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AN ALTRUIST
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LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN.
An Altruist
BY
OUIDA
AUTHOR OF “TOXIN,” “LE SELVE,”
“THE SILVER CHRIST,” ETC.
Second Edition
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
1897
COPYRIGHT BY T. FISHER UNWIN
_for Great Britain and United States
of America_
[Illustration]
AN ALTRUIST.
[Illustration]
The scene is Wilfrid Bertram’s rooms in Piccadilly, facing the Green
Park. The time is six o’clock in the afternoon. The audience is a
goodly number of men and women of that class which calls itself
Society. The rooms are small and the guests are many. A few look
contemptuously amused. A great many appear excruciatingly bored.
“It’s all rot!” says one gentleman in confidence to his walking-stick.
It is the general opinion, though it has but one spokesman.
“What a shame, when he is so much in earnest!” says a pretty girl.
“Bores always are awfully in earnest,” replies the critic. “If he’d
only give us something to drink----”
“You can get plenty to drink in the street,” says the young lady, with
a withering glance.
Meantime, Wilfrid Bertram, who has been speaking for more than an hour
without contradiction, except such as he read on his friends’ faces,
perceives at last that he has been wearying them; a knowledge which is
always slow to steal upon the teacher of mankind.
He stops in the middle of a very fine peroration.
“My dear people,” he remarks, a little irritably--“I mean, ladies and
gentlemen--if you are so soon weary of so illimitable a subject, I fear
I must have failed to do it justice.”
“So soon?--oh, hang it!” says the man who has wished for something to
drink. “We came upstairs at half-past four, and you’ve had all the jaw
to yourself ever since, and it’s past six now, and we’re all as thirsty
as dogs.”
An expression of extreme disdain passes over the lecturer’s face.
“I did not invite _you_, Lord Marlow,” he says, very coldly. “If I had
done I would have provided beer and skittles for your entertainment.”
“Oh, I say Wilfrid, come, finish your address to us; it’s extremely
interesting,” observes, in amiable haste, a much older man, with a
bald head and pleasant, ruddy countenance, who is his uncle, Lord
Southwold.
“Immensely interesting!” echo everybody: they can say so with
animation, almost with veracity, now that they are aware it is drawing
to an end.
“I ask your pardon if my infirmities have done injustice to a noble
theme. I fear I have failed to make myself intelligible,” says Bertram,
in a tone intended to be apologetic, but which is actually only
aggressive, since it plainly implies that his pearls have been thrown
before swine. He closes the manuscript and note-books which are lying
before him with the air of a person who is prepared for anything from
the obtuseness and ingratitude of humanity.
“Nothing could be clearer than what you’ve said,” says the gentleman
who wanted a drink. “Nobody is to have anything they can call their
own, and everybody who likes is to eat in one’s plate and bathe in
one’s bath.”
“At theatres the buffoon in the gallery is usually turned out, with the
approval of the entire audience,” Bertram remarks, with sententious
chilliness. “Were I not in my own chambers----”
Lord Marlow laughs rudely.
“I don’t think you could throw me downstairs. Your diet of brown bread
and asparagus don’t make muscle.”
“My dear fellow--before women--pray be quiet,” murmurs a guardsman who
is on the seat next to him.
“Do finish your reading, Wilfrid,” says Lady Southwold, coaxingly.
“Your views are so disinterested if they are a--a--a little difficult
to carry out as the world is constituted.”
“Excuse me,” replies Bertram, “I have trespassed too long on every
one’s indulgence. It is, I believe, altogether impossible to attempt
to introduce altruism and duty into a society which considers Lord
Marlow’s type of humanity as either wholesome or ornamental.”
“I never knew a lecture that didn’t end in a free fight,” says his
uncle Southwold, hurriedly. “But we can’t have one here, Wilfrid, there
are too many ladies present.”
A shabby little old gentleman, doubled up in his chair, who is his
grace of Bridlington, murmurs doubtfully: “I don’t see how your
theories would work, Bertram.”
“Don’t you, Duke? Is there not such a proverb as _Fais ce que dois,
advienne que pourra_?”
The duke nods, and coughs. “There is. But I am afraid it will land you
in Queer Street sometimes. There’s another old saw, you know, ‘Look
before you leap!’ Safer of the two, eh?”
“For the selfish, no doubt,” replies Bertram.
His hand is on his note-book; he is thinking with regret of the
concluding passages which he has not been able to read, and a little
also that Cicely Seymour, the young lady who snubs Marlow, has a very
beautiful profile, as a white gauze hat laden with white lilac rests on
the fair coils of her hair.
That brute Marlow is at her elbow, saying something idiotic; Bertram
cannot hear what, but he hears her laugh, and knows that she is
probably being made to laugh at himself.
The intruding Marlow’s jeer at his vegetarian views is unjust to him,
for he is tall and well made, though slender; but then, as his people
often tell him, his muscle was built up in the score of unregenerate
years before his Oxford terms, when he was as philistine as any other
Eton boy, though he liked his books better than the playing-fields.
He is the younger son of a peer, has a little money of his own, and
makes a little more by writing for scholarly reviews; but beyond all
he is an altruist, a collectivist, a Fourrierist, an Engelist, a
Tolstoi-ist; and, in common with other theorists, he has imagined that
to be told the truth is enough to make people believe in it and observe
its gospel. He has been continually deceived in this impression; but he
has always held it, and it is proportionately irritating to him when,
after having shed the light of information upon his contemporaries,
they still show no symptoms of being converted.
