THE MADDING CROWD
Andreas Hausberger was a dictator. He kept his own counsel till the
moment of action grew ripe for birth in the womb of time; then, heeding
no man, he gave his orders. Three days after Will Deverill’s departure
from St Valentin, he called up Linnet to his office suddenly. “The
dressmaker has brought home your new costume,” he said in his curt way.
“Go upstairs and put it on. Then come down and let me see you.”
Linnet, much wondering what this mood might portend, went up to her own
room and tried on her new gew-gaws. Puffed white sleeves, laced corset,
crimson kirtle, high shoes, flowered kerchief at her bosom, silver dirk
in her hair; Linnet wasn’t over-vain, as girls go in this world, but
tricked out in such finery, she gazed in her glass, and, to tell the
whole truth, admired herself consumedly. If only her Englishman could
have seen her in that dress! But she stifled her sigh, and tripped
lightly downstairs again, with the buoyancy of youth, when conscious of
a perfectly becoming costume, for Andreas Hausberger’s scrutiny.
The _wirth_ scanned her, well satisfied. “On Monday,” he said, briefly,
in that iron voice, “we set out on our tour, and go first to Innsbruck.”
It was earlier by a week than he at first intended; but he saw it would
be hard, if he stopped at St Valentin, to keep Fridolin’s hands from
Franz’s throat much longer. So, by way of minimising the adverse
chances, he made up his mind to start as soon as possible for his winter
season. He meant to begin modestly with entertainments at hotels among
the Tyrolese winter resorts, and the towns of the Riviera; and then,
when his troupe had got over its first access of stage fright, and grown
used to an audience, to go across for the summer to England or America.
So, for the next few days Linnet was busy as a bee with preparations for
her first journey into the great wide world outside the Zillerthal. As
yet, her native valley had bounded her view—she had never gone even as
far as Jenbach. Expectation and preparation kept her mind well employed
during that busy week, and prevented it from dwelling too much or too
long on the kindly Engländer, who had vanished from her ken across the
sea to England. For, that he had gone straight home, Linnet never even
doubted. On the afternoon of Andreas Hausberger’s exciting announcement,
indeed, a little registered parcel came by post for her to St Valentin.
It bore the postmark of Wilten, where Will had intentionally dropped it
into the letter-box, on purpose to conceal from her his exact
whereabouts. Linnet scanned it close, and read the name correctly, but
was too innocent of the topography of her native country to know that
Wilten is the name of a village on the outskirts of Innsbruck. When she
asked Andreas Hausberger where Wilten was, a little later in the day,
without showing him the postmark, he confirmed her belief by answering
at once that ’twas a town in England, not far from Salisbury. So he had
thought of her over sea, then, and sent her this beautiful costly
present from his own country. She tried it on that night before her tiny
square mirror. As Will had rightly judged, it set off the rich tints of
her creamy brown neck to the best advantage.
A beautiful gift! A real lady might have worn it! Later on, when Linnet
had diamonds and rubies at command, there was no trinket she prized
among all her jewels like Will Deverill’s coral.
At last the eventful morning itself arrived. The little troupe set out
on foot down the mountain to Mairhofen. There, their boxes, sent on
over-night, awaited them. They drove in a large open brake to
Jenbach—Andreas Hausberger, Franz Lindner, Linnet herself, Philippina,
and the two other singers who composed the party. At Jenbach, they
descended at the door of the railway station. For the first time in her
life, Linnet saw, half-alarmed, a puffing and snorting machine, a sort
of iron devil, breathing flames like purgatory, burst with smoke and
stench upon the crowd by the waiting-room. Though she had heard all
about it often enough before, and could see for herself that this great
scurrying creature, for all its noise and bustle, kept rigidly to the
rails as it approached the platform, she yet drew back in pure physical
terror and surprise at the swiftness and irresistibility of the
fire-fiend’s motion.
She had scant time to think, however, for scarce had it come to rest
when Andreas Hausberger, little heeding, bundled them all
unceremoniously into a third-class compartment; and before Linnet had
leisure to recover her self-possession, the engine had uttered one wild
discordant shriek, and with ringing of bells and rattlings of wheels in
her ears, she found herself, willy-nilly, beyond hope of release,
whirled along at the break-neck pace of what you and I know as an
Austrian slow train, over the jolting rails, up the broad Inn valley.
In spite of her terror—for she knew the railway as yet chiefly by
hearing reports of collisions and accidents—Linnet enjoyed to the full
that first steam-borne journey. She whirled past turreted towers like
Hall and Volders, which to you and me commend themselves as the absolute
quintessence of old-world quaintness, but which, to Linnet’s young eyes,
accustomed only to St Valentin and the grassy Alps, envisaged themselves
rather in glowing hues as the kingdoms of the world and all their glory.
They had been late to start, and their drive from Mairhofen had been
tolerably leisurely, so dusk was closing in when they arrived at
Innsbruck. Oh, the bustle, the din, the whirling awe of that arrival!
Electric lamps lighted up the broad Platz in front of the station; on
either side rose great hotels, grander and more palatial than any
buildings on earth Linnet’s poor little fancy had ever yet dreamed of.
