with some details of the----”
“To what end? Do the items of the contents of the pack interest the
pack-horse to whose aching back the burden is offered?”
“Again I fail to follow you.”
“To follow him, Mr. Folliott,” says Fanshawe, “requires a long course
of patient perusal of the _Age to Come_.”
“Quite so, quite so,” answers the solicitor, coldly, in a tone which
intimates that he will not have that patience. “I have certainly never
seen the announcement of an inheritance received in such a manner.”
“But why,” says Bertram--“why did this relative, whom I never knew,
leave his property to me?”
“I cannot tell, sir. It was certainly not by the advice of our firm.”
“Are there any conditions attached to this extraordinary bequest?”
“None, sir. You can realise at once and invest everything in dynamite
and pyretic acid,” replies the solicitor, with a rasping scorn showing
through the velvet of his admirable manners.
“Oh, my dear sir! Can you fall into the vulgar error of confounding
collectivism and altruism with anarchy? They are as far apart as the
Poles. One is love; the other hatred.”
“I confess, sir, that such love nauseates me. I prefer of the two
the hatred. But I am an old-fashioned person, and I know little of
literature later than the ’Sixties.”
“A most debased period in every form of production.”
“It may be so. Macaulay was alive in it and Tennyson. But I did not
come here to discuss the characteristics of generations. I came to
inform you of an event which I immaturely concluded would appear to you
both important and agreeable.”
“You did not know me, my dear sir.”
“I did not, sir.”
With a little cough and a little stately bow the old gentleman prepares
to leave, with the cat’s glance at the bull terrier still more hostile
and more scared.
“You will be so good, sir, as to call on us to-morrow morning, or to
send some representative authorised by you. You must be aware that the
law requires you either to accept the bequest or decline it.”
“I am criminal if I accept: I may be equally criminal if I reject it.”
“Again I fail to follow you, sir. But of course you are your own
master; and in the event of your failure to call on us to-morrow
morning you will be so good as to make us acquainted with your decision
and intentions.”
“I will send you, Mr. Fanshawe,” replies Bertram.
The solicitor does not look everjoyed at the promise, but bows in
silence, a very stiff and formal bow, and leaves the room without more
words.
“I am afraid I was not very polite to him,” says Bertram, doubtfully,
when the stuffs of the _portière_ have fallen behind him.
“You certainly were not,” replies Fanshawe. “I think you could give
hints to Whistler on the Gentle Art of making Enemies. But why did you
talk all that rot? He only ridiculed you for it.”
“I merely said what I meant.”
“You mean to let this fortune go to Magdalen College?”
“Unless I change my present intentions very completely.”
“Oh, Lord! This is green sickness, moonstruck madness; Hamlet’s
monomania was nothing to it. Are you absolutely insensible to the fact
that you would be able to print ten million copies of the _Age to Come_
every week and distribute them gratis all over Great Britain every
week?”
“Even that alluring prospect cannot tempt me. My acceptance of a
fortune would be as anomalous as Lord Rosebery’s creation of peers.
Miserable creatures that we are, we are only tolerably respectable so
long as we are commonly consistent.”
“Oh, Lord save us! You can’t possibly be serious?”
“I speak in entire sincerity.”
“A very dangerous thing to do at any time. People have such a shocking
habit of taking one at one’s word! Old Folliott’s very shrewd too,
though he’s a Tory.”
“What is his shrewdness to me?”
“Well, if you retain him as your man of business it may be a great
deal. It is usual to retain the testator’s solicitors when they are as
eminent and irreproachable as Folliott and Hake.”
Bertram grows impatient.
“Cannot you understand? I do not take this property. Do not dream of
taking it for a single instant!”
“You can’t be such a transcendent ass! Excuse me, but----”
“I should have thought _you_ would have looked at this matter as I do.”