Even the old duke, who is his godfather, and is generally tender to his
theories, does nothing but nod his head and repeat like a magpie: “Look
before you leap!”
“I think you said that property was like a cancer in the body
politic?” observes a lover of practical politics, a Unionist member of
parliament, putting his glass in his eye.
“I said the consolidation and transmission of property was so,” replies
Bertram, with some hauteur: people cannot even quote him correctly!
“Ah! seems to me the same thing.”
“No more the same thing than Seltzer and the Sellinger!” cries Marlow.
“Oh, indeed,” says the politician, humbly; “forgive my stupidity.”
Bertram implies by a gesture that his indulgence to human imbecility is
inexhaustible, but sorely tried.
“I had hoped,” he says, sententiously, “that you would have gathered
from my previous discourse how intense is my conviction that those who
possess property should give it up, generously, spontaneously, for the
good of all, before awaiting that inevitable retribution which will
fall on them if they continue to insult the People by their display of
wealth, unearned and unjustified; for the riches of the noble and the
millionaire are as absolutely theft as any stolen goods obtained by
violence and fraud, and do continually provoke the crimes which they so
savagely denounce and punish----”
“Humph! That’s strong,” mutters the duke.
“La Propriété c’est le vol,” murmurs Cicely Seymour “La propriété
d’autrui, oui; mais pas la mienne!”
“If there’s no flimsy anywhere,” asks Lord Marlow, “who’ll breed
racers?”
“Who’ll buy Comet clarets?”
“Who’ll employ cooks?”
“Who’ll keep up shootin’?”
“Who’ll build _Valkyries_?”
“Who’ll go by the Flying Dutchman?”
“Who’ll dance cotillons?”
Bertram replies with dignity: “My friends, these are mere frivolous
jests on your part. When the entire structure of our rotten and debased
society shall have been shattered there will of course be no place in a
regenerate world for these mere foolish egotisms.”
“Foolish egotisms!” echoes Lord Southwold. “Oh, Lord! A good glass of
wine a foolish egotism?”
“Do you mean you want Local Option?” asks the duke, with some alarm. “I
wouldn’t have come if I’d known that.”
Bertram answers with irritation; “There is no question of local option
or of total abstinence, Duke. If property were generally and duly
distributed, wine would be so too; and if individualism were duly
recognised, you would no more dare to interfere with the drunkard than
with the genius.”
“African sherry all round--what a millennium!” cries his uncle.
“Tipplers all over the place, and no lock-up to put ’em in! What an
Arcadia!”
“Genius has frequently been rudely compared to inebriety,” remarks the
practical politician; “but I have never known quite such a slap in the
face given to it as this. Max Nardau is deferential in comparison.”
“Look, sir,” says Bertram, addressing the duke, but glancing at Cicely
Seymour--“look at the utter debasement of our financial system! What
are banks except incentives to crime? What are the Bourses, the
Exchanges, or Wall Street, except large seething cauldrons of sin?
What are the great speculating companies if not banded thieves for
the stripping of a gullible public? What is the watch you wear, with
its visible chain glaring across your waistcoat, except a base, mean,
grinning mockery of the hungry man who meets you in the street?”
Marlow takes out his watch.
“My conscience is clear in that respect. My watch is a Waterbury, and
wouldn’t fetch the hungry man a shilling if he pawned it.”
“And my chain,” says Lord Southwold, touching a steel one, “was my poor
old Hector’s collar, and I wear it in memory of him. How he’d thresh
out five acres of turnips before luncheon! We shall never see his
like.”
Bertram grows impatient: “Individually you may wear Waterburys or
dog-collars, but each is nevertheless a symbol of inequality between
you and the man in the street, who is obliged to look at the church
clock to see the hour at which he may seek the parish dole.”
“What profound philosophy!” cries Southwold. “What crimes one may
commit without knowing it!”
“If a watch be an unwholesome sign of a bloated aristocracy, pray, Mr.
Bertram, what are our jewels?” asks a very pretty woman, Lady Jane
Rivaux.
“There are no words strong enough,” replies Bertram, “to condemn the
use of gems, whether from a moral or an æsthetic point of view. In a
purified condition of society they would of course become impossible
abominations.”
The ladies present are too horrified to speak; Jane Rivaux, alone,
recovering her first shock of surprise at such a blasphemy, asks, with
vivacity:
“But all the people you would throw out of employment? The people who
dig for jewels, don’t they dig? The people who polish them, and cut
them, and set them, and deal in them; the people who make the iron
safes, and the patent locks, you would throw them all out of work?
Surely that wouldn’t be doing any good? What would become of the miners
and lapidaries and jewellers and all the rest?”
Bertram smiles with pitying disdain.
“Oh, my dear Lady Jane, your kind of reasoning is as old as the hills,
and carries its own refutation with it. All those workmen and tradesmen
would be liberated from labours which now degrade them, and would thus
be set free for higher work--work worthy of being illumined by the
light of reason.”
“What work? Would they be all schoolmasters and governesses? Or all
authors and artists?”
“What work? Such work as the Community might organise and distribute,
such work as might be needful for the general good. When every one
will work, every one will have leisure. The poet will mow the meadow
in the morning and compose his eclogues in the afternoon. The painter
will fell trees at dawn and at noon paint his landscapes in the forest.
