One day, shortly after this, at the bindery, his friend Poupin was
absent, and sent no explanation, as was customary in case of illness or
domestic accident. There were two or three men employed in the place
whose non-appearance, usually following close upon pay-day, was better
unexplained, and was an implication of moral feebleness; but as a
general thing Mr Crookenden’s establishment was a haunt of punctuality
and sobriety. Least of all had Eustache Poupin been in the habit of
asking for a margin. Hyacinth knew how little indulgence he had ever
craved, and this was part of his admiration for the extraordinary
Frenchman, an ardent stoic, a cold conspirator and an exquisite artist,
who was by far the most interesting person in the ranks of his
acquaintance and whose conversation, in the workshop, helped him
sometimes to forget the smell of leather and glue. His conversation!
Hyacinth had had plenty of that, and had endeared himself to the
passionate refugee—Poupin had come to England after the Commune of
1871, to escape the reprisals of the government of M. Thiers, and had
remained there in spite of amnesties and rehabilitations—by the
solemnity and candour of his attention. He was a Republican of the
old-fashioned sort, of the note of 1848, humanitary and idealistic,
infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality, and inexhaustibly
surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in
the land of his exile. Poupin had a high claim upon Hyacinth’s esteem
and gratitude, for he had been his godfather, his protector at the
bindery. When Anastasius Vetch found something for Miss Pynsent’s
_protégé_ to do, it was through the Frenchman, with whom he had
accidentally formed an acquaintance, that he found it.
When the boy was about fifteen years of age Mr Vetch made him a present
of the essays of Lord Bacon, and the purchase of this volume had
important consequences for Hyacinth. Anastasius Vetch was a poor man,
and the luxury of giving was for the most part denied him; but when
once in a way he tasted it he liked the sensation to be pure. No man
knew better the difference between the common and the rare, or was more
capable of appreciating a book which opened well—of which the margin
was not hideously chopped and of which the lettering on the back was
sharp. It was only such a book that he could bring himself to offer
even to a poor little devil whom a fifth-rate dressmaker (he knew
Pinnie was fifth-rate) had rescued from the workhouse. So when it
became a question of fitting the great Elizabethan with a new coat—a
coat of full morocco, discreetly, delicately gilt—he went with his
little cloth-bound volume, a Pickering, straight to Mr Crookenden, whom
every one that knew anything about the matter knew to be a prince of
binders, though they also knew that his work, limited in quantity, was
mainly done for a particular bookseller and only through the latter’s
agency. Anastasius Vetch had no idea of paying the bookseller’s
commission, and though he could be lavish (for him) when he made a
present, he was capable of taking an immense deal of trouble to save
sixpence. He made his way into Mr Crookenden’s workshop, which was
situated in a small superannuated square in Soho, and where the
proposal of so slender a job was received at first with coldness. Mr
Vetch, however, insisted, and explained with irresistible frankness the
motive of his errand: the desire to obtain the best possible binding
for the least possible money. He made his conception of the best
possible binding so vivid, so exemplary, that the master of the shop at
last confessed to that disinterested sympathy which, under favouring
circumstances, establishes itself between the artist and the
connoisseur. Mr Vetch’s little book was put in hand as a particular
service to an eccentric gentleman whose visit had been a smile-stirring
interlude (for the circle of listening workmen) in a merely mechanical
day; and when he went back, three weeks later, to see whether it were
done, he had the pleasure of finding that his injunctions, punctually
complied with, had even been bettered. The work had been accomplished
with a perfection of skill which made him ask whom he was to thank for
it (he had been told that one man should do the whole of it), and in
this manner he made the acquaintance of the most brilliant craftsman in
the establishment, the incorruptible, the imaginative, the unerring
Eustache Poupin.
In response to an appreciation which he felt not to be _banal_ M.
