This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from
his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism. His lean
slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest
of prominent large eyes. He placed his master’s letters legibly on the
table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the
hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.
Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.
‘How about the Schools for Boxing?’ that gentleman said.
Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: ‘I
have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously: a person of no
station:--it does not appear of national importance. Ladies are against.
They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because
of the blood; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not; and
it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex. They seem to be
unaware of their own interests--ladies. The contention all around us is
with ignorance. My plan is written; I have shown it, and signatures
of gentlemen, to many of our City notables favourable in most cases:
gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly. The clergy and the medical
profession are quite with me.’
‘The surgical, perhaps you mean?’
‘Also, sir. The clergy strongly.’
‘On the grounds of--what, Skepsey?’
‘Morality. I have fully explained to them:--after his work at the desk
all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment. He needs it, must
have it. I propose to catch him on his way to his music-halls and other
places, and take him to one of our establishments. A short term of
instruction, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves; it would
delight him more than excesses-beer and tobacco. The female in her right
place, certainly.’ Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his
hearer, and pursued,
‘It would improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his
sense of personal dignity.’
‘Would you teach females as well--to divert them from their
frivolities?’
‘That would have to be thought over, sir. It would be better for them
than using their nails.’
‘I don’t know, Skepsey: I’m rather a Conservative there.’
‘Yes; with regard to the female, sir: I confess, my scheme does not
include them. They dance; that is a healthy exercise. One has only to
say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency.
I look to that. And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent
of--I have to say--sex. Not that there is harm in sex. But we are for
training. I hope my meaning is clear?’
‘Quite. You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic
recreation.’
‘Recreation is the word, sir; I have often admired it,’ said Skepsey,
blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic.
‘I was a bit of a boxer once,’ Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height
and breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him.
‘Something might be done with you still, sir.’
Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful summary of his gifts in
a glimpse. Mr. Fenellan bowed to him.
Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters
perused.
‘Skepsey’s craze: regeneration of the English race by boxing--nucleus of
a national army?’
‘To face an enemy at close quarters--it teaches that, sir. I have always
been of opinion, that courage may be taught. I do not say heroism. And
setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable
citizens. Protection to the weak in streets and by-places--shocking
examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd.’
‘One strong man is an overmatch for your mob,’ said Mr. Fenellan.
Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion
of the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn.
‘Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant mob:--strong, you
say, sir? I venture my word that a decent lad, with science, would beat
him. It is a question of the study and practice of first principles.’
‘If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman?’ Skepsey
conjured the scene by bending his head and peering abstractedly, as if
over spectacles.
‘I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake.’
Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting.
‘My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first
principles, I think?’
‘Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir: exceedingly quick and clever; a
hard boxer to beat.’
‘You will not call him captain when you see him; he has dismissed the
army.’
‘I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him. Captain Dartrey
Fenellan was a beautiful fencer. He gave me some instruction; unhappily,
I have to acknowledge, too late. It is a beautiful art. Captain Dartrey
says, the French excel at it. But it asks for a weapon, which nature has
not given: whereas the fists...’
‘So,’ Mr. Radnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey: ‘No sign of life?’
‘It is not yet seen in the City, sir.’
‘The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth’s
maziest penetralia, where no tides are! is it not so, Skepsey?’ said
Mr. Fenellan, whose initiative and exuberance in loquency had been
restrained by a slight oppression, known to guests; especially to the
guest in the earlier process of his magnification and illumination by
virtue of a grand old wine; and also when the news he has to communicate
may be a stir to unpleasant heaps. The shining lips and eyes of
his florid face now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy
jack-o’-lanterning over it. ‘Business hangs to swing at every City door,
like a ragshop Doll, on the gallows of overproduction. Stocks and Shares
are hollow nuts not a squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight
of the milky kernel mouldered to beard.
Percentage, like a cabman without a fare, has gone to sleep inside his
vehicle. Dividend may just be seen by tiptoe: stockholders, twinkling
heels over the far horizon. Too true!--and our merchants, brokers,
bankers, projectors of Companies, parade our City to remind us of the
poor steamed fellows trooping out of the burst-boiler-room of the big
ship Leviathan, in old years; a shade or two paler than the crowd o’ the
passengers, apparently alive and conversible, but corpses, all of them
to lie their length in fifteen minutes.’
‘And you, Fenellan?’ cried his host, inspired for a second bottle by the
lovely nonsense of a voluble friend wound up to the mark.
‘Doctor of the ship! with this prescription!’ Mr. Fenellan held up his
glass.
‘Empty?’
Mr. Fenellan made it completely so. ‘Confident!’ he affirmed.
An order was tossed to the waiter, and both gentlemen screwed their
lips in relish of his heavy consent to score off another bottle from the
narrow list.
