After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend’s
contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for
as long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official
duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro.
Fenellan waited for him to lead.
‘Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?’
‘I have dined with Mr. Carling:--capital claret.’
Emptiness was in the reply.
Victor curbed himself and said: ‘By the way, you’re not likely to have
dealings with Blathenoy. The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty
eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business. I shall sit on the
Board of my Bank. One hears things. He lives in style at Wrensham. By
the way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her.
You said of little Mabsy--“Here she comes into the room all pink and
white, like a daisy.” She’s the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at
that age.--So, then, we come to another dead block!’
‘Well, no; it’s a chemist’s shop, if that helps us on,’ said Fenellan,
settling to a new posture in his chair. ‘She’s there of an afternoon for
hours.’
‘You mean it’s she?’
‘The lady. I ‘ll tell you. I have it from Carling, worthy man; and
lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret. He’s a
bit of a “Mackenzie Man,” as old aunts of mine used to say at home--a
Man of Feeling. Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted
a lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it’s an exposition
of positive human nature when they’ve pulled down our noses to the worst
parts--if there’s a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the
dogs is to have us by the nose:--excite it and befoul it, and you’re
fearfully credible! You don’t read that olfactory literature. However,
friend Carling is a conciliatory carle. Three or four days of the week
the lady, he says, drives to her chemist’s, and there she sits in the
shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop
looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if
Carling’s picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green
shade over her forehead. Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders
of applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind
of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she ‘ll try
it herself. It’s a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent’s Park
pretty well every day.’
‘Ha! Regent’s Park!’ exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the
district and the number of the house, dismal to him. London buried
the woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London. ‘A
chemist’s shop! She sits there?’
‘Mrs. Burman. We pass by the shop.’
‘She had always a turn for drugs.--Not far from here, did you say? And
every day! under a green shade?’
‘Dear fellow, don’t be suggesting ballads; we’ll go now,’ said Fenellan.
‘It ‘s true it’s like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.’
He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the
office.
‘You’ve done nothing?’ Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.
‘Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.’
‘Where did you hear?’
‘Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady’s chemists. I
called the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board
Meeting.’
‘The Themison?’
‘The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much
in request for it.’
‘There’s one of your echoes of Colney!’ Victor cried. ‘One gets dead
sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors. They don’t kill, you know
very well. It ‘s not to their interest to kill. They may take the relish
out of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the patient
living!’
Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through
his friend.
‘The City’s mending; it’s not the weary widow woman of the day when we
capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,’ he said, as they trod
the pavement. ‘Funny people, the English! They give you all the primeing
possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for the
exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not, you’re
marched off to penitence. I complain, that they have no philosophical
appreciation of human nature.’
‘We pass the shop?’ Victor interrupted him.
‘You’re in view of it in a minute. And what a square, for recreative
dancing! And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
agitation! And what a country, where from morning to night it’s an
endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence! Old Colney
seems right now and then: they ‘re the offspring of pirates, and they
‘ve got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of
quarrelling everlastingly over the booty. I ‘d have band-music here for
a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the
East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South
too. But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this
London of ours, it ‘s only too sadly true that the people are in the
first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives. Now
you see the shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.’
Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
swelled it, ahemming. ‘That shop?’ said he. And presently: ‘Fenellan,
I’m not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day
of our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked
home up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that
identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having
forgotten Nataly’s favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I’m
stating a fact--I distinctly--I ‘m sure of the shop--felt myself plucked
back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a
foot backward to keep your equilibrium.’
So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
for the colouring of history.
He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder’s
experience.
Fenellan smiled indulgently. ‘Queer things happen. I recollect reading
in my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where
he was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight
of the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice,
when at his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted
twice; and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and
he jumped up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them
providentially over the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into
the boat awaiting them, and had them safe on and polished the day he
preached the sermon of gratitude for the special deliverance. There was
a Warning! and it might well be called, as he called it, from within.