Poupin remarked that he had at home a small collection of experiments
in morocco, Russia, parchment, of fanciful specimens with which, for
the love of the art, he had amused his leisure hours and which he
should be happy to show his interlocutor if the latter would do him the
honour to call upon him at his lodgings in Lisson Grove. Mr Vetch made
a note of the address and, for the love of the art, went one Sunday
afternoon to see the binder’s esoteric studies. On this occasion he
made the acquaintance of Madame Poupin, a small, fat lady with a
bristling moustache, the white cap of an _ouvrière_, a knowledge of her
husband’s craft that was equal to his own, and not a syllable of
English save the words, “What you think, what you think?” which she
introduced with startling frequency. He also discovered that his new
acquaintance had been a political proscript and that he regarded the
iniquitous fabric of Church and State with an eye scarcely more
reverent than the fiddler’s own. M. Poupin was a socialist, which
Anastasius Vetch was not, and a constructive democrat (instead of being
a mere scoffer at effete things) and a theorist and an optimist and a
visionary; he believed that the day was to come when all the nations of
the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses,
and embrace on both cheeks, and cover the globe with boulevards,
radiating from Paris, where the human family would sit, in groups, at
little tables, according to affinities, drinking coffee (not tea, _par
exemple!_) and listening to the music of the spheres. Mr Vetch neither
prefigured nor desired this organised felicity; he was fond of his cup
of tea, and only wanted to see the British constitution a good deal
simplified; he thought it a much overrated system, but his heresies
rubbed shoulders, sociably, with those of the little bookbinder, and
his friend in Lisson Grove became for him the type of the intelligent
foreigner whose conversation completes our culture. Poupin’s humanitary
zeal was as unlimited as his English vocabulary was the reverse, and
the new friends agreed with each other enough, and not too much, to
discuss, which was much better than an unspeakable harmony. On several
other Sunday afternoons the fiddler went back to Lisson Grove, and
having, at his theatre, as a veteran, a faithful servant, an occasional
privilege, he was able to carry thither, one day in the autumn, an
order for two seats in the second balcony. Madame Poupin and her
husband passed a lugubrious evening at the English comedy, where they
didn’t understand a word that was spoken, and consoled themselves by
gazing at their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure did not
arrest the development of a friendship into which, eventually, Amanda
Pynsent was drawn. Madame Poupin, among the cold insularies, lacked
female society, and Mr Vetch proposed to his amiable friend in Lomax
Place to call upon her. The little dressmaker, who in the course of her
life had known no Frenchwoman but the unhappy Florentine (so favourable
a specimen till she began to go wrong), adopted his suggestion, in the
hope that she should get a few ideas from a lady whose appearance would
doubtless exemplify (as Florentine’s originally had done) the fine
taste of her nation; but she found the bookbinder and his wife a
bewildering mixture of the brilliant and the relaxed, and was haunted,
long afterwards, by the memory of the lady’s calico jacket, her
uncorseted form and her carpet slippers.
The acquaintance, none the less, was sealed three months later by a
supper, one Sunday night, in Lisson Grove, to which Mr Vetch brought
his fiddle, at which Amanda presented to her hosts her adoptive son,
and which also revealed to her that Madame Poupin could dress a
Michaelmas goose, if she couldn’t dress a fat Frenchwoman. This lady
confided to the fiddler that she thought Miss Pynsent exceedingly
_comme il faut—dans le genre anglais;_ and neither Amanda nor Hyacinth
had ever passed an evening of such splendour. It took its place, in the
boy’s recollection, beside the visit, years before, to Mr Vetch’s
theatre. He drank in the conversation which passed between that
gentleman and M. Poupin. M. Poupin showed him his bindings, the most
precious trophies of his skill, and it seemed to Hyacinth that on the
spot he was initiated into a fascinating mystery. He handled the books
for half an hour; Anastasius Vetch watched him, without giving any
particular sign. When, therefore, presently, Miss Pynsent consulted her
friend for the twentieth time on the subject of Hyacinth’s ‘career’—she
spoke as if she were hesitating between the diplomatic service, the
army and the church—the fiddler replied with promptitude, “Make him, if
you can, what the Frenchman is.” At the mention of a handicraft poor
Pinnie always looked very solemn, yet when Mr Vetch asked her if she
were prepared to send the boy to one of the universities, or to pay the
premium required for his being articled to a solicitor, or to make
favour, on his behalf, with a bank-director or a mighty merchant, or,
yet again, to provide him with a comfortable home while he should woo
the muse and await the laurels of literature—when, I say, he put the
case before her with this cynical, ironical lucidity, she only sighed
and said that all the money she had ever saved was ninety pounds,
which, as he knew perfectly well, it would cost her his acquaintance
for evermore to take out of the bank. The fiddler had, in fact,
declared to her in a manner not to be mistaken that if she should
divest herself, on the boy’s account, of this sole nest-egg of her old
age, he would wash his hands of her and her affairs. Her standard of
success for Hyacinth was vague, save on one point, as regards which she
was passionately, fiercely firm; she was perfectly determined he should
never go into a small shop. She would rather see him a bricklayer or a
costermonger than dedicated to a retail business, tying up candles at a
grocer’s, or giving change for a shilling across a counter. She would
rather, she declared on one occasion, see him articled to a shoemaker
or a tailor.
