The bearer of his master’s midday letters from London shot beyond
Nataly as soon as seen, with an apparent snap of his body in passing. He
steamed to the end of the terrace and delivered the packet, returning
at the same rate of speed, to do proper homage to the lady he so much
respected. He had left the railway-station on foot instead of taking a
fly, because of a calculation that he would save three minutes; which
he had not lost for having to come through the raincloud. ‘Perhaps the
contrary,’ Skepsey said: it might be judged to have accelerated his
course: and his hat dripped, and his coat shone, and he soaped his
hands, cheerful as an ouzel-cock when the sun is out again.
‘Many cracked crowns lately, in the Manly Art?’ Colney inquired of him.
And Skepsey answered with precision of statement: ‘Crowns, no, sir; the
nose, it may happen; but it cannot be said to be the rule.’
‘You are of opinion, that the practice of Scientific Pugilism offers us
compensation for the broken bridge of a nose?’
‘In an increase of manly self-esteem: I do, sir, yes.’
Skepsey was shy of this gentleman’s bite; and he fancied his defence had
been correct. Perceiving a crumple of the lips of Mr. Durance, he took
the attitude of a watchful dubiety.
‘But, my goodness, you are wet through!’ cried Nataly, reproaching
herself for the tardy compassion; and Nesta ran up to them and heaped
a thousand pities on her ‘poor dear Skip,’ and drove him in beneath the
glass-dome to the fragments of pic-nic, and poured champagne for him,
‘lest his wife should have to doctor him for a cold,’ and poured afresh,
when he had obeyed her: ‘for the toasting of Lakelands, dear Skepsey!’
impossible to resist: so he drank, and blinked; and was then told, that
before using his knife and fork he must betake himself to some fire
of shavings and chips, where coffee was being made, for the purpose of
drying his clothes. But this he would not hear of: he was pledged to
business, to convey his master’s letters, and he might have to catch a
train by the last quarter-minute, unless it was behind the time-tables;
he must hold himself ready to start. Entreated, adjured, commanded,
Skepsey commiseratingly observed to Colney Durance, ‘The ladies do not
understand, sir!’ For Turk of Constantinople had never a more haremed
opinion of the unfitness of women in the brave world of action. The
persistence of these ladies endeavouring to obstruct him in the course
of his duty, must have succeeded save that for one word of theirs he had
two, and twice the promptitude of motion. He explained to them, as to
good children, that the loss of five minutes might be the loss of a
Post, the loss of thousands of pounds, the loss of the character of a
Firm; and he was away to the terrace. Nesta headed him and waved him
back. She and her mother rebuked him: they called him unreasonable;
wherein they resembled the chief example of the sex to him, in a wife he
had at home, who levelled that charge against her husband when most she
needed discipline: the woman laid hand on the very word legitimately his
own for the justification of his process with her.
‘But, Skips! if you are ill and we have to nurse you!’ said Nesta.
She forgot the hospital, he told her cordially, and laughed at the
notion of a ducking producing a cold or a cold a fever, or anything
consumption, with him. So the ladies had to keep down their anxious
minds and allow him to stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and
salad.
Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness that they were
seductresses for inducing him to drink wine--and a sparkling wine.
‘It is to warm him,’ they pleaded; and she said: ‘He must be warm from
his walk’; and they said: ‘But he is wet’; and said she, without a show
of feeling: ‘Warm water, then’; and Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp
of anatomists, at being the subject of female contention or humane
consideration. Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in
him; she remarked encouragingly:
‘I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.’
She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his hand, and
he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion; and he profoundly
bowed to principles, believing his England to be pillared on them; and
the lady looked like one who bore the standard of a principle; and if we
slap and pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems
entering us to support. Subscribing to a principle, our energies are
refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not with us before
the act; and of a real well-founded faith come the glowing thoughts
which we have at times: thoughts of England heading the nations; when
the smell of an English lane under showers challenges Eden, and the
threading of a London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral
organ. It may be, that by the renunciation of any description of
alcohol, a man will stand clearer-headed to serve his country. He may
expect to have a clearer memory, for certain: he will not be asking
himself, unable to decide, whether his master named a Mr. Journeyman or
a Mr. Jarniman, as the person he declined to receive. Either of the
two is repulsed upon his application, owing to the guilty similarity of
sounds but what we are to think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency
in failing to remember; which accuses our physical condition, therefore
our habits.--Thus the little man debated, scarcely requiring more than
to hear the right word, to be a convert and make him a garland of the
proselyte’s fetters.
Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla gestured the
putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation to him, so to
put aside temptation that instant; and she signified in a very ugly jerk
of her features, the vilely filthy stuff Morality thought it, however
pleasing it might be to a palate corrupted by indulgence of the sensual
appetites.
But the glass had been handed to him by the lady he respected, who
looked angelical in offering it, divinely other than ugly; and to her
he could not be discourteous; not even to pay his homage to the
representative of a principle. He bowed to Miss Graves, and drank, and
rushed forth; hearing shouts behind him.
His master had a packet of papers ready, easy for the pocket.
‘By the way, Skepsey,’ he said, ‘if a man named Jarniman should call at
the office, I will see him.’
Skepsey’s grey eyes came out.
Or was it Journeyman, that his master would not see; and Jarniman that
he would?
His habit of obedience, pride of apprehension, and the time to catch
the train, forbade inquiry. Besides he knew of himself of old, that his
puzzles were best unriddled running.
The quick of pace are soon in the quick of thoughts.
Jarniman, then, was a man whom his master, not wanting to see, one day,
and wanting to see, on another day, might wish to conciliate: a case of
policy. Let Jarniman go. Journeyman, on the other hand, was nobody
at all, a ghost of the fancy. Yet this Journeyman was as important an
individual, he was a dread reality; more important to Skepsey in
the light of patriot: and only in that light was he permitted of a
scrupulous conscience and modest mind to think upon himself when the
immediate subject was his master’s interests. For this Journeyman had
not an excuse for existence in Mr. Radnor’s pronunciation: he was born
of the buzz of a troubled ear, coming of a disordered brain, consequent
necessarily upon a disorderly stomach, that might protest a degree of
comparative innocence, but would be shamed utterly under inspection of
the eye of a lady of principle.
What, then, was the value to his country of a servant who could not
accurately recollect his master’s words! Miss Graves within him asked
the rapid little man, whether indeed his ideas were his own after
draughts of champagne.
The ideas, excited to an urgent animation by his racing trot, were a
quiverful in flight over an England terrible to the foe and dancing on
the green. Right so: but would we keep up the dance, we must be red iron
to touch: and the fighter for conquering is the one who can last and has
the open brain;--and there you have a point against alcohol. Yes, and
Miss Graves, if she would press it, with her natural face, could be
pleasant and persuasive: and she ought to be told she ought to marry,
for the good of the country. Women taking liquor: Skepsey had a vision
of his wife with rheumy peepers and miauly mouth, as he had once beheld
the creature:--Oh! they need discipline not such would we have for the
mothers of our English young. Decidedly the women of principle are bound
to enter wedlock; they should be bound by law. Whereas, in the opposing
case--the binding of the unprincipled to a celibate state--such a law
would have saved Skepsey from the necessitated commission of deeds of
discipline with one of the female sex, and have rescued his progeny from
a likeness to the corn-stalk reverting to weed. He had but a son for
England’s defence; and the frame of his boy might be set quaking by a
thump on the wind of a drum; the courage of William Barlow Skepsey would
not stand against a sheep; it would wind-up hares to have a run at him
out in the field. Offspring of a woman of principle!... but there is no
rubbing out in life: why dream of it? Only that one would not have one’s
country the loser!
Dwell a moment on the reverse--and first remember the lesson of
the Captivity of the Jews and the outcry of their backsliding and
repentance:--see a nation of the honourably begotten; muscular men
disdaining the luxuries they will occasionally condescend to taste,
like some tribe in Greece; boxers, rowers, runners, climbers; braced,
indomitable; magnanimous, as only the strong can be; an army at word,
winning at a stroke the double battle of the hand and the heart: men
who can walk the paths through the garden of the pleasures. They receive
fitting mates, of a build to promise or aid in ensuring depth of chest
and long reach of arm for their progeny.
Down goes the world before them.
And we see how much would be due for this to a corps of ladies like Miss
Graves, not allowed to remain too long on the stalk of spinsterhood. Her
age might count twenty-eight: too long! She should be taught that
men can, though truly ordinary women cannot, walk these orderly paths
through the garden. An admission to women, hinting restrictions, on a
ticket marked ‘in moderation’ (meaning, that they may pluck a flower or
fruit along the pathway border to which they are confined), speedily,
alas, exhibits them at a mad scramble across the pleasure-beds. They
know not moderation. Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of
Posterity will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun
it.
