“I am suffering extremely, but we must all suffer, so long as the
social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected,” Poupin
remarked, speaking French and rolling toward Hyacinth his salient,
excited-looking eyes, which always had the same proclaiming,
challenging expression, whatever his occupation or his topic. Hyacinth
had seated himself near his friend’s pillow, opposite the strange young
man, who had been accommodated with a chair at the foot of the bed.
“Ah, yes; with their filthy politics the situation of the _pauvre
monde_ is the last thing they ever think of!” his wife exclaimed, from
the fire. “There are times when I ask myself how long it will go on.”
“It will go on till the measure of their imbecility, their infamy, is
full. It will go on till the day of justice, till the reintegration of
the despoiled and disinherited, is ushered in with an irresistible
force.”
“Oh, we always see things go on; we never see them change,” said Madame
Poupin, making a very cheerful clatter with a big spoon in a saucepan.
“We may not see it, but _they’ll_ see it,” her husband rejoined. “But
what do I say, my children? I do see it,” he pursued. “It’s before my
eyes, in its luminous reality, especially as I lie here—the
revendication, the rehabilitation, the rectification.”
Hyacinth ceased to pay attention, not because he had a differing
opinion about what M. Poupin called the _avènement_ of the
disinherited, but, on the contrary, precisely on account of his
familiarity with that prospect. It was the constant theme of his French
friends, whom he had long since perceived to be in a state of chronic
spiritual inflammation. For them the social question was always in
order, the political question always abhorrent, the disinherited always
present. He wondered at their zeal, their continuity, their vivacity,
their incorruptibility; at the abundant supply of conviction and
prophecy which they always had on hand. He believed that at bottom he
was sorer than they, yet he had deviations and lapses, moments when the
social question bored him and he forgot not only his own wrongs, which
would have been pardonable, but those of the people at large, of his
brothers and sisters in misery. They, however, were perpetually in the
breach, and perpetually consistent with themselves and, what is more,
with each other. Hyacinth had heard that the institution of marriage in
France was rather lightly considered, but he was struck with the
closeness and intimacy of the union in Lisson Grove, the passionate
identity of interest: especially on the day when M. Poupin informed
him, in a moment of extreme but not indiscreet expansion, that the lady
was his wife only in a spiritual, transcendental sense. There were
hypocritical concessions and debasing superstitions of which this
exalted pair wholly disapproved. Hyacinth knew their vocabulary by
heart, and could have said everything, in the same words, that on any
given occasion M. Poupin was likely to say. He knew that ‘they’, in
their phraseology, was a comprehensive allusion to every one in the
world but the people—though who, exactly, in their length and breadth,
the people were was less definitely established. He himself was of this
sacred body, for which the future was to have such compensations; and
so, of course, were the Frenchman and his consort, and so was Pinnie,
and so were most of the inhabitants of Lomax Place and the workmen in
old Crookenden’s shop. But was old Crookenden himself, who wore an
apron rather dirtier than the rest of them and was a master-hand at
‘forwarding’, but who, on the other side, was the occupant of a villa
almost detached, in Putney, with a wife known to have secret
aspirations toward a page in buttons? Above all, was Mr Vetch, who
earned a weekly wage, and not a large one, with his fiddle, but who had
mysterious affinities of another sort, reminiscences of a phase in
which he smoked cigars, had a hat-box and used cabs—besides visiting
Boulogne? Anastasius Vetch had interfered in his life, atrociously, in
a terrible crisis; but Hyacinth, who strove to cultivate justice in his
own conduct, believed he had acted conscientiously and tried to esteem
him, the more so as the fiddler evidently felt that he had something to
make up to him and had treated him with marked benevolence for years.
He believed, in short, that Mr Vetch took a sincere interest in him,
and if he should meddle again would meddle in a different way: he used
to see him sometimes looking at him with the kindest eyes. It would
make a difference, therefore, whether he were of the people or not,
inasmuch as in the day of the great revenge it would only be the people
who should be saved. It was for the people the world was made: whoever
was not of them was against them; and all others were cumberers,
usurpers, exploiters, _accapareurs_, as M. Poupin used to say. Hyacinth
had once put the question directly to Mr Vetch, who looked at him a
while through the fumes of his eternal pipe and then said, “Do you
think I’m an aristocrat?”