“Dear boy, all property _ought_ to be abolished, on that we are quite
agreed, but whilst it still exists in this piggish world we are bound
in duty to ourselves and our neighbours to make the best of it, and get
as much as we can!”
“Then you are a mere sham? A humbug? A hypocrite?”
“You mean to be rude, but I take no offence. Everybody is insincere in
civilised countries.”
“What an infamous theory! I have always thought that your Richmond
villa, your house at Prince’s Gate, your swell garden parties, your
blood horses, and all the rest of it, were ludicrously out of keeping
with your political and literary declarations of opinion.”
“Not more so than your silver tea-set and your exemplary Critchett are
with yours. Don’t let us quarrel, at least not until to-morrow. I want
to see more of old Folliott. He is one of the worst enemies I have,
and I do so delight in drawing the claws of an enemy with my bland and
benign manners. Besides, I owe him a good deal. The _Torch_ was in its
infancy when he made its fortune and set it on its legs by his libel
suits. Meet me in Hyde Park at eleven to-morrow. I’ll come out of my
house through Albert Gate, and we’ll go down to his office together.”
“You can go, and take my written refusal with you.”
Fanshawe gives a gesture of irritated impatience, and looks at his
watch.
“_La nuit porte conseil._ You will think differently in the morning. I
am dining at Richmond. I can’t stay another moment, but for Heaven’s
sake take till to-morrow to think it over Ta-ta!”
“Good-day.”
Bertram looks out of the window and watches Fanshawe’s private hansom
flash down Piccadilly; he vaguely wishes that he too were going to dine
at Richmond, and were not fettered by principle to a cheese omelette
and a vol au vent of mushrooms.
It is a fine, breezy sunshiny morning on the morrow, good yachting
weather, as some one says who is going down to Gravesend for the first
cutter race of the season.
Bertram walks along Rotten Row under the trees with a mind so
preoccupied that he narrowly escapes being knocked down by an
ambassadress on a bicycle. He is repeating to himself what he said
to the old duke, “fais ce que dois advienne que pourra,” and he is
conscious that the injunction has its thorny side like most other
virtuous things.
He has been unable to sleep all night for the tormenting visions evoked
by Folliott’s visit and his dead cousin’s bequest.
Because you valorously resist a temptation it does not any the less
sharply assail you. Because you limit yourself strictly to rice
croquettes you do not the less painfully recall the forbidden flavour
of a salmi of game. He considers it no more possible for him in
common decency to accept this property than to embrace Mahomedanism or
renounce clothing; but none the less is he haunted by the possibilities
that its possession would bring with it.
He is human, and his heart is heavy as he walks along in the pleasant
April wind. He realises that there are many charming things which he
has renounced--voluntarily renounced, indeed; but, then, is it really
more agreeable to kill oneself than to be killed? Anyhow, the result is
the same; the grave is as deep and the sleep as eternal.
When he has arrived opposite the residential hotel which raises the
colossal offence of its eleven stories between the elm-trees and their
right to air and light he sits down, feeling rather limp and aimless;
and lighting a cigarette, he awaits the coming of Fanshawe. There is a
policeman close at hand; some children are near, with their nurses; and
a respectable-looking, middle-aged, brisk woman, with some fine linen
in a flat basket, is approaching. He raises his hat to her.
“Is that you, Mrs. Brown? I never saw you in the Park before.”
“No, sir, I don’t often come nigh fine folks,” answers Mrs. Brown.
“But I’ve got to go to Prince’s Gate, number fifteen, and I turned in
’ere ’cos the traffic’s that crowded on the ’igh-road; ’is ’Ighness is
agoin’ down to ’Ounslow.”
“Oh, to be sure. How are your people this morning?”
“My pore legs, sir, be as bad as ever--but there, we pore folks can’t
stop for aches and pains, or we’d never do naught in this ’ere world;
’twasn’t made for the likes of us.”
“That is a sad reflection. But pray don’t say ‘sir’ to me.”