Not to one of these, however, of course, did Andreas Hausberger take his
little troupe of minstrels. But even the humbler inn on the south side
of the Theresien Strasse, to which they repaired on foot, bearing their
boxes between them, seemed to Linnet’s inexperienced and impressionable
eye a most princely caravanserai. After the noise and bustle in that
busy railway junction, which made her brain whirl with the unaccustomed
dizziness of a great city, the comparative rest and quiet of the Golden
Eagle seemed a positive relief both of mind and body. That night she
slept little. Her head swam with excitement; for this was the first step
on her journey through the world, which might lead her perhaps at last
to England. And in England, she thought to herself once or twice with a
little thrill, who could tell but peradventure she might meet . . . Will
Deverill?
For she knew little as yet of how big the world is, and how long you may
live in it, going to and fro, without necessarily knocking up against
this one or that of its component units.
Next morning they rose betimes, and went out into the street to view the
city. For to Linnet, as to Mrs Palmer, a city it was—and a very great
one. Such streets and streets seemed to frighten and appal her. Florian
had admired in that picturesque old capital of a mountain land, the
antiquated tone, the eighteenth-century flavour, the mediæval survivals,
the air as of a world elsewhere gone from us utterly. But to Linnet,
though it was beautiful and impressive too, it was above all things
magnificent, grandiose, stately, imposing. She gazed with open eyes at
the Golden Roof, admired the bronze statues at the base of the Anna
Column, looked up with silent awe at the front of the Landhaus, and
thought the Rudolfsbrunnen, with its attendant griffins and dragons, a
wonderful work of art for the world’s delectation.
Philippina went with her, her companion on the alp. Linnet noticed with
much surprise—for she knew not as yet the difference in fibre between
them—that Philippina, though as interested as herself in the shops and
their contents, seemed wholly unimpressed by these other and vastly more
attractive features of a civilised city. For Linnet had been gifted by
nature, to the fullest degree, with the profound Tyrolese artistic
susceptibility. Though her mind came to art as a blank page, it
responded to the stimulus, once presented to its ken, as the sensitive
plate of a photographic camera responds in every line to the inspiring
picture.
As they strolled through the town, by Andreas Hausberger’s express
desire—for the wise impresario had arranged their first appearance for
that very evening, and wished the girls to come to it fresh, after a
morning’s exercise—they paid comparatively little heed to what most of
us regard as by far the most striking characteristic of Innsbruck—the
great limestone crags that seem on every side to tower and overhang the
very roofs of the city. They were accustomed, indeed, to crags, and made
very small case of them. It was the houses, the shops, the noise, the
crowd, the gaiety, that chiefly struck them. Innsbruck to Linnet was as
a little Paris. But as they went on their way through the bustling
streets, they came at last to a church door, which Linnet’s profound
religious nature could hardly pass by without one minute’s prayer for
Our Lady’s aid at this critical turning-point of her artistic history.
Philippina, nothing loth, for her part, opined it could do them no harm
to make favour above with the blessed saints for this evening’s work by
a little Pater Noster. The blessed saints dearly love attentions: much
may be done with them by a small wax candle! So they opened the door,
and stepped into the Hofkirche.
Even those of us who know well the world and its art, can remember
vividly the strange start of surprise with which we gazed round for the
first time on that oddest and most bizarre of Christian temples. It
isn’t so much beautiful, indeed, as unexpected and startling. To push
open the church door and find oneself at once ringed round and guarded
close, as it were, by that great circle of mailed knights and
bronze-wimpled ladies, who watch the long sleep of the kneeling
Maximilian on his cenotaph in the centre, gives one a thrill of a novel
sort from which some tinge of dim awe can hardly ever be wholly absent.
There they stand, on their low pedestals, a congregation of bronze
ancestors round their descendant’s tomb—Theodoric the Ostrogoth and
King Arthur the Briton, Mary of Burgundy and Eleonora of
Portugal—strange efforts of struggling art in its first faint steps
towards the attainment of the beautiful—naïf, ungainly, crude, rising
only once or twice within measurable distance of the ideal in the few
figures cast in metal by Peter Vischer of Nuremberg. But to Linnet, a
woman grown, instinct with the innate artistic taste of her countrymen,
yet innocent till then of all forms of art save the saints and
purgatories of her mountain chapels, the Hofkirche was a glimpse of some
new and unseen world of infinite possibilities. She went through it all
piecemeal with open-mouthed interest. Philippina could only laugh at the
quaint vizors of the knights, the quainter dresses of the ladies. But
Linnet was almost shocked Philippina should laugh at them. She herself
half forgot her intended prayer to Our Lady in her delight and surprise
at those wonderful figures and those beautiful bas-reliefs. She read all
the names on the bases conscientiously; they didn’t mean much to her, to
be sure—her historical ideas didn’t get as far as “Clovis, King of the
Franks,” or even as “Count Frederick of Tyrol with the Empty Pockets”;
but in a vague sort of way she gathered for herself that these were
statues of archdukes and mighty heroes, keeping watch and ward silently
round the great dead emperor who knelt in the centre on his marble
sarcophagus. Good luck, too, attended them. The little hump-backed
sacristan, seeing two pretty girls looking through the grating at the
reliefs on its sides, relaxed his stony heart without the customary
kreuzers, and admitted them within the railing to inspect at their
leisure those exquisite pictures in marble which Thorwaldsen declared
the most perfect work of their kind in the whole of Christendom.
