BETWEEN THEM AND OF A SATIRIST’S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS
COUNTRY
There is at times in the hearts of all men of active life a vivid wild
moment or two of dramatic dialogue between the veteran antagonists,
Nature and Circumstance, when they, whose business it should be to be
joyfully one, furiously split; and the Dame is up with her shrillest
querulousness to inquire of her offspring, for the distinct original
motive of his conduct. Why did he bring her to such a pass! And what is
the gain? If he be not an alienated issue of the great Mother, he will
strongly incline to her view, that he put himself into harness to join
with a machine going the dead contrary way of her welfare; and thereby
wrote himself donkey, for his present reading. Soldiers, heroes, even
the braided, even the wearers of the gay cock’s feathers, who get
the honours and the pocket-pieces, know the moment of her electrical
eloquence. They have no answer for her, save an index at the machine
pushing them on yet farther under the enemy’s line of fire, where they
pluck the golden wreath or the livid, and in either case listen no more.
They glorify her topping wisdom while on the march to confound it.
She is wise in her way. But, it is asked by the disputant, If we had
followed her exclusively, how far should we have travelled from our
starting-point? We of the world and its prizes and duties must do her
an injury to make her tongue musical to us, and her argument worthy of
attention. So it seems. How to keep the proper balance between those two
testy old wranglers, that rarely pull the right way together, is as much
the task for men in the grip of the world, as for the wanton youthful
fry under dominion of their instincts; and probably, when it is done,
man will have attained the golden age of his retirement from service.
Why be scheming? Victor asked. Unlike the gallant soldiery, his question
was raised in the blush of a success, from an examination of the
quality of the thing won; although it had not changed since it was first
coveted; it was demonstrably the same: and an astonishing dry stick
he held, as a reward for perpetual agitations and perversions of his
natural tastes. Here was a Dudley Sowerby, the direct issue of the
conception of Lakelands; if indeed they were not conceived together
in one; and the young gentleman had moral character, good citizen
substance, and station, rank, prospect of a title; and the grasp of him
was firm. Yet so far was it from hearty, that when hearing a professed
satirist like Colney Durance remark on the decorous manner of Dudley’s
transparent courtship of the girl, under his look of an awakened
approval of himself, that he appeared to be asking everybody:--Do you
not think I bid fair for an excellent father of Philistines?--Victor had
a nip of spite at the thought of Dudley’s dragging him bodily to be the
grandfather. Poor Fredi, too!--necessarily the mother: condemned by
her hard fate to feel proud of Philistine babies! Though women soon get
reconciled to it! Or do they? They did once. What if his Fredi turned
out one of the modern young women, who have drunk of ideas? He caught
himself speculating on that, as on a danger. The alliance with Dudley
really seemed to set him facing backward.
Colney might not have been under prompting of Nataly when he derided
Dudley; but Victor was at war with the picture of her, in her
compression of a cruel laugh, while her eyelids were hard shut, as if to
exclude the young patriarch of Philistines’ ridiculous image.
He hearkened to the Nature interrogating him, why had he stepped on a
path to put division between himself and his beloved?--the smallest
of gaps; and still the very smallest between nuptial lovers is a
division--and that may become a mortal wound to their one-life. Why
had he roused a slumbering world? Glimpses of the world’s nurse-like,
old-fashioned, mother-nightcap benevolence to its kicking favourites;
its long-suffering tolerance for the heroic breakers of its rough-cast
laws, while the decent curtain continues dropped, or lifted only
ankle-high; together with many scenes, lively suggestions, of the
choice of ways he liked best, told of things, which were better things,
incomprehensibly forfeited. So that the plain sense of value insisted on
more than one weighing of the gain in hand: a dubious measure.
He was as little disposed to reject it as to stop his course at a
goal of his aim. Nevertheless, a gain thus poorly estimated, could not
command him to do a deed of humiliation on account of it. The speaking
to this dry young Dudley was not imperative at present. A word would do
in the day to come.