“It comes nat’ral, sir. I hev allus been one as did my humble duty to
the quality.”
“Oh, I know! It is this terrible servility which has entered like
blood-poisoning into the very marrow of the people.”
The policeman standing near listening grins behind his white-gloved
hand.
“You are so used to stoop and cringe that you have lost the power
to stand upright when you are invited to do so,” says Bertram,
impatiently. “Where is your daughter?”
“Annie’s at Ealing, sir. It’s Primrose Day to-morrow.”
“And what is your opinion of Primrose Day, Mrs. Brown?”
“Well, sir, it’s got ’em lots o’ votes, but it do seem to me a pack o’
folly. No offence.”
“And the Primrose Dames, Mrs. Brown?”
“Well, sir, they’re a pretty spry lot o’ ladies, and they come and
talk, talk, talk, and me at the mangle, and I wish ’em anywheres; and
one o’ ’em promised to have my kitchen boiler looked to, but, Lord!
that’s three months ago come Monday was a week, and nobody’s come to
the boiler.”
“The Conservative party always forgets the boilers; and are extremely
astonished when the neglected boilers blow up.”
“My boiler was no business o’ theirs,” says the good woman, hotly;
“but if they said they’d send, they hought to hev sent. But there!
that’s them ladies all over, in and out, and to and fro, and it’s
how’s my soul? and how’s my dust-bin? and hev I faith? and hev I a
patent kitchener? and do I read my Bible? and do I keep the traps on
my drains? and do I see the blessin’s o’ eddication? and do I keep my
sink flushed? and am I an abstainer? and do I use carbolic acid? Such a
pack o’ nonsense, and in they comes without rappin’; and if they sees a
bit o’ dust in a corner ’tis ‘Lord, Mrs. Brown, don’t ye know as dust
is microbes, and microbes is sartain death?’ And I says, says I, ‘No,
marm, my leddy, my granny lived to ninety-six, and on her ninetieth
birthday she walked four miles to market at Winchester and back, and
she allus said to all o’ us as dust was wholesome, and cobwebs too, and
shouldn’t ne’er be interfered with----’”
She stops, out of breath, and the listening policeman smiles again.
“People were more robust in those days, Mrs. Brown,” remarked Bertram.
“Yes, sir, there weren’t so many doctors all over the place. When I was
a gal, in our village there weren’t a doctor within twenty mile; and
nobody never was ill. Nowadays young and old is allus talking about
their livers and lights till they fret theirselves into sickness.”
“That is very possible. Science is much to blame for teaching humanity
to concentrate the mind on the body. There I wholly agree with you.”
Mrs. Brown picks up her load of linen, which she has momentarily rested
on the back of the bench.
“Well, sir, you’ll please excuse me, but I can’t stand chatterin’ here.
We pore has got our work to do. That’s what I says to them ladies when
they come botherin.’ I says, says I, ‘We pore has our work to do, and
when ’tis done we want to sit still, and put our feet up, and take a
cup o’ tea, and doze like; we don’t want to go strammarkin’ about to
your concerts, and your readin’s, and your mothers’ meetin’s, and all
them rubbishes, and see a duchess playin’ a banjo or hear a duke sing
“Hot Codlins.”’ Let ’em keep in their place, and we’ll keep in ours.
That’s what I says, sir, and I bring up my children to say it arter me.”
“Oh, I am aware, Mrs. Brown, you and those who resemble you, are a
terrible stumbling-block to progress.”
“Please don’t call me names, sir. I’m a pore workin’ woman, but I’m one
as hev allus kep’ my head above water. You’re in one speer, and we’re
in another, as I hev allus told ye, but all the same I choose to be
respecket.”
“My dear creature, no one can respect you more profoundly than I do.”
But Mrs. Brown is not appeased by this assurance; walks away in high
dudgeon; there is meanwhile a great noise of yelling and shouting in
the distance near the statue of Achilles.