The sculptor will hew coal in the bowels of the earth for a few hours
and come to the upper air to carve the marble and mould the clay. The
author will guide the plough or plant the potato-patch at sunrise and
will have the rest of the day free to write his novel or study his
essay----”
“Humph!” says Southwold, ruffling his short grey hair in perplexity.
“The precise use of wasting Sir Frederic Leighton’s time on a seam
of coal, and Mr. Swinburne’s on a mowing machine, I don’t exactly
perceive. However----”
“Pierre Loti is your ideal, then,” says Cicely Seymour. “He ‘has gone
down to the deep in ships’ before he writes of sea life.”
“He is an officer,” objects Bertram, with regret and condemnation in
his tone. “With his true and profound altruism he should have gone
before the mast.”
“I suppose our sex will have to sweep and cook and sew before we are
allowed to frolic?” asks Lady Jane.
“You’ll have to produce a certificate that you have made and baked
three dozen pigeon pies before you’ll be allowed one waltz, Lady Jane,”
says Marlow, who has with difficulty kept his mouth shut.
“We shall sweep our own chimneys, clean ourselves, and play the
violin,” replies that lively person. “We shall have to cook our salmon
before we’re allowed to fish for it; we shall have to roast our
pheasants before we’re allowed to shoot them, and----”
Bertram interrupts her with scant courtesy: “I understood that those
who did me the honour to come here to-day brought open minds and
philosophical views to this meeting, or I should not have invited you
to discuss and consider the best means for the educated classes to
anticipate the coming changes of the world.”
“Why should we anticipate them,” murmurs the old duke, “when they’ll be
so deucedly uncomfortable to all of us?”
“Yes, indeed,” says Southwold, “it’ll be bad enough to grin and
bear’em.”
Bertram plays wearily with his shut note-book.
“If you cannot see the theoretic beauty of united and universal
work, it is hopeless to expect that you should desire its practical
adjustment to everyday life.”
“Well, but,” says the politician, who is nothing if not practical, “it
is just the utter unworkableness of your system which damns it in the
eyes of rational men. Pardon my saying so.”
Lady Southwold murmurs: “Give them some tea, Wilfrid; they are all
growing cross.”
“As you please. But it is to me absolutely frightful to see how
unconscious of your own doom, and how indifferent to the great
movements of the day you all are----”
“If they are really great movements, they’ll move without us; you can’t
stop an iceberg or an earthquake with your little finger. But there’s
a good deal of grit in the old order of things still,” says the duke.
“Yes, I’ll have a cup of tea, Wilfrid; I see you’ve got it there.”
Bertram murmurs wearily: “Critchett--tea!”
“Yes, sir,” says a person who is the perfection of all the virtues of
valetdom.
Marlow, wholly undisturbed by the insults which have been heaped on
him, calls out:
“And temperance drinks, Critchett! Lemons divorced from rum, sterilised
milk, barley-water, tartaric acid----”
“Mr. Bertram,” says Cicely Seymour, “how do you reconcile your
conscience to the debasing offices which you employ Critchett to fill
for you?”
“Or to the fact of keeping a Critchett at all?” adds his aunt Southwold.
“Surely it’s Critchett who keeps him, ----, out of a
strait-waistcoat?” murmurs Marlow.
Critchett hands tea and coffee and chocolate, in a silver service, with
cakes, fruits, and biscuits.
“And all these pretty things, Mr. Bertram?” asks Lady Jane. “Surely
they are the flesh-pots of Egypt, and ought not to be here?”
“They ought not,” replies Bertram, “nor Critchett either.”
“Oh, he is such a delightful servant; so noiseless, so _prévenant_, and
so devoted to you; you would never find his equal if you sent him away.”
“No; but for one man to serve another is contrary to all principles of
self-respect on either side.”
“My dear Wilfrid,” cries Lady Southwold, “how I wish you were small
enough to be whipped! What a deal of good it would do you!”
Bertram smiles faintly.
“Flagellation was, I believe, most admirable discipline; but we have
grown too effete for it. Our bodies are as tender as our hearts are
hard.”
“I have always thought,” said Cicely Seymour, in a very soft voice,
“that if everybody could be born with ten thousand a year, nobody would
ever do anything wrong.”
Bertram looks at her approvingly. “You are on the right road, Miss
Seymour. But as we cannot generalise property, we must generalise
poverty. The result will be equally good.”
“Good Lord!” roars his uncle very loudly. “I never heard such a
subversive and immoral doctrine in all my days!”
Bertram glances pityingly at him.
“And yet it is based on precisely the same theory as the one which you
accepted when you passed the Compulsory Clause of the Parish Councils
Bill.”
“The Upper House passed that infamous Bill. I was in the minority
against it,” replies Southwold, very angrily.
“But when everybody’s got sixpence a day,” suggests a young man with
an ingenuous countenance, “and nobody sixpence halfpenny, surely
somebody’ll have a try for the illegal halfpenny, won’t they? It is
human nature.”
“Certainly not,” replies Bertram, very positively. “Nobody will even
wish for an extra halfpenny, because when inequality shall be at an
end envy and discontent will be unknown. Besides, if all the property
of the world was confiscated or realised and equally distributed, the
individual portion would come more nearly to half a crown a head per
diem. On half a crown a head per diem any one can live----”
Lord Southwold sighs. “Oysters are three shillings a dozen,” he murmurs.
“Of course, if you expect to continue the indulgence of an epicure’s
diseased appetites----” says Bertram, with impatience.
“It’s the oysters that are diseased, not our appetites,” says
Southwold, with a second sigh.
