she once loved
well a wilderness wherein no fairy might henceforth furl its wings.
She said 'good-bye' to the Owl, who shed one tear at parting, and to
all the loyal birds, and went back to Samoa. But alas! Samoa, like
Great Britain, was no longer any place for her. It was annexed: it was
evangelised. The natives of it were going to church; they were going to
Sunday School; they were going to heaven. They were sending their
children to be educated at English colleges: they were translating
Tennyson and Wesley's sermons, and learning the catechism, and reading
the Testament in the original Greek, and wearing high-crowned hats and
paper collars. There was no end of the things they were doing, and they
had no time for fairies.
Queen Mab summoned her Court together in despair, and left for one of
the Admiralty Islands. There, till the civilisation that dogs the steps
of the old folk-lore has driven her thence—with constitutions, and
microscopes, and a higher Pantheism that leaves the older Pantheism in
the lurch, and other advantages of the nineteenth century—she is
secure. We trust that she is also happy, and that the shadow of the
approaching hour when she will be ultimately reduced by scientific
theologians to a symbol of some deeper verity, the conception of men
whose understandings could not cope, like ours, with abstract truth, is
not cast heavily upon her path. For she knows well, now, that her day
is over, that she is too tangible by far for a higher Pantheism, and
that only among the heathen, in some obscure corner of Oceania, she is
still permitted to linger on, till that lagging island too receives its
chrism of intellect, and is caught up into the van of time.
The Owl is yet the wisest of the birds, though he has commenced a
course of psychological research that, it is to be feared, if persisted
in, will seriously injure his brain. For he said, only yesterday, that
as he was conscious of external objects merely through the medium of
his own ego, how was he to know whether or not his own ego was the sole
ego in the universe—in fact, composed the universe? He wished to be
informed whether he could possibly be nothing but an impression or
somebody else's ego; and said finally, in a despondent tone, that it
was hopeless to regard this mundane scheme as anything but a subjective
phenomenon, mere _Schein_ or _maya_, and that he gave it up.
But the Democrat, untroubled by transcendental scruples, goes on his
way, rejoicing in the prospect of the Millennium, now close at hand. He
does not much care what the universe is, but he knows what he wants to
get out of it, and that is sufficient for his purpose. To be sure, he
wants to get what no one ever did or will obtain, but his moments are
impassioned, and his idea is a distraction, like another.
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