‘At the office in forty minutes,’ Skepsey’s master nodded to him and
shot him forth, calling him back: ‘By the way, in case a man named
Jarniman should ask to see me, you turn him to the rightabout.’
Skepsey repeated: ‘Jarniman!’ and flew.
‘A good servant,’ Mr. Radnor said. ‘Few of us think of our country
so much, whatever may be said of the specific he offers. Colney has
impressed him somehow immensely: he studies to write too; pushes to
improve himself; altogether a worthy creature.’
The second bottle appeared. The waiter, in sincerity a reluctant
executioner, heightened his part for the edification of the admiring
couple.
‘Take heart, Benjamin,’ said Mr. Fenellan; ‘it’s only the bottle dies;
and we are the angels above to receive the spirit.’
‘I’m thinking of the house,’ Benjamin replied. He told them that again.
‘It ‘s the loss of the fame of having the wine, that he mourns. But,
Benjamin,’ said Mr. Fenellan, ‘the fame enters into the partakers of it,
and we spread it, and perpetuate it for you.’
‘That don’t keep a house upright,’ returned Benjamin.
Mr. Fenellan murmured to himself: ‘True enough, it ‘s elegy--though we
perform it through a trumpet; and there’s not a doubt of our being down
or having knocked the world down, if we’re loudly praised.’
Benjamin waited to hear approval sounded on the lips uncertain as a
woman is a wine of ticklish age. The gentlemen nodded, and he retired.
A second bottle, just as good as the first, should, one thoughtlessly
supposes, procure us a similar reposeful and excursive enjoyment, as of
men lying on their backs and flying imagination like a kite. The effect
was quite other. Mr. Radnor drank hastily and spoke with heat: ‘You told
me All? tell me that!’
Mr. Fenellan gathered himself together; he sipped, and relaxed his
bracing. But there really was a bit more to tell: not much, was it? Not
likely to puff a gale on the voluptuous indolence of a man drawn along
by Nereids over sunny sea-waves to behold the birth of the Foam-Goddess?
‘According to Carling, her lawyer; that is, he hints she meditates a
blow.’
‘Mrs. Burman means to strike a blow?’
‘The lady.’
‘Does he think I fear any--does he mean a blow with a weapon? Is it a
legal...? At last? Fenellan!’
‘So I fancied I understood.’
‘But can the good woman dream of that as a blow to strike and hurt, for
a punishment?--that’s her one aim.’
‘She may have her hallucinations.’
‘But a blow--what a word for it! But it’s life to us life! It’s the blow
we’ve prayed for. Why, you know it! Let her strike, we bless her. We’ve
never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary--pity, pity,
pity! Let her do that, we’re at her feet, my Nataly and I. If you knew
what my poor girl suffers! She ‘s a saint at the stake. Chiefly on
behalf of her family. Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my
fortune: I’ll own to luck; I put in a claim to courage and calculation.’
‘You’ve been a bulwark to your friends.’
‘All, Fenellan, all-stocks, shares, mines, companies, industries at
home and--abroad--all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow!
Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again--singing! Ha! the
woman has threatened it before. It’s probably feline play with us.’
His chin took support, he frowned.
‘You may have touched her.’
‘She won’t be touched, and she won’t be driven. What ‘s the secret of
her? I can’t guess, I never could. She’s a riddle.’
‘Riddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the
ardently sought secret to reveal itself,’ said Mr. Fenellan.
His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor’s
eyes, they turned over. ‘Oh!--her charms! She had a desperate belief
in her beauty. The woman ‘s undoubtedly charitable; she’s not without a
mind--sort of mind: well, it shows no crack till it’s put to use. Heart!
yes, against me she has plenty of it. They say she used to be courted;
she talked of it: “my courtiers, Mr. Victor!” There, heaven forgive me,
I wouldn’t mock at her to another.’
‘It looks as if she were only inexorably human,’ said Mr. Fenellan,
crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to
flavour. ‘We read of the tester of a bandit-bed; and it flattened unwary
recumbents to pancakes. An escape from the like of that seems pleadable,
should be: none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the
insane.’
Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case. ‘For the sake of
my sanity, it was! to preserve my.... but any word makes nonsense of
it. Could--I must ask you--could any sane man--you were abroad in those
days, horrible days! and never met her: I say, could you consent to
be tied--I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth-tied to--I was
barely twenty-one: I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an
engagement--which is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good
faith; that is, with capacity on both sides to keep the engagement:
between the man you know I was in youth and a more than middle-aged
woman crazy up to the edge of the cliff--as Colney says half the world
is, and she positively is when her spite is roused. No, Fenellan, I have
nothing on my conscience with regard to the woman. She had wealth: I
left her not one penny the worse for--but she was not one to reckon it,
I own. She could be generous, was, with her money. If she had struck
this blow--I know she thought of it: or if she would strike it now, I
could not only forgive her, I could beg forgiveness.’