“If,” says Bertram, ignoring his uncle’s nonsense--“if I have made
anything clear in my recent remarks it must surely be that Property
is, in the old copy-book phrase, the root of all evil; the mandrake
growing out of the bodies of the dead, the poisonous gas exhaling from
the carrion of prejudice, of injustice, and of caste.”
“But, my dear Wilfrid,” cries Lady Southwold, with equal impatience,
“yours is rank Communism.”
“You can call it what you please. It is the only condition of things
which would accompany pure civilisation. When, however, I speak of half
a crown a day,” he pursues, “I use a figure of speech! Of course, in
a purely free world there would be no coined or printed money, there
would be only barter.”
“Barter!” echoes Marlow. “I should carry two of my Berkshire pigs, one
under each arm, and exchange them with you for a thousand copies of
your _Age to Come_.”
“I think barter would be inconvenient, Mr. Bertram,” says Cicely
Seymour, doubtfully. “And what should I barter? I can’t make anything.
I should have to cut off my hair and wait a year till it grew again.”
Every one laughs, and Bertram even relaxes his gravity.
“I fear, Miss Seymour, that Solon’s self would give you all you wished
for a single smile!”
At that moment a small boy comes into the room, out of breath,
grinning, with several oblong pieces of printed paper in his hand;
he pushes his way unconcerned between the ladies and gentlemen, and
thrusts the papers at Bertram.
“Here, mister, you must tone these here down; manager says as Fanshawe
says as the British Public wouldn’t never stand them pars. he’s marked
at no time; and manager says as I was to tell you Public is extra
nervous now cos o’ that bomb at Tooting.”
Bertram takes the sheets in ill humour, and tears them across.
“Mr. Fanshawe is well aware that I never correct and I never suppress.
I forbid the production of the article in a mutilated state.” He hands
the pieces to the boy. “Bid Mr. Fanshawe return me my original copy.”
The boy looks frightened.
“Who’ll pay for this here settin’-up, sir, please, if proof ain’t to be
used?”
“Did you say Fanshawe?” says Lord Southwold. “Do you mean the great
Fanshawe of the _Torch_? Can anything be possibly too strong for him?”
“Oh, my dear Wilfred! do let us hear what you can have said? It must
be something terrific!” says the old duke, who rather likes subversive
opinions, considering philosophically that he will be in his grave
before they can possibly be put into practice.
“What ’m I to tell the manager about payin’ for the settin’-up of
this here, if type’s to be broke up, sir?” asks the boy, with dogged
persistence.
“Go out of the room, you impudent little rascal!” says Bertram, in
extreme irritation. “Critchett! turn that boy out!”
Marlow gets up and offers the boy a plate of pound cake.
“You are not civil to your sooty Mercury, Bertram. He offers you at
this moment the most opportune illustration of your theories. He comes
on an errand of the intellect, and if a somewhat soiled messenger, he
should nevertheless be treated with the respect due to a guardian of
literary purity and public morality. Sweet imp! refresh your inner man!”
The boy stuffs his mouth with cake and grins.
“Are these chambers mine or yours, Lord Marlow?” asks Bertram.
“Both mine and yours, or neither yours or mine. There is no such thing
as exclusive possession. You have just told us so.”
“Critchett!” says Bertram, and points with stony gaze to the printer’s
devil, “turn that boy out of the room.”
Critchett, reluctantly touching anything so sooty, takes him by the
collar and drives him before him out of the room.
Marlow picks up the torn proofs. “Who’ll pay for the setting-up?
asks this dear child. Unused proofs are, I suppose, first cousins to
spilt milk and spoilt powder. Mayn’t we read this article? The title
is immensely suggestive--‘Fist-right and Brain-divinity.’ Are you
feloniously sympathetic with the Tooting bomb?”
Bertram takes the torn proofs from him in irritation and throws them
into the open drawer of a cabinet.
“The essay is addressed to persons of intelligence and with principle,”
he says, significantly.
“But it seems that Fanshawe has neither, if he fail to appreciate it?”
“Fanshawe has both; but there are occasional moments in which he
recollects that he has some subscribers in Philistia.”
“Fanshawe knows where his bread is buttered,” chuckles the duke; “knows
where his bread is buttered.”
“If Fanshawe don’t publish it he won’t pay for it, will he?” asks
Marlow, with some want of tact.
“I do not take payment for opinions,” replies Bertram, _au bout des
lèvres_, and much annoyed at the turn the conversation has taken.
“Most people run opinions in order to get paid for ’em,” says the duke,
with a chuckle.
“Why are you not in Parliament, Mr. Bertram?” asks Cicely Seymour.
“In Parliament!” repeats Bertram, with the faintness of horror;
incredulous that he can hear aright.
“Well, yes; have I said anything so very dreadful?”
“Oh, my dear Cicely!” says Lady Southwold. “Ever since Wilfrid came of
age we have all been at him about that; he might have had a walk over
for Sax-Stoneham, or for Micklethorpe, at any election, but he would
never even let himself be nominated.”
Bertram shrugs his shoulders in ineffable disgust.
“Two Tory boroughs!”
“You could have held any opinions you had chosen. Toryism is a _crépon
changeant_ nowadays; it looks exactly like Radicalism very often, and
only differs from it in being still more outrageous.”
“But perhaps Mr. Bertram’s objection is to all representative
government?” says Cicely Seymour.
Bertram glances gratefully at her. “Precisely so, Miss Seymour.”