“What are they doing?” Bertram asks of the constable, who, touching his
helmet, answers:
“Well, sir, the Salvationists have got new banners, ‘Glory’ on one
side, and ‘Eternal Fire’ on t’other; and the pop’lace don’t like ’em.
Pop’lace very queer and touchy, sir. Never knows what it wants.”
“That is a hasty condemnation to pass on those who form the bulwarks of
a nation.”
“Bulwarks, is it, sir? Not when they’ve got any beer in ’em.”
The uproar in the distance grows very loud indeed; some children are
alarmed; the nurse who is with them asks the policeman if there is any
danger of a riot.
He replies cheerfully, “No fear, mum. They’re round Hachilles; the
Salvationists are on one side, a rum chap hollering against property on
the other. He’s one o’ them Communists, and the pop’lace don’t cotton
to them ideas; pop’lace likes gentlefolks. Lord! see ’em run to stare
at the carriages o’ Drawing Room days!”
“What is the use,” thinks Bertram, “of trying to save sheep who carry
their own fleeces obstinately to the shearers?”
“This is the impression,” he asks of the policeman, “which years on the
London pavement gives you of the London populace?”
Policeman answers, drily, “Yessir. All the force’ll tell ye the same.
London populace likes the nobs. Some on ’em yell a lot o’ revolutionary
nonsense when they gets in Trafalgar Square, but, Lord bless ye, they
don’t mean it.”
“They will mean it one day.”
“Well, sir, if they ever run short o’ liquor, on account of them total
habstainers, they will.”
“What a view of the sovereign people!” says Bertram, “who in the _Age
to Come_ advocates voluntary total abstinence.”
“Sovereign, is it, sir? Ever seen ’em o’ Derby Day, sir?”
“Yes,” replies Bertram, curtly. He perceives that the constable is a
satirist.
In sight at that moment appears a struggling form being violently
propelled by two officers of the law, and followed by some yelling
roughs and capering boys.
Bertram cannot believe his senses.
“Good gracious! That is Hopper!” he says to the satirical policeman at
his side. “What are they doing to him? Why is he arrested?”
Policeman replies politely, but with slightly veiled contempt: “Seem to
be running him in, sir. Is he a protegy of yours?”
Bertram goes up to the prisoner: “Why, Hopper, is that you? What has he
done? Why do you collar him like that?”
The constables, who are dragging Hopper between them, reply with curt
contempt: “Disorderly; drunk and disorderly, that’s what he is, sir,
and incitin’ to crime.”
“Drunk?” repeats Bertram. “Hopper? Impossible! He has touched nothing
but lemonade and mineral water for three years!”
“Is that so, sir? Well, there’s an excuse for him, then, poor devil!”
The prisoner whines and weeps, “Is that you, Mr. Bertram? You’ll speak
for a pore honest man--for a pore honest man--not a drop hev Hopper
took--not a--not a--not a drop. Hark’ee, Mister--Hopper was a-tellin’
folks--good tidings--proputty’s pison--proputty’s thievin’--proputty’s
root o’ all evil--said so yerself, mister. Hopper used yer werry words.
And Hopper’s run in, and ye stand there--yah! Blackgud.”
“I am ashamed of you, Hopper,” says Bertram, sternly. “But,” he adds to
the constables, “if you arrest this man for having taken stimulants, I
cannot oppose the measure, he may deserve arrest; but if you consider
him guilty because he has merely striven to disseminate the doctrines
which I myself hold, I ought in common justice to accompany him and be
locked up as well.”
The first policeman, who has a satiric vein, smiles rather cynically:
“Well, sir, I don’t say as you shouldn’t, but we can’t run you in, sir;
you aren’t disorderly.”
Marlow, who is sauntering past, stops, and laughs: “His opinions are
very disorderly. Half an hour in Bow Street might be a seasonable
douche.”