Nataly was busy with her purchases of furniture, and the practise for
the great August Concert. He dealt her liberal encouragements, up to the
verge of Dr. Themison’s latest hummed words touching Mrs. Burman, from
which he jumped in alarm lest he should paralyze her again: the dear
soul’s dreaded aspect of an earthy pallor was a spectre behind her
cheeks, ready to rush forth. Fenellan brought Carling to dine with him;
and Themison was confirmed by Carting, with incidents in proof; Caning
by Jarniman, also with incidents; one very odd one--or so it seemed, in
the fury of the first savour of it:--she informed Jarniman, Skepsey said
his friend Jarniman said, that she had dreamed of making her appearance
to him on the night of the 23rd August, and of setting the date on the
calendar over his desk, when she entered his room: ‘Sitting-room, not
bedroom; she was always quite the lady,’ Skepsey reported his Jarniman.
Mrs. Burman, as a ghost, would respect herself; she would keep to her
character. Jarniman quite expected the dream to be verified; she was
a woman of her word: he believed she had received a revelation of the
approaching fact: he was preparing for the scene.
Victor had to keep silent and discourse of general prosperity. His happy
vivaciousness assisted him to feel it by day. Nataly heard him at night,
on a moan: ‘Poor soul!’ and loudly once while performing an abrupt
demi-vault from back to side: ‘Perhaps now!’ in a voice through doors.
She schooled herself to breathe equably.
Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of comfort he was
charged with, he swallowed it himself; and these were the consequences.
And an uneasy sleep was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the
Radnor family. The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia, would have
cited ancestral names, showing it to be the worst of intimations. At
night, lying on his back beneath a weight of darkness, one heavily
craped figure, distinguishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black
pad, accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind
was dragged to go through the whole case by morning light; and the
compassionate man appealed to common sense, to stamp and pass his
delectable sophistries; as, that it was his intense humaneness, which
exposed him to an accusation of inhumanity; his prayer for the truly
best to happen, which anticipated Mrs. Burman’s expiry. They were simple
sophistries, fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing
the imprimatur of common sense. They refreshed him, as a chemical scent
a crowded room.
All because he could not open his breast to Nataly, by reason of her
feebleness; or feel enthusiasm in the possession of young Dudley! A
dry stick indeed beside him on the walk Westward. Good quality wood, no
doubt, but dry, varnished for conventional uses. Poor dear Fredi would
have to crown it like the May-day posy of the urchins of Craye Farm and
Creckholt!
Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate him as a diligent
student of commercial matters: rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal
Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome
appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born
to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and
Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England
prone along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the
possession of certain of them. But when, as Colney says, a grateful
England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he gratefully
hands-over the establishment to his country; and both may disregard the
howls of a Salvation Army of shareholders.--Beaten by the Germans in
Brewery, too! Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow. We were ahead of
them, and they came and studied us, and they studied Chemistry as well;
while we went on down our happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire
their young Professors, and then to import their beer.
Have the Germans more brains than we English? Victor’s blood up to the
dome of his cranium knocked the patriotic negative. But, as old Colney
says (and bother him, for constantly intruding!), the comfortably
successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain yet more
than it eases the person: hence are we outpaced; we have now to know
we are racing. Victor scored a mark for one of his projects. A
well-conducted Journal of the sharpest pens in the land might, at a
sacrifice of money grandly sunk, expose to his English how and to what
degree their sports, and their fierce feastings, and their opposition to
ideas, and their timidity in regard to change, and their execration of
criticism applied to themselves, and their unanimous adoption of it
for a weapon against others, are signs of a prolonged indulgence in the
cushioned seat. Victor saw it. But would the people he loved? He
agreed with Colney, forgetting the satirist’s venom: to-wit; that the
journalists should be close under their editor’s rod to put it in sound
bold English;--no metaphors, no similes, nor flowery insubstantiality:
but honest Saxon manger stuff: and put it repeatedly, in contempt of the
disgust of iteration; hammering so a soft place on the Anglican skull,
which is rubbed in consequence, and taught at last through soreness
to reflect.--A Journal?--with Colney Durance for Editor?--and
called conformably THE WHIPPING-TOP? Why not, if it exactly hits the
signification of the Journal and that which it would have the country do
to itself, to keep it going and truly topping? For there is no vulgarity
in a title strongly signifying the intent. Victor wrote it at night,
naming Colney for Editor, with a sum of his money to be devoted to the
publication, in a form of memorandum; and threw it among the papers in
his desk.