“But what could you substitute?”
“Oh, my dear Cicely, read his paper the _Age to Come_, and pray
spare us such a discussion before dinner,” says Lady Southwold, with
impatience.
“But what would you substitute?” says Cicely Seymour, with persistent
interest in the topic.
“Yes; what would you substitute?” asks the practical politician.
Bertram is out of temper; these acquaintances and relatives worried
him into giving this exposition of his altruistic and socialistic
views, and then they brought a fool with them like Marlow, and have
turned the whole thing into a farce. To Bertram his views were the most
serious things in creation. He does not choose to have them set up like
croquet pegs for imbeciles to bowl at in an idle hour.
“I would abolish _all_ government,” he replies, very decidedly.
“Oh!” Both the politician and Cicely Seymour look a little astonished.
“But how then would you control people?”
“Sane people do not require to be controlled.”
“But I have heard a man of science say that only one person out of
every hundred is really sane?”
“We are bad judges of each other’s sanity. But since you take an
interest in serious subjects,” says Bertram, resting his eyes on her in
approval, “I will, if you will allow me, send you some back numbers of
the _Age to Come_.”
“Do you mean, Wilfrid, that an obtuse world is so ungrateful as to
leave you any back numbers at all?” asks Southwold.
“They will show you,” continues Bertram, ignoring the interruption,
“what my views and the views of those who think with me are, concerning
the best method of preparing the world to meet those social changes
which are inevitable for the future, those rights of the individual
which are totally ignored and outraged by all present governments,
whether absolute, constitutional, or, in nomenclature, republican.”
“But why should we prepare to meet them when they’ll be so deucedly
uncomfortable to us if they arrive, and why should we trouble about
helping them onward if they’re so inevitable and cocksure in their
descent on us?” says his uncle.
“I asked you that question just now, and you didn’t answer me. Does one
avoid an avalanche in the Alps by firing a gun to make it fall sooner
than it would do if left alone?”
Critchett is meantime engaged on the expulsion of the printer’s devil
by a back-stair exit, and, profiting by his absence, a little girl, who
has come in at the front entrance, pushes aside the _portière_ of the
door and stands abashed in the middle of the room. She is eight years
old, has a head of red hair, and the shrewd, watching face of the
London child; she carries a penny bunch of violets. Bertram sees her
entrance with extreme displeasure, not unmixed with embarrassment.
“What do you want here, Bessy?” he inquires, with scant amiability.
Bessy advances and holds out the violets.
“Annie sends these ’ere vi’lets with her love, and she’s got to go to
Ealin’ for a big border o’ mustard an’ cress, and please when’ll you be
round at our place?”
Bertram is extremely annoyed.
“Run away, my good child. You see I am engaged.”
“When’ll you be round at our place?” repeats the little girl. “The pal
as lodges over cousin Joe hev given us tickets for Hoxton Theayter,
and Annie says as how she’d go if you wasn’t comin’ in this evenin’.”
“Run away, child,” repeats Bertram, imperiously. “Critchett!”
Critchett, who has returned, with a demure smile, guides the steps of
the reluctant Bessy from the chamber.
“Why do you let these children in, Critchett?” asks Bertram, as the
valet returns.
“I beg pardon, sir,” the servant says, humbly, as he lays the violets
down on a _cloisonné_ plate. “But you have told me, sir, that you are
always at home for the Brown family.”
“You might surely have more judgment, after all your years of service!”
replies his master. “There are exceptions to every rule.”
Marlow looks up to the ceiling in scandalised protest.
“Service! Service!” he repeats. “Hear him, ye gods! This is the rights
of the individual; the independence of the unit; the perfect equality
of one human being before another!”
Cicely Seymour looks over her shoulder at him and remarks slightingly:
“You are a great tease, Lord Marlow. You make me think I am in the
schoolroom at Alfreton with my brothers home from Eton for Christmas.
Do you really think that chaff is wit?”
“I am not chaffing, Miss Seymour. I am in deadly earnest. This modest
bunch must hold a deal of meaning. Who are the Brown family? Where
is ‘our place’? What is the meeting which must be postponed because
a bloated aristocrat, rolling in ill-gotten wealth, requires that
corrupting luxury known as mustard and cress?”
Everybody laughs, except Cicely Seymour.
“Yes, Wilfrid,” says Lady Southwold; “who are the Brown family?”
“To whom you are always at home,” adds his uncle.
“And Annie who sends button-holes with love,” adds Marlow.
Bertram replies with icy brevity, “A perfectly respectable young woman.”
“And the respectable one’s address?” asks Marlow. “Where is ‘our
place’? I am seized with an irresistible longing to eat mustard and
cress. I never did eat it, but still----”
Bertram eyes him very disagreeably. “The Browns are persons I esteem. I
should not give their address to persons for whom I have no esteem.”
“My dear Wilfrid!” cries his aunt. “How altruism does sour the temper!”
“Temper! I hope I have too much philosophy to allow my temper to be
ruffled by the clumsy horse-jokes of my acquaintances.”
“But why are you always at home to these Browns?”
Bertram hesitates.
“Are they acolytes? studies? pensioners?” asks his aunt.
“Is the respectable one pretty?” murmurs Marlow. “The respectable ones
so uncommonly rarely are!”
He takes the violets off the _cloisonné_ plate.
“A buttonhole to be worn at Hoxton Theatre? It is an emblem of the
immorality of finance: for its commercial value must be at least four
farthings. If my Waterbury offend the eye of eternal justice this penny
bunch must outrage it no less.”