A stationer in a neighbouring street had affixed to his window a
written notice that he was in want of a smart errand-boy, and Pinnie,
on hearing of it, had presented Hyacinth to his consideration. The
stationer was a dreadful bullying man, with a patch over his eye, who
seemed to think the boy would be richly remunerated with three
shillings a week; a contemptible measure, as it seemed to the
dressmaker, of his rare abilities and acquirements. His schooling had
been desultory, precarious, and had had a certain continuity mainly in
his early years, while he was under the care of an old lady who
combined with the functions of pew-opener at a neighbouring church the
manipulation, in the Place itself, where she resided with her sister, a
monthly nurse, of such pupils as could be spared (in their families)
from the more urgent exercise of holding the baby and fetching the
beer. Later, for a twelvemonth, Pinnie had paid five shillings a week
for him at an ‘Academy’ in a genteel part of Islington, where there was
an ‘instructor in the foreign languages’, a platform for oratory, and a
high social standard, but where Hyacinth suffered from the fact that
almost all his mates were the sons of dealers in edible
articles—pastry-cooks, grocers and fishmongers—and in this capacity
subjected him to pangs and ignominious contrasts by bringing to school,
for their exclusive consumption, or for exchange and barter, various
buns, oranges, spices, and marine animals, which the boy, with his
hands in his empty pockets and the sense of a savourless home in his
heart, was obliged to see devoured without his participation. Miss
Pynsent would not have pretended that he was highly educated, in the
technical sense of the word, but she believed that at fifteen he had
read almost every book in the world. The limits of his reading were, in
fact, only the limits of his opportunity. Mr Vetch, who talked with him
more and more as he grew older, knew this, and lent him every volume he
possessed or could pick up for the purpose. Reading was his happiness,
and the absence of any direct contact with a library his principal
source of discontent; that is, of that part of his discontent which he
could speak out. Mr Vetch knew that he was really clever, and therefore
thought it a woful pity that he could not have furtherance in some
liberal walk; but he would have thought it a greater pity still that so
bright a lad should be condemned to measure tape or cut slices of
cheese. He himself had no influence which he could bring into play, no
connection with the great world of capital or the market of labour.
That is, he touched these mighty institutions at but one very small
point—a point which, such as it was, he kept well in mind.