Young Dudley had a funny inquisitiveness about Dartrey Fenellan; owing
to Fredi’s reproduction or imitation of her mother’s romantic sentiment
for Dartrey, doubtless: a bit of jealousy, indicating that the dry
fellow had his feelings. Victor touched--off an outline of Dartrey’s
history and character:--the half-brother of Simeon, considerably
younger, and totally different. ‘Dartrey’s mother was Lady Charlotte
Kiltorne, one of the Clanconans; better mother than wife, perhaps; and
no reproach on her, not a shadow; only she made the General’s Bank-notes
fly black paper. And--if you ‘re for heredity--the queer point is,
that Simeon, whose mother was a sober-minded woman, has always been the
spendthrift. Dartrey married one of the Hennen women, all an odd lot,
all handsome. I met her once. Colney said, she came up here with a
special commission from the Prince of Darkness. There are women who stir
the unholy in men--whether they mean it or not, you know.’
Dudley pursed to remark, that he could not say he did know. And good for
Fredi if he did not know, and had his objections to the knowledge! But
he was like the men who escape colds by wrapping in comforters instead
of trusting to the spin of the blood.
‘She played poor Dartrey pranks before he buried--he, behaved well to
her; and that says much for him; he has: a devil of a temper. I ‘ve seen
the blood in his veins, mount to cracking. But there’s the man: because
she was a woman, he never let it break out with her. And, by heaven,
he had cause. She couldn’t be left. She tricked him, and she loved
him-passionately, I believe. You don’t understand women loving the
husband they drag through the mire?’
Dudley did not. He sharpened his mouth.
‘Buried, you said, sir?--a widower?’
‘I’ve no positive information; we shall hear when he: comes back,’
Victor replied hurriedly. ‘He got a drenching of all the damns in the
British service from his. Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a
trooper’s negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes
Dartrey to his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation.
Good soldier lost. And I can’t complain; he has been a right-hand man to
me over in Africa. But a man ought to have some control of his temper,
especially a soldier.’
Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.
‘Worse than that temper of Dartrey’s, he can’t forgive an injury. He
bears a grudge against his country. You’ve heard Colney Durance abuse
old England. It’s three parts factitious-literary exercise. It ‘s milk
beside the contempt of Dartrey’s shrug. He thinks we’re a dead people,
if a people; “subsisting on our fat,” as Colney says.’
‘I am not of opinion that we show it,’ observed Dudley.
‘We don’t,’ Victor agreed. He disrelished his companion’s mincing tone
of a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to
be at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens,
who little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the
gentleman cordially signifying full agreement. But Dudley was not gifted
to read behind words and looks.
They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was
this young Dudley saying, quite commendably: ‘It’s a pity we seem to
have no means of keeping our parks select.’
Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought. He remembered a fable of
Fenellan’s, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to
discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure
in their hymning.
‘Have you seen anything offensive to you?’ he asked.
‘One sees notorious persons.’
Dudley spoke aloof from them--‘out of his cold attics,’ Fenellan would
have said.
Victor approved: with the deadened feeling common to us when first in
sad earnest we consent to take life as it is.
He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the
fatherly embrace of goodness.
Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of
Lakelands. If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his
morality! But no; he wore it cap a pie, like a mediaeval knight his
armour. One had to approve. And there was no getting away from him. He
was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture
of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for
him at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him
at a corner of the Strand.
Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed
with Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on
self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to
Dudley’s. Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in the
presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of
conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses. Dudley drove
him to Colney for relief. Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be
bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley
to critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and
foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul. That quieted her. And another
thing, she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a
tuning-fork for the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also, she
seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having
to share, high flights. And she was, in her queer woman’s way, always
reassured by his endurance of Colney’s company:--she read it to mean,
that he could bear Colney’s perusal of him, and satiric stings. Victor
had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve
his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young
Dudley within him, he felt them. Preferring Fenellan’s easy humour to
Colney’s acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter’s antidote to
Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.
For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of
their society. They might have headed those tribes in the country. At a
period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants
to be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not
performance, of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their
temperaments. Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of
the Nineteenth Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and
negatives divorced from harmony and awakened by the slight increase
of incubating motion to vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion
duellists for the rosy and the saturnine since the former cheerfully
slaved for a small stipend in the City of his affection, and the latter
entered on an inheritance counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew
a briefless barrister disposed for scholarship from the forlornest
of seats in the Courts. They had foretold of one another each the
unfulfilled; each claimed the actual as the child of his prediction.
Victor was to have been ruined long back; Colney the prey of independent
bachelors. Colney had escaped his harpy, and Victor could be called a
millionaire and more. Prophesy was crowned by Colney’s dyspepsia, by
Victor’s ticklish domestic position. Their pity for one another, their
warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of different temperaments;
and we have to distinguish, that in many estimable and some gifted human
creatures, it is the quality of the blood which directs the current of
opinion.
Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal satisfaction, and
to lull Nataly and make her laugh; but he could not, as she hoped he
was doing, take Colney into his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist,
impelled by his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and
does things; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic, with the
delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things. Our Optimy has
his instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy’s countenance at the
confession of a dilemma-foreseen! He hands himself to Pessimy, as it
were a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack
with the wood. But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no
compensation: Pessimy is invulnerable. You waste your time in hurling a
common ‘tu-quoque’ at one who hugs the worst.
The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view,
and neutral view of life, were a comical trio. They had come upon the
days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London’s early August
when it is not pipeing March. Victor complacently bore heat as well as
cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it;
and why was he stewing in London? It was for this young Dudley, who
resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and
blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale
water: or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London’s
professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told: Why was not
Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture! They
ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol. Nesta had of late been
turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after
a run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she
and Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath
had filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it
as victim on St. Helena’s rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua’s
fortress-walls blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes
for his pathetic sublime.
Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of
his darlings. But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious
pictures of that mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth
from the London oven:--lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags with livid peaks
and snow lining shelves and veins of the crevices; and folds of pinewood
undulations closed by a shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a
dazzling pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it
shooting aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge, and
wide-armed in its pure white shroud beneath; tranced, but all motion in
immobility, to the heart in the eye; a splendid image of striving, up to
crowned victory. And see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows
and maize, and lower vineyards and central tall green spires! Walking
beside young Dudley, conversing, observing too, Victor followed the
trips and twists of a rill, that was lured a little further down through
scoops, ducts, and scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.
He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water: a wren-robin-thrush on
the dance down of a faun; till it was caught and muted, and the silver
foot slid along the channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an
air of ‘Whither you will, so it be on’; happy for service as in freedom.
Then the yard of the inn below, and the rillwater twirling rounded
through the trout-trough, subdued, still lively for its beloved onward:
dues to business, dues to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest
on earth:-eh? like some one we know, and Nataly has made the comparison.
Fresh forellen for lunch: rhyming to Fenellan, he had said to her; and
that recollection struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined
military captain living on a literary quill at the time; and Nataly’s
tender pleading, ‘Could you not help to give him another chance, dear
Victor?’--signifying her absolute trust in his ability to do that or
more or anything, had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office;
which he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previously an
untutored rill of the mountains, if ever was one.