“It is quite natural, I think,” says Cicely Seymour, rather
impatiently, “that Mr. Bertram should have many friends in those
classes which he considers so superior to his own.”
“I do not say any class is superior to any other,” interrupts Bertram.
“I say that all are equal.”
There is now a great buzz of voices everywhere in the rooms; people are
so very glad to have the muzzle off after an hour’s silence; he cannot
doubt, as that murmur and trill of conversation run all round him,
that he has bored them all excruciatingly.
“They have no minds!” he thinks, bitterly. “We sell a bare score of
copies a month of the _Age to Come_, and the _Dustcart_, with its
beastly ribaldry and social scandals, sells sixty-five thousand!”
“Do you mean to say, Wilfrid,” asks his aunt, eating a caviare
sandwich, “that anybody would pay taxes if they were not obliged?”
“Do not people, urged by conscience, send arrears, unasked, to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer?”
“Well, they do certainly now and then. But they must be very oddly
constituted people.”
“Is conscience an eccentricity?”
His aunt does not argue, she only shakes her head.
“I can’t believe anybody would pay taxes if they weren’t obliged.”
“But they do. There are these instances in the papers. If moral feeling
in the public were acute and universal, as it ought to be, every public
duty would be fulfilled with promptitude and without pressure.”
The old duke nods very expressively.
“Your aunt’s right,” he mumbles. “Conscience-money can only come from
cranks!”
“Come and dine with us, Wilfrid,” says his aunt; “we never see you now.
I assure you a good dinner changes the colour of political opinions in
a wonderful degree. I am dreadfully afraid that you have been living on
boiled soles and carrot fritters.”
Bertram smiles slightly. “The carrot fritters; not the soles. I am a
vegetarian.”
“But we are justified in being carnivorous,” says Southwold, very
eagerly. “Individualism justifies us.”
Marlow repeats with emphasis: “We are justified in being carnivorous.
Individualism justifies us.”
“Certainly,” says Bertram, with uncivil sarcasm. “The crocodile has a
right to its appetites, and the cur to its vomit. Solomon said so.”
“Am I the crocodile or the cur?” asks Southwold.
“Do you keep Critchett on carrot fritters?” asks Marlow, “and what does
he have to drink? Hot water? Hot water is, I believe, the beverege
which nowadays accompanies high thinking.”
“And how do you reconcile your conscience and your creeds to keeping a
Critchett at all?” repeats Lady Jane.
Bertram replies with distant chillness and proud humility: “The leaven
of long habit is hard to get rid of; I entirely agree with you that I
am in the wrong. To have a servant at all is an offence to humanity; it
is an impertinence to the brotherhood of our common mortality.”
“Don’t be afraid,” says Southwold, grimly, “our brothers and sisters
in the servants’ halls pay us out for the outrage; they take away our
characters, read our correspondence, and pocket twenty per cent. on all
our bills.”
“Can you blame them? They are the product of a corrupt society. No one
can blame them, whatever they are or do. The dunghill cannot bring
forth the rose. Your service has debased them. The fault of their
debasement lies with you.”
“But Critchett cannot be debased. He must, living in so rarefied a
moral atmosphere, be elevated above all mortal weaknesses.”
Bertram replies stiffly: “I can assure you I have much more respect for
Critchett than for any member of a St. James’ Street club.”
“And yet you give him carrot fritters!” cried Lady Southwold.
Bertram replies with great irritation: “He eats whatever he pleases,
turtle and turbot for aught I know. I should never presume to impose
upon him either my menu or my tenets, my beliefs or my principles.”
“You do wisely if you wish to keep him!” says his aunt. “I hope you
_will_ keep him. He is your only link with civilised life.”
Bertram smiles. “My dear aunt, when I was in the South Pacific I landed
at a small island where civilisation was considered to consist in a
pierced nose and a swollen belly. I do not want to be offensive, but
the estimate which my age takes of its own civilisation is not very
much more sensible.”
“I think it would have been better, Wilfrid, to study psychology under
these savages than to publish the _Age to Come_! You could not have
injured _them_, but here----”
“How illiberal you are, dear Lady Southwold,” says Cicely Seymour. “You
want a course of Montaigne.”
“What’s that, Miss Seymour?” asks Marlow. “A rival to Mariani wine?”
“Yes, a French wine; very old and quite unequalled!”
Even Bertram laughs. Marlow is irritated. He does not see what he has
said which is so absurd, or why his friends are laughing.
“Why do you always take that prig’s part?” he mutters, sullenly, aside
to Cicely Seymour.
“I do not take any one’s part,” replies the young lady; “but I detest
injustice and illiberality.”
At this moment the old duke rises with Bertram’s help, is assisted by
him to find his hat and stick, and takes his departure, assuring his
godson that he had been much entertained.
Following the duke’s example every one takes their leave, assuring
their instructor that they have derived much entertainment and
information from his disquisition. Cicely Seymour says simply and very
gently: “Thanks, Mr. Bertram. You have made me your debtor for many
noble thoughts.”
When they have left him Bertram walks up and down his rooms
dissatisfied with himself.