The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract, as men do.
But there are grounds for supposing that the example before them of a
sex exercising self-control in freedom, would induce women to pledge
themselves to a similar abnegation, until they gain some sense of touch
upon the impalpable duty to the generations coming after us thanks to
the voluntary example we set them.
The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey in the course of
conversational remonstrances with his wife;--that of getting the Idea of
Posterity into the understanding of its principal agent, might then be
mastered.
Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement: it manifestly
devolves upon them. Let them at once take to rigorous physical
training. Women under compulsion, as vessels: men in their magnanimity,
patriotically, voluntarily.
Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed it; and it
plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not suffer him to
escape without ruefully feeling the feebleness of his vocabulary: and
consequently he made a reluctant appeal to figures, and it hung upon the
bolder exhibition of lists and tables as to whether he was beaten; and
if beaten, he was morally her captive; and this being the case, nothing
could be more repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of his nature
passively or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld himself
wearing a detestable ‘ribbon,’ for sign of an oath quite needlessly
sworn (simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him with nimbler tongue),
and blocking the streets, marching in bands beneath banners, howling
hymns.
Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging opinions
in argument, always fell back, frightened him. As long as they had
no opponents of their own kind, they swept the field, they were
intelligible, as the word ‘principle’ had become. But the appearance of
one body of Statistics invariably brought up another; and the strokes
and counterstrokes were like a play of quarter-staff on the sconce,
to knock all comprehension out of Skepsey. Otherwise he would not
unwillingly have inquired to-morrow into the Statistics of the
controversy between the waters of the wells and of the casks, prepared
to walk over to the victorious, however objectionable that proceeding.
He hoped to question his master some day except that his master would
very naturally have a tendency to sum-up in favour of wine--good
wine, in moderation; just as Miss Graves for the cup of tea--not so
thoughtfully stipulating that it should be good and not too copious.
Statistics are according to their conjurors; they are not independent
bodies, with native colours; they needs must be painted by the different
hands they pass through, and they may be multiplied; a nought or so
counts for nothing with the teller. Skepsey saw that. Yet they can
overcome: even as fictitious battalions, they can overcome. He shrank
from the results of a ciphering match having him for object, and was
ashamed of feeling to Statistics as women to giants; nevertheless he
acknowledged that the badge was upon him, if Miss Graves should beat
her master in her array of figures, to insist on his wearing it, as she
would, she certainly would. And against his internal conviction perhaps;
with the knowledge that the figures were an unfortified display, and his
oath of bondage an unmanly servility, the silliest of ceremonies! He was
shockingly feminine to Statistics.
Mr. Durance despised them: he called them, arguing against Mr. Radnor,
‘those emotional things,’ not comprehensibly to Skepsey. But Mr.
Durance, a very clever gentleman, could not be right in everything. He
made strange remarks upon his country. Dr. Yatt attributed them to the
state of ‘his digestion.
And Mr. Fenellan had said of Mr. Durance that, as ‘a barrister wanting
briefs, the speech in him had been bottled too long and was an overripe
wine dripping sour drops through the rotten cork.’ Mr. Fenellan said it
laughing, he meant no harm. Skepsey was sure he had the words. He heard
no more than other people hear; he remembered whole sentences, and many:
on one of his runs, this active little machine, quickened by motion to
fire, revived the audible of years back; whatever suited his turn of
mind at the moment rushed to the rapid wheels within him. His master’s
business and friends, his country’s welfare and advancement, these, with
records, items, anticipations, of the manlier sports to decorate, were
his current themes; all being chopped and tossed and mixed in salad
accordance by his fervour of velocity. And if you would like a further
definition of Genius, think of it as a form of swiftness. It is the
lively young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which
mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the
motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof
is multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your
half-lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then
Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius. What do you say?
Without having a great brain, the measure of it possessed by Skepsey was
alive under strong illumination. In his heart, while doing penance for
his presumptuousness, he believed that he could lead regiments of men.