Useless to be dwelling on holiday pictures: Lakelands had hold of him!
Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes, the greater the
slaves we become.--But we must have an aim, my friend, and success must
be the aim of any aim!--Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the
disappointing miss, which saved you from being damned by your bullet on
the centre.--You’re dead against Nature, old Colney.--That is to carry
the flag of Liberty.--By clipping a limb!
Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-Court. He
entertained a pronounced dissension with bachelors pretending to
independence. It could not be argued publicly, and the more the
pity:--for a slight encouragement, he would have done it: his
outlook over the waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly
constrained) spinsters--and another outlook, midnight upon Phlegethon to
the thoughts of men, made him deem it urgent. And it helped the plea in
his own excuse, as Colney pointed out to the son of Nature. That, he
had to admit, was true. He charged it upon Mrs. Burman, for twisting the
most unselfish and noblest of his thoughts; and he promised himself
it was to cease on the instant when the circumstance, which Nature was
remiss in not bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass. He
could see his Nataly’s pained endurance beneath her habitual submission.
Her effort was a poor one, to conceal her dread of the day of the
gathering at Lakelands.
On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the
amateurs by rail to Wrensham, to hear ‘trial of the acoustics’ of the
Concert-hall. They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the
railway-carriage over Colney’s description of Fashionable London’s vast
octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of
its longest filament for an hour, plying suckers on him the while. He
had the look, to general perception, of a man but half-escaped: and as
when the notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set down
upon tablets in the head behind. Victor observed his look at Nataly. The
look was like a door aswing, revealing in concealing. She was not or did
not appear struck by it; perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy
professional gentleman’s holiday reckoning of the hours before the
return train to his harness, and his arrangements for catching it. She
was, as she could be on a day of trial, her enchanting majestic self
again--defying suspicions. She was his true mate for breasting a world
honoured in uplifting her.
Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr. Themison’s very warm
applause. He named the greatest of contraltos. Colney did better service
than Fenellan at the luncheon-table: he diverted Nataly and captured
Dr. Themison’s ear with the narrative of his momentous expedition of
European Emissaries, to plead the cause of their several languages at
the Court of Japan: a Satiric Serial tale, that hit incidentally the
follies of the countries of Europe, and intentionally, one had to think,
those of Old England. Nesta set him going. Just when he was about
to begin, she made her father laugh by crying out in a rapture, ‘Oh!
Delphica!’ For she was naughtily aware of Dudley Sowerby’s distaste for
the story and disgust with the damsel Delphica.
Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the grand object of
the expedition: indeed one of the eminent ones of the world; matter
for an Epic; though it is to be feared, that our part in it will not
encourage a Cis-Atlantic bard. To America the honours from beginning to
end belong.
So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language, for the adoption
of the language it may choose among the foremost famous European
tongues. Japan becomes the word for miraculous transformations of a
whole people at the stroke of a wand; and let our English enrol it as
the most precious of the powerful verbs. An envoy visits the principal
Seats of Learning in Europe. He is of a gravity to match that of his
unexampled and all but stupefying mission. A fluent linguist, yet an
Englishman, the slight American accent contracted during a lengthened
residence in the United States is no bar to the patriotism urging him
to pay his visit of exposition and invitation from the Japanese Court
to the distinguished Doctor of Divinity Dr. Bouthoin. The renown of Dr.
Bouthoin among the learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to
him; a scholar endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive eloquence to
cite and instance as well as illustrate the superior advantages to Japan
and civilization in the filial embrace of mother English. ‘For to this
it must come predestinated,’ says the astonishing applicant. ‘We seem
to see a fitness in it,’ says the cogitative Rev. Doctor. ‘And an Island
England in those waters, will do wonders for Commerce,’ adds the former.
‘We think of things more pregnant,’ concludes the latter, with a dry
gleam of ecclesiastical knowingness. And let the Editor of the Review
upon his recent pamphlet, and let the prelate reprimanding him, and let
the newspapers criticizing his pure Saxon, have a care!