Hopper is struggling between the two constables, who have him by the
collar: “Hi, mister!” he groans, “won’t ye speak hup for a ’onest man?
Kep’ me on beastly swills, you hev--kep’ promisin’ on me beer’d be free
all round--promised as ’ow I’d live in Windsor Castle, and hev ale
an’ gin on tap all day--promised as ’ow--promised as ’ow--promised as
’ow----”
“Shut up his jaw,” says one of the constables to the other. “Get him
along somehow. We can’t waste no more time.”
They go down the road, dragging and pushing Hopper, a group of small
boys dancing hilariously in their rear.
“I assure you he was an entirely reformed character, up to this
moment,” says Bertram to the satirical and remaining policeman.
“Aye, they’re allus the worst, sir,” says that functionary, with
conviction.
“Reformed characters have a knack of backsliding,” says Marlow, who
has lingered to look on, with great enjoyment of the scene. “Vice is
magnetic. Virtue isn’t--somehow.”
Bertram ignores him and continues to address the policeman: “I suppose
I can witness on his behalf in the police-court? Get him out on bail?
My testimony surely----”
“Well, sir, I’d let him bide if I was you,” says the policeman, without
a grain of sympathy. “Seven days’ll do him a world o’ good. Wonderful
how it sobers ’em.”
“Why are you so ungenerous to your own class?”
Policeman looks puzzled: “Don’t know about ongenerous, sir; but I
didn’t never cotton to drunkards afore I was in the force.”
“I thought you were a total abstainer, Bertram?” says Marlow.
Bertram replies, very stiffly: “Drink is the most disgusting of all
weaknesses, but our disgust ought not to destroy our compassion. In
that poor man yonder it is a relapse into a bad habit after three years
of rigorous abstinence.”
The policeman smothers a decorous smile: “Beg pardon, sir that ’ere man
was run in dead drunk a fortnight ago on the Nottin’ ’Ill road and got
two days.”
Bertram is silent.
He remembers that Hopper appeared at his chambers ten days previously
with a black eye and bandaged head, and accounted for his condition by
a very well-told episode of a runaway horse and a lady saved by his
courage and resolution.
Marlow laughs, nods, and walks on; Bertram lights another cigarette. He
is not pleased by this episode.
Marlow, meanwhile continuing his walk, comes, some tenth part of a mile
further down the road, on two ladies, whom he recognises immediately
although their backs are towards him; one is Cicely Seymour, the other
Lady Jane Rivaux. He overtakes them with as much haste and joyousness
as it is possible for a London man in the ’Nineties to display in
public.
“Oh, Miss Seymour, such a lark down there,” he says, with great
satisfaction. “A friend of Bertram’s run in dead drunk by the police,
and Bertram preaching red ruin on his behalf. On my word, it’s the
drollest sight I’ve seen for many a day.”
“It must be,” replied Cicely, between her teeth. “We have all of us
numbers of friends who take more stimulants than are good for them, but
they are careful to be in the sanctuary of their own houses or in their
clubs.”
“How you do pull up a fellow!” murmurs Marlow. “Of course, when I say
friend I mean a--a--well, one of his monstrous queer acquaintances. He
lives amongst that class.”
“What class?”
“Well, the--the mob--you know. Folks that come out when there’s a riot
and smash windows and lamps; never see ’em any other time; burrow, I
suppose, like rabbits.”
“Darkest London? I fear the lamps when they are not smashed do not
throw much light on their darkness.”
“How sententious you are, Cicely!” says Lady Jane. “You ought to marry
a rising politician.”
“Because I detest politics?”
“Bertram’s views aren’t politics, they’re red ruin,” repeats Marlow.
“Red ruin to himself, too; he’s dropped such a pot o’ money over that
revolutionary journal of his that he’ll be in the bankruptcy court
before the season’s over.”
“Has he borrowed any money of you?” asks Cicely, curtly.