Philippina found the dresses quite grotesquely old-fashioned; but
Linnet, hardly knowing why she lingered so long, gazed at each scene in
detail with the profoundest interest.
While down in the town Linnet was thus engaged, high up in the hills
Will Deverill sat alone by Mrs Palmer’s side on an outcrop of rock near
the summit of the Lanser Kopf. Florian had gone off for a minute or two
round the corner by the mountain indicator, with the giggling
inarticulates. Mrs Palmer, pointing her moral with the ferrule of her
parasol on the grass in front of her, was discoursing to Will earnestly
of his work and his prospects. “I want to see you do something really
great, Mr Deverill,” she said, with genuine fervour, looking deep into
his eyes; “something larger in scale and more worthy of your
genius—something that gives full scope to your dramatic element. I
don’t like to see you frittering away your talents on these exquisite
little lyrics—beautiful gems in their way, to be sure, but that way not
the highest. I want to see you settled down for a long spell of hard
work at some big undertaking—an epic, a play, a grand opera, a
masterpiece. I know you could do it if only you took the time. You
should go to some quiet place where there’s nothing to distract you, and
make your mind up to work, to write something more lasting than even
that lovely _Gwyn_, or that exquisite _Ossian_!”
Will looked down and sighed. ’Tis pleasant to be appreciated by a
beautiful woman. And every man thinks, if he had but the chance, he
could show the world yet the sort of stuff that’s in him. “I only wish I
could,” he answered, regretfully. “But I’ve my living to earn. That ties
me down still to the treadmill of journalism. When my holiday’s
over—the first for two years—I must get back once more, well content,
to Fleet Street and drudgery.”
Mrs Palmer sighed too. She felt his difficulty. Her parasol played more
nervously on the grass than before. She answered nothing, but she
thought a great deal. How small a matter for her to secure this young
poet whom she admired so much, six months of leisure for an immortal
work—and yet, how impossible! There was only one way, she knew that
very well; and the first step towards that way must come, not from her,
but from this modest Will Deverill.
’Twas a passing thought, half formed, or scarce half formed, in the
pretty widow’s mind. But nothing came of it. As she paused, and sighed,
and played trembling with her parasol, and doubted what to answer him,
Florian came up once more with the giggling inarticulates, “Well, Mr
Wood?” she said, looking up, just by way of saying something, for the
pause was an awkward one.
“Pardon me,” the mannikin of culture answered in his impressive way; “my
name is Florian.”
“But _I_ can’t call you so,” Mrs Palmer answered, recovering herself,
with a merry little laugh.
“It’s usual in Society,” Florian responded with truth. “Just ask Will
Deverill.”
Will nodded assent. “Quite true,” he admitted. “Men and women alike in
London know him only as Florian. It’s a sort of privilege he has, an
attribute of his own. He’s arrogated it to himself, and the world at
large acquiesces in his whim, and grants it.”
“It makes things seem so much more real and agreeable, you see, as Dick
Swiveller said to the marchioness,” Florian continued blandly. “Now
suppose we five form an elective family, a little brotherhood of our
own, a freemasonry of culture, and call one another, like brothers and
sisters, by our Christian names only! Wouldn’t that be delightful! I’ve
just been explaining to Ethel and Eva that I mean henceforth to Ethel
and Eva them. Soul gets nearer to soul without these flimsy barriers.
I’m Florian; this is Will; and you, Mrs Palmer, your Christian name
is——?”
The pretty widow drew back with a little look of alarm. “Oh no,” she
said, shortly; “I never could tell you my given name for anything. It’s
much too dreadful.” She pulled out a pencil from the pocket at her side.
“See here,” she said to Will, writing down one word for him on the
silver-cased tablets that hung pendant from her delicate Oriental
chatelaine, “there’s a name, if you like, for two Puritan parents to
burden the life of their poor innocent child with! Don’t tell Mr
Wood—or Florian if he wishes it; he’d make fun of it behind my back,
I’m perfectly certain. I know his way. To him nothing, not even a
woman’s name, is sacred.”
Will glanced at the word curiously. He couldn’t forbear a quiet smile.
“It’s bad enough, I must admit,” he answered, perforce. The Vision of
Beauty had been christened Jerusha!
“But I make it _Rue_ for short,” she added, after a moment, with a
deprecating smile.
Florian caught at the word, enraptured. “The very thing!” he cried,
eagerly. “Capital, capital, capital! ‘There’s rue for you, and here’s
some for me: we may call it herb-o’-grace o’ Sundays.’ But Rue shall be
your weekday name for the Brotherhood. Let’s read the roll-call!
Florian, Will, Rue, Ethel, Eva! Those are our names henceforth among
ourselves. We scorn formalities! No mystery for us. We abolish the
_misters_!”
And so indeed it was. As Will, Rue, and Florian, those three of the
Elective House knew each other thereafter.