When Pinnie replied to the stationer round the corner, after he had
mentioned the ‘terms’ on which he was prepared to receive applications
from errand-boys, that, thank heaven, she hadn’t sunk so low as that—so
low as to sell her darling into slavery for three shillings a week—he
felt that she only gave more florid expression to his own sentiment. Of
course, if Hyacinth did not begin by carrying parcels he could not hope
to be promoted, through the more refined nimbleness of tying them up,
to a position as accountant or bookkeeper; but both the fiddler and his
friend—Miss Pynsent, indeed, only in the last resort—resigned
themselves to the forfeiture of this prospect. Mr Vetch saw clearly
that a charming handicraft was a finer thing than a vulgar ‘business’,
and one day, after his acquaintance with Eustache Poupin had gone a
considerable length, he inquired of the Frenchman whether there would
be a chance of the lad’s obtaining a footing, under his own wing, in Mr
Crookenden’s workshop. There could be no better place for him to
acquire a knowledge of the most delightful of the mechanical arts; and
to be received into such an establishment, and at the instance of such
an artist, would be a real start in life. M. Poupin meditated, and that
evening confided his meditations to the companion who reduplicated all
his thoughts and understood him better even than he understood himself.
The pair had no children, and had felt the defect; moreover, they had
heard from Mr Vetch the dolorous tale of the boy’s entrance into life.
He was one of the disinherited, one of the expropriated, one of the
exceptionally interesting; and, moreover he was one of themselves, a
child, as it were, of France, an offshoot of the sacred race. It is not
the most authenticated point in this veracious history, but there is
strong reason to believe that tears were shed that night, in Lisson
Grove, over poor little Hyacinth Robinson. In a day or two M. Poupin
replied to the fiddler that he had now been several years in Mr
Crookenden’s employ; that during that time he had done work for him
that he would have had _bien du mal_ to get done by another, and had
never asked for an indulgence, an allowance, a remission, an
augmentation. It was time, if only for the dignity of the thing, he
should ask for something, and he would make their little friend the
subject of his demand. “_La société lui doit bien cela_,” he remarked
afterwards, when, Mr Crookenden proving drily hospitable and the
arrangement being formally complete, Mr Vetch thanked him, in his
kindly, casual, bashful English way. He was paternal when Hyacinth
began to occupy a place in the malodorous chambers in Soho; he took him
in hand, made him a disciple, the recipient of a precious tradition,
discovered in him a susceptibility to philosophic as well as technic
truth. He taught him French and socialism, encouraged him to spend his
evenings in Lisson Grove, invited him to regard Madame Poupin as a
second, or rather as a third, mother, and in short made a very
considerable mark on the boy’s mind. He elicited the latent Gallicism
of his nature, and by the time he was twenty Hyacinth, who had
completely assimilated his influence, regarded him with a mixture of
veneration and amusement. M. Poupin was the person who consoled him
most when he was miserable; and he was very often miserable.
His staying away from his work was so rare that, in the afternoon,
before he went home, Hyacinth walked to Lisson Grove to see what ailed
him. He found his friend in bed, with a plaster on his chest, and
Madame Poupin making _tisane_ over the fire. The Frenchman took his
indisposition solemnly but resignedly, like a man who believed that all
illness was owing to the imperfect organisation of society, and lay
covered up to his chin, with a red cotton handkerchief bound round his
head. Near his bed sat a visitor, a young man unknown to Hyacinth.
Hyacinth, naturally, had never been to Paris, but he always supposed
that the _intérieur_ of his friends in Lisson Grove gave rather a vivid
idea of that city. The two small rooms which constituted their
establishment contained a great many mirrors, as well as little
portraits (old-fashioned prints) of revolutionary heroes. The
chimney-piece, in the bedroom, was muffled in some red drapery, which
appeared to Hyacinth extraordinarily magnificent; the principal
ornament of the salon was a group of small and highly-decorated cups,
on a tray, accompanied by gilt bottles and glasses, the latter still
more diminutive—the whole intended for black coffee and liqueurs. There
was no carpet on the floor, but rugs and mats, of various shapes and
sizes, disposed themselves at the feet of the chairs and sofas; and in
the sitting-room, where there was a wonderful gilt clock, of the
Empire, surmounted with a ‘subject’ representing Virtue receiving a
crown of laurel from the hands of Faith, Madame Poupin, with the aid of
a tiny stove, a handful of charcoal, and two or three saucepans,
carried on a triumphant _cuisine_. In the windows were curtains of
white muslin, much fluted and frilled, and tied with pink ribbon.