“What a coward!” he thinks, with the moral self-flagellation of an
over-sensitive and over-sincere person. “Why could I not tell them
the truth? Why did I limit myself to saying that she was a perfectly
respectable young woman? If I cannot face the simple enunciation of
the intention, how shall I ever bring myself to the endurance of
publishing the fact when it is accomplished? Am I, after all, the slave
of opinion, like anybody else? Am I afraid of a set of fools who are
capering on their primrose path, seeing nothing of the abyss to which
it leads? If I have not the courage of my views and faiths, wherein am
I superior to their philistinism? I do what I choose; what I see to be
wise and right and just; I desire to give an example which shall show
how utterly I despise the fictitious barriers of caste and custom,
and yet I have not courage enough to say to a few people who are
drinking tea in my rooms, ‘My good folks, I am going to marry a young
woman called Annie Brown.’ Why could I not say it? Why was I such a
miserable poltroon?”
He throws himself into a deep chair and lights a cigarette.
“What would my aunt have done? What would that grinning cad Marlow have
said? What would Cicely Seymour have thought? Perhaps she would have
approved. She has more sympathy, more insight than the others--and what
a charming profile! And those deep blue eyes under those long thick
lashes; they are eyes which have mind in them as well as youth and
smiles and innocence; they are eyes which will be still beautiful when
she is seventy and her hair is white under a lace mob-cap or a black
satin hood. What colour are Annie’s eyes? They are round and small, of
no particular colour, I think; a reddish grey. Dear good little girl,
it was not for her beauty that I selected her.”
Critchett opens the door at that moment, and breaks in on his
reflections.
“Mr. Fanshawe, sir.”
A gentleman of no definite age, with a shrewd countenance and a
significant smile, crosses the room with outstretched hand.
“My dear Wilfrid, they tell me you are in a wax about the exceptions
I took to your article. I am extremely sorry to touch any single line
of yours, but B.P. must be considered, you know. You are miles too
advanced for this inviolate isle; she is still shuddering at the fright
which Guy Fawkes gave her.”
Bertram replies stiffly: “I have certainly no affinity to Guy Fawkes,
who was a religious person and a strict monarchist. As for the essay,
pray do not trouble yourself; I shall publish it in the _Age to Come_.”
“Oh, that’s a pity; that will be practically putting it into the
waste-paper basket; excuse me saying so, but you know the circulation
of the _Age to Come_ is at present--is--well--limited.”
“We certainly do not chronicle scandals of the hunting-field, and
devote columns to prophesying the shape of next year’s bonnets, as the
_Torch_ does!”
“That shows you don’t understand your public, or don’t want to secure
one. Extreme opinions, my dear boy, can only be got down the throats
of the world in a weekly journal by being adroitly sandwiched between
the caviare of calumny and the butter of fashion. People hate to be
made to think, my dear boy. The _Age to Come_ gives ’em nothing but
thinking; and damned tough thinking too. You write with uncommon power,
but you are too wholesale, too subversive; you scare people so awfully
that they stop their ears to your truths. That is not the way to secure
a hearing.”
“I am consistent.”
“Oh, Lord! Never be consistent. There’s nothing so unpopular in life.”
“I despise popularity.”
“You despise bread and butter. I believe you lose twenty pound a month
by your _Age to Come_?”
“To speak more correctly,” replies Bertram, bitterly, “it gets me into
debt to that amount!”
“Heaven and earth! Why don’t you drop it?”
“It is a matter of principle.”
“Principle which will land you in Queer Street. Now, my dear Wilfrid,
no man thinks more things bosh than I do, or takes more pleasure in
saying so, but I combine pleasure with business; I say my say in such a
way that it brings me in eighty per cent.”
Bertram looks at him derisively.
“I have always known that your intellect was only equalled by your
venality!”
Fanshawe laughs good-humouredly.
“That is neat. That is soothing. It is not difficult to understand
that you are not considered a clubbable man! However, as you credit me
with intellect, I don’t mind your denying me morality. But seriously,
my dear friend, you are much too violent, too uncompromising for
success in journalism. Who tries to prove too much fails to prove
anything, and when you bend your bow too violently it snaps and speeds
no arrow. I confess that I (who am as revolutionary as most people
and always disposed to agree with you) do frequently get up from the
perusal of one of your articles with the unwilling conviction that it
is best to let the old order of things alone. Now, that is certainly
not the condition of mind which you wish to produce in your readers.”
Bertram is silent. After a pause he says:
“What do you advocate, then? A cautious trimming?”
“Trimming was the name which the eighteenth-century politician gave to
what we now call opportunism. All sagacious men are not opportunists,
but all sagacious men endeavour to create supporters, not antagonists.
Now, all violent assertion raises opposition, for human nature is
cantankerous and contradictory.”
Critchett enters and hands a card on a salver. “If you please, sir,
the gentleman’s waiting below; says he sent you a letter two days ago;
gentleman’s head of the firm of Folliott and Hake, sir.”
Bertram looks vaguely about the room. “There are a good many letters
unopened. I wonder which it is?”
Fanshawe catches up a pile of letters from a writing-table and sorts
them: “Here’s one with ‘Folliott and Hake’ on the seal; how unpractical
you are, dear boy!”
Bertram takes the letter and looks at it without curiosity. “It is sure
to be something unpleasant. I never heard of Folliott and Hake.”
Fanshawe laughs. “I have; many a time. They have been solicitors in
more than one libel case, of which the _Torch_ was defendant. Come,
open the letter. See what it says.”
Bertram opens and reads it: “Only that they have a matter of great
importance to communicate to me. I really have no idea what it can
be. People think so many things important which are of infinitesimal
insignificance.”
“You will best correct your ignorance by allowing Mr. Folliott to enter
and explain himself.”