We’re cared for, never doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help
yourself in a calamity, or you’ll not stand in boots at your next
Sermon, contrasting with the burnt. That sounds like the moral.’
‘She could have seen me,’ Victor threw out an irritable suggestion. The
idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.
‘Scarcely likely. I’m told she sits looking on her lap, under the
beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
mixture that strikes her fancy. It’s possible to do more suicidal things
than sit the afternoons in a chemist’s shop and see poor creatures get
their different passports to Orcus.’
Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
chemical wash. The woman might be inside there now! She might have
seen his figure in the shop-mirror! And she there! The wonder of it all
seemed to be, that his private history was not walking the streets.
The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day’s
immunity: because this woman would live in London, in order to have
her choice of a central chemist’s shop, where she could feed a ghastly
imagination on the various recipes... and while it would have been so
much healthier for her to be living in a recess of the country!
He muttered: ‘Diseases--drugs!’
Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
woman going.
‘And deadly spite.’ That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.
In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.
A little further on, he said: ‘Poor soul!’ He confessed to himself, that
latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous
in thought, as never before. He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving. He accused her of dragging
him down to humanity’s lowest.
But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.
Her station in the chemist’s shop he passed almost daily, appeared to
him as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a
short drive from the house in Regent’s Park; but having shaken-off
that house, he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it. The woman
certainly had a power.
He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for
winning men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of
his energies: men and, individually, women. Individually, the women were
to be counted on as well; warm supporters.
It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
collectively. Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them. Glancing at
congregated women, he had a chill. The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective
woman: that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of
civilized life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the
tolerable, the legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an
aspect of the stand against him.
Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
not to be subdued? And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
Nataly!
Victor’s novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight. Not
many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that
index: nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure
of value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides.
The passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to
sit beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a
henbane-visage!--had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the
abstract verity: and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world
to the practical mind. But he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of
sensibility, to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a
source that was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.
In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school
of its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums
done on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip
of the creditor on the defaulter. Debtors are always paying like those
who are guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth,
they have made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in
soul; and the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete
burden is undischarged. You know the Liar; you must have seen him
diminishing, until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to
humanity’s preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful
outline on our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of
things, he must from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive
nimbleness, up to the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it
again. There is a repentance that does reconstitute! It may help to the
traceing to springs of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out
of the wood.
Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every
debt with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt
apologies for a short brush of his temper. Nay, he had such a conscience
for the smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish
to say a friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge,
softened his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.
Although this man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature
which drives to unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen
at its beating after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for
the reverse of lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship.
So social a man could not otherwise incline. But when it came to the
examination of accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of
physical revulsion, loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out
of Court. To men, it was impossible for him to speak the torments of
those days of the monstrous alliance. The heavens were cognizant. He
pleaded his case in their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by
wealth, attracted, besought, snared, revolted, etc. And Mrs. Burman,
when roused to jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of
his admiration of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless
fair woman living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the
corpse and shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her
breath about him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!
He pleaded successfully. But the silence following the verdict was
heavy; the silence contained an unheard thunder. It was the sound, as
when out of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict. Are we
expected to commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
public?--Imagine it for a moment as done. Men are ours at a word--or at
least a word of invitation. Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman.
And that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns the
poor racked wretch who so much as remembers them! She is the enemy of
Nature.--Tell us how? She is the slave of existing conventions.--And
from what cause? She is the artificial production of a state that exalts
her so long as she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.
Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with
her arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.
He placed himself to the right of Mrs. Burman, for the world to behold
the couple: and he lent the world a sigh of disgust.
What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to rise above the
situation, in a splendid survey and rapid view of the means of reversing
it. He was too social to be a captain of the socially insurgent;
imagination expired.
But having a courageous Nataly to second him!--how then? It was the
succour needed. Then he would have been ready to teach the world that
Nature--honest Nature--is more to be prized than Convention: a new Era
might begin.