He was not the army’s General, he was the General’s Lieutenant, now and
then venturing to suggest a piece of counsel to his Chief. On his own
particular drilled regiments, his Chief may rely; and on his knowledge
of the country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills, dividing
rivers. He had mapped for himself mentally the battles of conquerors in
his favourite historic reading; and he understood the value of a plan,
and the danger of sticking to it, and the advantage of a big army for
flanking; and he manoeuvred a small one cunningly to make it a bolt at
the telling instant. Dartrey Fenellan had explained to him Frederick’s
oblique attack, Napoleon’s employment of the artillery arm preparatory
to the hurling of the cataract on the spot of weakness, Wellington’s
parallel march with Marmont up to the hour of the decisive cut through
the latter at Salamanca; and Skepsey treated his enemy to the like,
deferentially reporting the engagement to a Chief whom his modesty kept
in eminence, for the receiving of the principal honours. As to his men,
of all classes and sorts, they are so supple with training that they
sustain a defeat like the sturdy pugilist a knock off his legs, and up
smiling a minute after--one of the truly beautiful sights on this
earth! They go at the double half a day, never sounding a single pair
of bellows among them. They have their appetites in full control, to eat
when they can, or cheerfully fast. They have healthy frames, you see;
and as the healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that,
under any title you like, they profess the principles--into the bog we
go, we have got round to it!--the principles of those horrible marching
and chanting people!
Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable
country for habitation?
Here was a knot.
Skepsey’s head dropped lower, he went as a ram. The sayings of Mr.
Durance about his dear England: that ‘her remainder of life is in the
activity of her diseases’--that ‘she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise
as to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution’: that ‘she
is animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly’; and so forth:--charged
on him during his wrestle with his problem. And the gentlemen had said,
had permitted himself to say, that our England’s recent history was a
provincial apothecary’s exhibition of the battle of bane and antidote.
Mr. Durance could hardly mean it. But how could one answer him when he
spoke of the torpor of the people, and of the succeeding Governments as
a change of lacqueys--or the purse-string’s lacqueys? He said, that Old
England has taken to the arm-chair for good, and thinks it her whole
business to pronounce opinions and listen to herself; and that, in the
face of an armed Europe, this great nation is living on sufferance. Oh!
Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.
‘Feel quite up to it?’ he was asked by his neighbour.
The mover of armed hosts for the defence of the country sat in a
third-class carriage of the train, approaching the first of the stations
on the way to town. He was instantly up to the level of an external
world, and fell into give and take with a burly broad communicative man;
located in London, but born in the North, in view of Durham cathedral,
as he thanked his Lord; who was of the order of pork-butcher; which
succulent calling had carried him down to near upon the borders of
Surrey and Sussex, some miles beyond the new big house of a Mister
whose name he had forgotten, though he had heard it mentioned by an
acquaintance interested in the gentleman’s doings. But his object was to
have a look at a rare breed of swine, worth the journey; that didn’t
run to fat so much as to flavour, had longer legs, sharp snouts to plump
their hams; over from Spain, it seemed; and the gentleman owning
them was for selling them, finding them wild past correction. But the
acquaintance mentioned, who was down to visit t’ other gentleman’s big
new edifice in workmen’s hands, had a mother, who had been cook to a
family, and was now widow of a cook’s shop; ham, beef, and sausages,
prime pies to order; and a good specimen herself; and if ever her son
saw her spirit at his bedside, there wouldn’t be room for much else in
that chamber--supposing us to keep our shapes. But he was the right sort
of son, anxious to push his mother’s shop where he saw a chance, and
do it cheap; and those foreign pigs, after a disappointment to their
importer, might be had pretty cheap, and were accounted tasty.
Skepsey’s main thought was upon war: the man had discoursed of pigs.
He informed the man of his having heard from a scholar, that pigs had
been the cause of more bloody battles than any other animal.
How so? the pork-butcher asked, and said he was not much of a scholar,
and pigs might be provoking, but he had not heard they were a cause of
strife between man and man. For possession of them, Skepsey explained.
Oh! possession! Why, we’ve heard of bloody battles for the possession of
women! Men will fight for almost anything they care to get or call their
own, the pork-butcher said; and he praised Old England for avoiding war.
Skepsey nodded. How if war is forced on us? Then we fight. Suppose we
are not prepared?--We soon get that up. Skepsey requested him to state
the degree of resistance he might think he could bring against a pair of
skilful fists, in a place out of hearing of the police.
‘Say, you!’ said the pork-butcher, and sharply smiled, for he was a man
of size.
‘I would give you two minutes,’ rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently
and kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum
vein.
‘Rather short allowance, eh, master?’ said the bigger man. ‘Feel here’;
he straightened out his arm and doubled it, raising a proud bridge of
muscle.
Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.
‘Twice that, would not help without the science,’ he remarked, and let
his arm be gripped in turn.
The pork-butcher’s throat sounded, as it were, commas and colons,
punctuations in his reflections, while he tightened fingers along the
iron lump. ‘Stringy. You’re a wiry one, no mistake.’ It was encomium.
With the ingrained contempt of size for a smallness that has not yet
taught it the prostrating lesson, he said: ‘Weight tells.’
‘In a wrestle,’ Skepsey admitted. ‘Allow me to say, you would not touch
me.’
‘And how do you know I’m not a trifle handy with the maulers myself?’
‘You will pardon me for saying, it would be worse for you if you were.’
The pork-butcher was flung backward. ‘Are you a Professor, may I
inquire?’
Skepsey rejected the title. ‘I can engage to teach young men, upon a
proper observance of first principles.’
‘They be hanged!’ cried the ruffled pork-butcher. ‘Our best men never
got it out of books. Now, you tell me--you’ve got a spiflicating style
of talk about you--no brag, you tell me--course, the best man wins, if
you mean that: now, if I was one of ‘em, and I fetches you a bit of a
flick, how then? Would you be ready to step out with a real Professor?’
‘I should claim a fair field,’ was the answer, made in modesty.
‘And you’d expect to whop me with they there principles of yours?’
‘I should expect to.’
‘Bang me!’ was roared. After a stare at the mild little figure with the
fitfully dead-levelled large grey eyes in front of him, the pork-butcher
resumed: ‘Take you for the man you say you be, you’re just the man for
my friend Jam and me. He dearly loves to see a set-to, self the same.
What prettier? And if you would be so obliging some day as to favour us
with a display, we’d head a cap conformably, whether you’d the best of
it, according to your expectations, or t’ other way:--For there never
was shame in a jolly good licking as the song says: that is, if you take
it and make it appear jolly good. And find you an opponent meet and fit,
never doubt. Ever had the worse of an encounter, sir?’
‘Often, Sir.’
‘Well, that’s good. And it didn’t destroy your confidence?’
‘Added to it, I hope.’
At this point, it became a crying necessity for Skepsey to escape from
an area of boastfulness, into which he had fallen inadvertently; and he
hastened to apologize ‘for his personal reference,’ that was intended
for an illustration of our country caught unawares by a highly trained
picked soldiery, inferior in numbers to the patriotic levies, but sharp
at the edge and knowing how to strike. Measure the axe, measure the
tree; and which goes down first?
‘Invasion, is it?--and you mean, we’re not to hit back?’ the
pork-butcher bellowed, and presently secured a murmured approbation from
an audience of three, that had begun to comprehend the dialogue, and
strengthened him in a manner to teach Skepsey the foolishness of ever
urging analogies of too extended a circle to close sharply on the mark.
He had no longer a chance, he was overborne, identified with the fated
invader, rolled away into the chops of the Channel, to be swallowed
up entire, and not a rag left of him, but John Bull tucking up his
shirtsleeves on the shingle beach, ready for a second or a third; crying
to them to come on.
Warmed by his Bullish victory, and friendly to the vanquished, the
pork-butcher told Skepsey he should like to see more of him, and
introduced himself on a card Benjamin Shaplow, not far from the Bank.
They parted at the Terminus, where three shrieks of an engine, sounding
like merry messages of the damned to their congeners in the anticipatory
stench of the cab-droppings above, disconnected sane hearing; perverted
it, no doubt. Or else it was the stamp of a particular name on his mind,
which impressed Skepsey, as he bored down the street and across the
bridge, to fancy in recollection, that Mr. Shaplow, when reiterating the
wish for self and friend to witness a display of his cunning with the
fists, had spoken the name of Jarniman. An unusual name yet more
than one Jarniman might well exist. And unlikely that a friend of the
pork-butcher would be the person whom Mr. Radnor first prohibited and
then desired to receive. It hardly mattered:--considering that the Dutch
Navy did really, incredible as it seems now, come sailing a good way
up the River Thames, into the very main artery of Old England. And
what thought the Tower of it? Skepsey looked at the Tower in sympathy,
wondering whether the Tower had seen those impudent Dutch a nice people
at home, he had heard. Mr. Shaplow’s Jarniman might actually be Mr.
Radnor’s, he inclined to think. At any rate he was now sure of the name.