“I am so opposed to all lawyers on principle.”
“So am I, as I am opposed to small-pox, or bicycle riders, or yellow
fogs; but they are not to be avoided in this life, and it is neither
polite or politic to keep these highly respectable solicitors waiting
like sweeps. Critchett, beg Mr. Folliott to enter. I will leave you,
Bertram.”
“No, no; for goodness’ sake stay. I may want some advice.”
“You not unfrequently do. But you never follow it when given. Pray be
civil.”
A few moments later Mr. Folliott enters; a bland, white-haired, portly
old gentleman, a little ruffled at having been left so long at the foot
of the stairs.
“I beg your pardon, Mr.--Mr.--Folliott,” says Bertram, looking at the
letter. “I had, in fact, not opened this note of yours. It is a bad
habit I have of leaving letters unread.”
“It was Sheridan’s, sir,” says the lawyer, pointedly. “It did not bring
him good fortune.”
He catches sight of Fanshawe, and his amiable countenance assumes
the startled and displeased expression of a cat’s face, when the cat
suddenly perceives a bull terrier.
“I naturally awaited you, Mr. Bertram, or a communication from you, all
the day,” he says, in an affronted tone. “Hearing nothing I thought it
best to come myself. You are perhaps unaware that the Prince of Viana
is dead.”
“I never heard of the individual,” says Bertram. “Who was he?”
“He was your first cousin. You may know him better as the son of Mr.
Horace Errington.”
“Oh! The son of my mother’s brother? We never knew him. There was a
family feud.”
“But you will remember to have heard that his father made great wealth
in the Abruzzi through copper mines, was nationalised, and was ennobled
by Victor Emmanuel. The family feud was chiefly on account of his
connection with commerce and his change of country.”
“Precisely.”
“I regret to inform you that your cousin is dead, at thirty-three
years of age, killed by a wild boar when hunting in the Pontine
marshes; he has left you, Mr. Bertram, his sole and exclusive heir.”
Bertram stares at him.
“What! you must be joking, Mr. Folliott!”
The old gentleman takes off his gold spectacles and puts them on again
in extreme irritation.
“I am not in the habit of joking, sir, either in business or outside
it. We were solicitors to his father and to himself. We drew up this
will five years ago. You are inheritor of an immense fortune, Mr.
Bertram.”
Bertram stands staring at him, then turns to Fanshawe. “Do you hear? Is
it true? Surely, no one could insult me so greatly, even in jest?”
“I really do not understand,” says the lawyer, bewildered. “What insult
can there be? I am speaking, sir, in most sober earnest.”
“Shall I fan you, Wilfrid? or send for some sal volatile?” says
Fanshawe, derisively. “Don’t be an ass,” he adds in a whisper. “This
sensible old fellow will think it his duty to shut you up in a private
mad-house, if you talk like that. Pull yourself together, and answer
him sensibly.”
Mr. Folliott surveys the speaker as a timid person may look at a lion
riding on a velocipede in a circus-ring.
“If Mr. Bertram would place me in communication with his solicitor
matters would be facilitated,” he murmurs.
“I have no solicitors,” replies Bertram. “If you will pardon what
may seem an offensive opinion, I regard all men of law as poisonous
parasites growing on the rotten trunk of a society which has the axe of
retribution laid at its roots.”
Mr. Folliott is too astonished to be offended: “I fail to follow you,
sir, but I have no doubt you mean something very profound. Your cousin
did not, I imagine, read your articles in the reviews, but I have
read one or two of them. However, notwithstanding your extraordinary
opinions, you are a man of birth and breeding, and must, in a measure,
be a man of the world, sir. You must know that you must allow me to
fulfil my office. This will has to be proved and probate taken out.”
“Where is the necessity?”
“Be so good as not to play with me. You must accept the inheritance or
decline it. In event of your refusal, of your formal and final refusal,
the whole of this property is to go to the testator’s old college at
Oxford--Magdalen College.”
“Ah! that is a consolation.”
“Why so, sir?”
“Because, although I have no sympathy with the modern movements at
Oxford, and consider that she has fallen away from her original high
mission, yet she is, and always will be, a seat of learning; and the
Humanities will never wholly be banished from her halls.”
“Again, I fail to follow you sir.”
“I mean that such an alternative destination for the property will
enable me to decline it with a clear conscience.”
“Really, sir, your replies are wholly unintelligible.”
Bertram turns helplessly to Fanshawe. “Explain to this gentleman my
views regarding property.”
“I am aware of some of them, sir,” replies the solicitor, sententiously.
“You read the _Torch_, Mr. Folliott, don’t you?” says the proprietor of
the _Torch_.
“When my professional duties compel me, sir.”
“But the _Torch_ is milk for lambs, Mr. Folliott, beside the _Age to
Come_.”
The solicitor bows with an expression which indicates that he would
prefer to remain unacquainted with the _Age to Come_.
“But pardon me,” continues Fanshawe, “is my friend here really so
immensely in luck’s way?”
“He inherits under the Prince of Viana’s will all properties, both
English and Italian,” replies the lawyer, with the cat’s expression
more accentuated on his countenance.
“And they are very large?”
“Very large. My late client was an only son, and though generous, never
spendthrift.”
Fanshawe touches Bertram’s arm. “Wake up, Wilfrid. Do you hear? Can’t
you speak?”
Bertram says wearily, “What am I to say? It is an unspeakably awful
thing. I really cannot bring myself to believe in it.”