A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead.
‘You’ve borne your part bravely, my friend.’
‘I!’ Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal burdens. ‘Praise my
Nataly if you like! Made for one another, if ever two in this world! You
know us both, and do you doubt it? The sin would have been for us two to
meet and--but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death and
beyond it: that’s my firm faith. Nataly teaches me the religion of
life, and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman.
Eighteen-nineteen-twenty years!’
Tears fell from him, two drops. He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed
his watch, and smiled: ‘The finishing glass! We should have had to put
Colney to bed. Few men stand their wine. You and I are not lamed by it;
we can drink and do business: my first experience in the City was,
that the power to drink--keeping a sound head--conduces to the doing of
business.’
‘It’s a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror.’
‘If it doubles the energies, mind.’
‘Not if it fiddles inside. I confess to that effect upon me. I’ve a
waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and
it won’t allow of a thought upon Investments.’
‘Consult me to-morrow,’ said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having
inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided. ‘You’ve
looked at the warehouse?’
‘That’s performed.’
‘Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early
morning as you well can.’
Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent,
the giant spoke in good fellowship. It would have been to have strained
his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to
boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.
He stopped, and laughed: ‘Now I ‘m pumping my pulpit-eh? You come with
us to Lakelands. I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.: if it’s
fine; train half-past. We take a basket. By the way, I had no letter
from Dartrey last mail.’
‘He has buried his wife. It happens to some men.’
Mr. Radnor stood gazing. He asked for the name of the place of the
burial. He heard without seizing it. A simulacrum spectre-spark of
hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening
at the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless
envy. Dartrey--Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and
dishonoured him: and it was in Africa! One would have to go to Africa
to be free of the galling. But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!--The
strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off
their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the
brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring,
always in ambush. We do not speak of them: we have not words to stamp
the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had
the words; we know them as out of reason: they haunt us, pluck at us,
fret us, nevertheless.
Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the
mind of shackled men.
It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that
Dartrey should be free, suddenly free; and free while still a youngish
man. He was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country
for vigour, gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness; his heavenly good
fortune decked him as a prodigy.
‘No harm to the head from that fall of yours?’ Mr. Fenellan said.
‘None.’ Mr. Radnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and
cried cheerily: ‘Now to business’; as men may, who have confidence in
their ability to concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial.
‘You dine with us. The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or
Catkin: Priscilla Graves and Nataly--the Rev. Septimus; Cormyn and his
wife: Young Dudley Sowerby and I--flutes: he has precision, as naughty
Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression. In the course of the
evening, Lady Grace, perhaps: you like her.’
‘Human nature in the upper circle is particularly likeable.’
‘Fenellan,’ said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his
fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey’s, ‘I put it to
you: would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend
Carling’s report?’
Although it had not been phrased as a report, Mr. Fenellan’s answering
look and gesture, and a run of indiscriminate words, enrolled it in that
form, greatly to the inspiriting of Mr. Radnor.
Old Veuve in one, to the soul of Old Veuve in the other, they recalled
a past day or two, touched the skies; and merriment or happiness in
the times behind them held a mirror to the present: or the hour of the
reverse of happiness worked the same effect by contrast: so that notions
of the singular election of us by Dame Fortune, sprang like vinous
bubbles. For it is written, that however powerful you be, you shall not
take the Winegod on board to entertain him as a simple passenger;
and you may captain your vessel, you may pilot it, and keep to your
reckonings, and steer for all the ports you have a mind to, even to
doing profitable exchange with Armenian and Jew, and still you shall do
the something more, which proves that the Winegod is on board: he is the
pilot of your blood if not the captain of your thoughts.
Mr. Fenellan was unused to the copious outpouring of Victor Radnor’s
confidences upon his domestic affairs; and the unwonted excitement of
Victor’s manner of speech would have perplexed him, had there not been
such a fiddling of the waltz inside him.
Payment for the turtle and the bottles of Old Veuve was performed
apart with Benjamin, while Simeon Fenellan strolled out of the
house, questioning a tumbled mind as to what description of suitable
entertainment, which would be dancing and flirting and fal-lallery in
the season of youth, London City could provide near meridian hours for
a man of middle age carrying his bottle of champagne, like a guest of an
old-fashioned wedding-breakfast. For although he could stand his wine
as well as his friend, his friend’s potent capacity martially after the
feast to buckle to business at a sign of the clock, was beyond him. It
pointed to one of the embodied elements, hot from Nature’s workshop. It
told of the endurance of powers, that partly explained the successful,
astonishing career of his friend among a people making urgent, if
unequal, demands perpetually upon stomach and head.