“Oh dear, no; I didn’t mean to imply----”
“Then what are his affairs to you?”
“Well--I--I--don’t know. Mustn’t one talk of one’s neighbours?”
“It shows great poverty of mind to speak merely of people. There are so
many other subjects.”
Marlow is abashed.
He knows that his mind is not rich according to her ideas of
intellectual wealth.
“At all events,” he says, rather crossly and hotly, “one may be allowed
to envy such a prig such good luck as to have Miss Seymour for a
champion.”
“Jane,” says Cicely, turning to her friend, “here come your children.
How well that mite Dolly rides!”
“He _is_ a prig, you know, my dear,” murmurs Lady Jane, “and I am sorry
it makes you angry when we say so.”
“I dislike all injustice,” says Cicely, coldly, “and I do not consider
that Mr. Bertram is in the least done justice to by his friends and
relations. How badly every one treated him yesterday in return for a
most learned and interesting lecture!”
While she is thus defending himself and his doctrines in his absence,
Bertram, still seated under the trees, sees in the distance a girl’s
figure; she wears a black straw hat, a black jacket, and a grey stuff
skirt; she has thread gloves and leather highlows, the highlows are
white with dust; she has two deep baskets filled with primroses and
covered by red cotton handkerchiefs; she carries one on each arm. She
has a round, fair, freckled face, a sweet and cheerful expression, and
a fringe of naturally curling brown hair.
She approaches Bertram smiling: “Oh, gracious, sir! Don’t get up for
the likes of me. Mother told me as how you were under this tree; I just
met her by the Gate, so I thought I’d come and have a peep at you.”
“Thanks,” replies Bertram, distantly. “Don’t say ‘as how,’ Annie. You
are heavily laden this morning.”
“Oh, no, sir. Primroses have no roots; they make a fine show, but they
don’t weigh naught.”
“Like the party of which they are the emblem.”
Annie smiles, in entire ignorance of his meaning, and sits down by him,
planting her baskets on the ground.
“These aren’t very good flowers,” she says, regretfully, “the rain’s
spiled ’em. They’ll do to put at the horses’ ears. Why do they put ’em
at the horses’ ears, sir? I asked a groom onst, and he says, says he,
it means that when our party come back to office we’ll take the tax off
horses. Is that so, sir?”
“They are not only at the horses’ ears, but at the asses’
button-holes!” says Bertram. “As for taxation, it is the arc of
Toryism.”
“Dear me!” he thinks, “why will she sit down by me? With all the will
in the world one cannot but fret occasionally at their manners, though
of course manner is only the shell, and ought not to weigh with one!”
Annie is meanwhile making some primroses up into a bunch. “What had you
said to mother?” she asks. “Her back was quite set up, like.”
“Your mother,” replies Bertram, “is the most estimable and
indefatigable of persons, but she has the taint of painfully narrowed
and archaic views: she persists in considering herself of an inferior
class; she persists in speaking of ‘quality,’ by which she means the
patrician order, as something superhuman and alien to herself. It
distresses me.”
“Oh, yes! Mother’s always going on about our engagement. She says as
how----”
“‘As how,’ again, Annie!”
“Well, sir, that’s just what mother means. You speak in one way and I
in another. And your friends will laugh at my way of speaking, sir;
they certainly will.”
“Let them laugh! Besides, we shall not see them, Annie; we shall live
wholly apart from them, in some remote spot of our own.”
“Out o’ London, sir?”
“Out of London beyond a doubt. Is that any subject of regret?”
“Well--I should miss the streets, sir.”
“Miss the streets! Merciful heavens! To what a pass has the baneful
disease of town life brought a pure and unsophisticated soul! But you
have been in the country this morning early--the hem of the country at
any rate. Did the freshness, the silence, the fragrance around you say
nothing to your heart?”
“Well, no, sir. Where the growers are you don’t smell much else than
manure; and there’s a steam pump always going fit to deafen you.”