Funds, universally the most convincing of credentials, are placed at
Dr. Bouthoin’s disposal: only it is requested, that for the present the
expedition be secret. ‘Better so,’ says pure Saxon’s champion. On a
day patented for secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent
through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the patent, the Rev.
Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate, the Rev. Mancate Semhians,
stumbling across portmanteaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and
other tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths in
the ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive, for the biggest
adventure ever embarked on by a far-thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic
pair speaking pure Saxon or other.
Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the custom of our period
(called the Realistic) to create, when casual opportunity offers, a
belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience. He passed
under veil the Rev. Doctor’s acknowledgement of Neptune’s power, and the
temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians. Proceeding at once to the comments
of these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness
of certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them
the indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant,
pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking
of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him
is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for
the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his irascible
incisiveness! Yet there is a strange tone that they have. What, then,
of the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages
the young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating outside them
to say a word? What of that outpouring, explosive, equally voluble,
uncontrolled M. Bobinikine, a Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued
like the pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive
boyhood, which smokes on the dish from the pot? And what of another,
hitherto unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name
transpires as Pisistratus Mytharete? He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some
lines of Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language.
Greek, is it? Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of
the poetic chants? Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation. Dr. Bouthoin caps
himself with the offended Don. Mr. Semhians opens half an eye and a
whole mouth. There must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another
in privacy. Delphica draws Mr. Semhians aside.
Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labrador at the
transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo, Mr. Semhians faintly tells
of a conversation he has had with the ingenuous fair one; and she ardent
as he for the throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths
of the races of mankind. Strange!--she partly suspects the Frenchman,
the Russian, the attentive silent Greek, to be all of them bound for the
Court of Japan. Concurrents? Can it be? We are absolutely to enter on
a contention with rivals? Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr. Gannius. He is
astonished, he says; he could not have imagined it!
‘Have you ever imagined anything?’ Dr. Gannius asks him. Entomologist,
botanist, palaeontologist, philologist, and at sound of horn a ready
regimental corporal, Dr. Gannius wears good manners as a pair of
bath-slippers, to rally and kick his old infant of an Englishman; who,
in awe of his later renown and manifest might, makes it a point of
discretion to be ultra-amiable; for he certainly is not in training, he
has no alliances, and he must diplomatize; and the German is a strong
one; a relative too; he is the Saxon’s cousin, to say the least.
This German has the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his
argumentative war into the enemy’s country: and he presents on all sides
a solid rampart of recent great deeds done, and mailed readiness for the
doing of more, if we think of assailing him in that way. We are really
like the poor beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless
flesh to his beak. So we are cousinly.
Whether more amused than amazed, we know not, Dr. Gannius hears from
‘our simpleton of the pastures,’ as he calls the Rev. Doctor to his
daughter, that he and Mr. Semhians have absolutely pushed forth
upon this most mighty of enterprises naked of any backing from their
Government! Babes in the Wood that they are! ‘a la grace de dieu’
at every turn that cries for astutia, they show no sign or symbol of
English arms behind them, to support--and with the grandest of national
prizes in view!--the pleading oration before the Court of the elect,
erudites, we will call them, of an intelligent, yet half barbarous,
people; hesitating, these, between eloquence and rival eloquence,
cunning and rival cunning. Why, in such a case, the shadow-nimbus of
Force is needed to decide the sinking of the scale. But have these
English never read their Shakespeare, that they show so barren an
acquaintance with human, to say nothing of semi-barbaric, nature? But
it is here that we Germans prove our claim to being the sons of his
mind.--Dr. Gannius, in contempt, throws off the mask: he also is a
concurrent. And not only is he the chosen by election of the chief
Universities of his land, he has behind him, as Athene dilating
Achilles, the clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and lightning of
his time. German, Japan shall be! he publicly swears before them all.