The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated him springingly. It
sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly’s want of common adventurous
daring. She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture
from a flowing purse with a heavy heart--unfeminine, one might say; she
preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think--but it
was unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a
strain and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.
These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant
twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away
independent of the player’s cunning hand. He would have said, that he
was more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make
him praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would it have astonished him
to contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
invoked. But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes. Men call
on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of
their rhetoric. They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not,
as women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour. It is not an effort
at epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.
An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.
‘How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians! Well, now, the Germans
have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
has done. He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod’s Romeo
et Juliette--and we don’t gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for
the melody gone; think of the little shepherd’s pipeing in Mireille; and
there’s another in Sapho-delicious. I held out against Wagner as long as
I could. The Italians don’t much more than Wagnerize in exchange for
the loss of melody. They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
Campagnole. The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
master. Aida and Otello, no. I confess to a weakness for the old
barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade. Aren’t you seduced by
cadences? Never mind Wagner’s tap of his paedagogue’s baton--a cadence
catches me still. Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps! There’s a march
in Verdi’s Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I’m in military step when
I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera. Fredi takes
little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night. Enough to make us old
ones envious! You remember your first Opera, Fenellan? Sonnambula, with
me. I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if
you like--showing all that’s noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
describe its effect on me. I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for
a year after. The Huguenots to-night. Not the best suited for little
Mabsy; but she’ll catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera; we used to
think it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
Meistersinger.’
Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
the Huguenots. That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him. He
drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying. The return of a lively
disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the
yoke of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist’s
shop; save that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the
picture; she threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him
through his nostrils. He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need
for it; singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour
abreast with Armandine’s kitchen-clock. Fenellan proposed a glass of
sherry and bitters at his Club over the way. He had forgotten a shower
of black-balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on
a certain past day. Without word of refusal, Victor entered a
wine-merchant’s office, where he was unknown, and stating his wish for
bitters and dry sherry, presently received the glass, drank, nodded
to the administering clerk, named the person whom he had obliged and
refreshed, and passed out, remarking to Fenellan: ‘Colney on Clubs! he’s
right; they’re the mediaeval in modern times, our Baron’s castles, minus
the Baron; dead against public life and social duties. Business excuses
my City Clubs; but I shall take my name off my Club up West.’
‘More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot, and Whist for
the services,’ Fenellan said. ‘Or tabernacles for the Chosen, and
Grangousier playing Divinity behind the veil. Well, they’re social.’
‘Sectionally social, means anything but social, my friend. However--and
the monastery had a bell for the wanderer! Say, I’m penniless or
poundless, up and down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must
feel, these palaces--if we’re Christian, not Jews: not that the Jews are
uncharitable; they set an: example, in fact....’
He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of Fenellan, who thought
of his pursuit of wealth and grand expenditure.
Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond the subject. He
was nearing to the Idea he had seized and lost on London Bridge.
The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit Nataly, withdrew him
from his ineffectual chase. He had nought to deliver; on the contrary,
a meditation concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment which was
the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent to him.
He snatched at the name of Themison.
With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report of progress to
be made to Nataly; and not at all an empty report.
Themison, then: he leaned on Themison. The woman’s doctor should have an
influence approaching to authority with her.
Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his theme of discourse to
Fenellan: let Banks beware.
Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his head. ‘Feel the wind?’
he said.
Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep tones, which at
times he had: ‘No: don’t be alarmed; I feel the devil. If one has wealth
and a desperate wish, he will speak. All he does, is to make me more
charitable to those who give way to him. I believe in a devil.’
‘Horns and tail?’
‘Bait and hook.’
‘I haven’t wealth, and I wish only for dinner,’ Fenellan said.
‘You know that Armandine is never two minutes late. By the way, you
haven’t wealth--you have me.’
‘And I thank God for you!’ said Fenellan, acutely reminiscent of his
having marked the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman
Buttermore, as a man who might be useful to his friend.