M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile; M. Bobinikine double-dimples
his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his beak; Dr.
Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such is the masterful
effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one party shows his hand, the
others find the reverse of concealment in hiding their own.
Dr. Bouthoin and Mr. Semhians are compelled to suspect themselves to be
encompassed with rivals, presumptively supported by their Governments.
The worthy gentlemen had hoped to tumble into good fortune, as in the
blessed old English manner. ‘It has even been thus with us: unhelped we
do it!’ exclaims the Rev. Doctor. He is roused from dejection by hearing
Mr. Semhians shyly (he has published verse) tell of the fairtressed
Delphica’s phosphorial enthusiasm for our galaxy of British Poets.
Assisted by Mr. Semhians, he begins to imagine, that he has, in the
person of this artless devotee an ally, who will, through her worship
of our poets (by treachery to her sire-a small matter) sacrifice her
guttural tongue, by enabling him (through the exercise of her arts,
charms, intrigues--also a small matter) to obtain the first audience
of the Japanese erudites. Delphica, with each of the rivals in turn,
is very pretty Comedy. She is aware that M. Falarique is her most
redoubtable adversary, by the time that the vast fleet of steamboats
(containing newspaper reporters) is beheld from the decks of the
Polypheme puffing past Sandy Hook.
There Colney left them, for the next instalment of the serial.
Nesta glanced at Dudley Sowerby. She liked him for his pained frown at
the part his countrymen were made to play, but did wish that he would
keep from expressing it in a countenance that suggested a worried knot;
and mischievously she said: ‘Do you take to Delphica?’
He replied, with an evident sincerity, ‘I cannot say I do.’
Had Mr. Semhians been modelled on him?
‘One bets on the German, of course--with Colney Durance,’ Victor said to
Dr. Themison, leading him over the grounds of Lakelands.
‘In any case, the author teaches us to feel an interest in the rivals. I
want to know what comes of it,’ said the doctor.
‘There’s a good opportunity, one sees. But, mark me, it will all end in
satire upon poor Old England. According to Colney, we excel in nothing.’
‘I do not think there is a country that could offer the entertainment
for which I am indebted to you to-day.’
‘Ah, my friend, and you like their voices? The contralto?’
‘Exquisite.’
Dr. Themison had not spoken the name of Radnor.
‘Shall we see you at our next Concert-evening in town?’ said Victor;
and hearing ‘the privilege’ mentioned, his sharp bright gaze cleared to
limpid. ‘You have seen how it stands with us here!’ At once he related
what indeed Dr. Themison had begun speculatively to think might be the
case.
Mrs. Burman Radnor had dropped words touching a husband, and of her
desire to communicate with him, in the event of her being given over to
the surgeons: she had said, that her husband was a greatly gifted
man; setting her head in a compassionate swing. This revelation of the
husband soon after, was filling. And this Mr. Radnor’s comrade’s manner
of it, was winning: a not too self-justifying tone; not void of feeling
for the elder woman; with a manly eulogy of the younger, who had flung
away the world for him and borne him their one dear child. Victor took
the blame wholly upon himself. ‘It is right that you should know,’ he
said to the doctor’s thoughtful posture; and he stressed the blame;
and a flame shot across his eyeballs. He brought home to his hearer the
hurricane of a man he was in the passion: indicating the subjection
of such a temperament as this Victor Radnor’s to trials of the moral
restraints beyond his human power.
Dr. Themison said: ‘Would you--we postpone that as long as we can: but
supposing the poor lady...?’
Victor broke in: ‘I see her wish: I will.’
The clash of his answer rang beside Dr. Themison’s faltering query.
We are grateful when spared the conclusion of a sentence born to
stammer. If for that only, the doctor pressed Victor’s hand warmly.
‘I may, then, convey some form of assurance, that a request of the kind
will be granted?’ he said.
‘She has but to call me to her,’ said Victor, stiffening his back.