“I didn’t know but you were a _bourgeois_,” the young man answered.
“No, I’m neither. I’m a Bohemian.”
“With your evening dress, every night?”
“My dear boy,” said the fiddler, “those are the most confirmed.”
Hyacinth was only half satisfied with this, for it was by no means
definite to him that Bohemians were also to be saved; if he could be
sure, perhaps he would become one himself. Yet he never suspected Mr
Vetch of being a ‘spy’, though Eustache Poupin had told him that there
were a great many who looked a good deal like that: not, of course,
with any purpose of incriminating the fiddler, whom he had trusted from
the first and continued to trust. The middle-class spy became a very
familiar type to Hyacinth, and though he had never caught one of the
infamous brotherhood in the act, there were plenty of persons to whom,
on the very face of the matter, he had no hesitation in attributing the
character. There was nothing of the Bohemian, at any rate, about the
Poupins, whom Hyacinth had now known long enough not to be surprised at
the way they combined the socialistic passion, a red-hot impatience for
the general rectification, with an extraordinary decency of life and a
worship of proper work. The Frenchman spoke, habitually, as if the
great swindle practised upon the people were too impudent to be endured
a moment longer, and yet he found patience for the most exquisite
‘tooling’, and took a book in hand with the deliberation of one who
should believe that everything was immutably constituted. Hyacinth knew
what he thought of priests and theologies, but he had the religion of
conscientious craftsmanship, and he reduced the boy, on his side, to a
kind of prostration before his delicate, wonder-working fingers. “What
will you have? _J’ai la main parisienne_,” M. Poupin would reply
modestly, when Hyacinth’s admiration broke out; and he was good enough,
after he had seen a few specimens of what our hero could do, to inform
him that _he_ had the same happy conformation. “There is no reason why
you shouldn’t be a good workman, _il n’y a que ça;_” and his own life
was practically governed by this conviction. He delighted in the use of
his hands and his tools and the exercise of his taste, which was
faultless, and Hyacinth could easily imagine how it must torment him to
spend a day on his back. He ended by perceiving, however, that
consolation was, on this occasion, in some degree conveyed by the
presence of the young man who sat at the foot of the bed, and with whom
M. Poupin exhibited such signs of acquaintance as to make our hero
wonder why he had not seen him before, nor even heard of him.
“What do you mean by an irresistible force?” the young man inquired,
leaning back in his chair, with raised arms and his interlocked hands
behind him, supporting his head. M. Poupin had spoken French, which he
always preferred to do, the insular tongue being an immense tribulation
to him; but his visitor spoke English, and Hyacinth immediately
perceived that there was nothing French about _him_—M. Poupin could
never tell him he had _la main parisienne_.
“I mean a force that will make the bourgeois go down into their cellars
and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps
of gold!” cried M. Poupin, rolling terrible eyes.
“And in this country, I hope in their coal-bins. _Là-là_, we shall find
them even there,” his wife remarked.
“’89 was an irresistible force,” said M. Poupin. “I believe you would
have thought so if you had been there.”
“And so was the entrance of the Versaillais, which sent you over here,
ten years ago,” the young man rejoined. He saw that Hyacinth was
watching him, and he met his eyes, smiling a little, in a way that
added to our hero’s interest.
“_Pardon, pardon_, I resist!” cried Eustache Poupin, glaring, in his
improvised nightcap, out of his sheets; and Madame repeated that they
resisted—she believed well that they resisted! The young man burst out
laughing; whereupon his host declared, with a dignity which even his
recumbent position did not abate, that it was really frivolous of him
to ask such questions as that, knowing as he did—what he did know.
“Yes, I know—I know,” said the young man, good-naturedly, lowering his
arms and thrusting his hands into his pockets, while he stretched his
long legs a little. “But everything is yet to be tried.”
“Oh, the trial will be on a great scale—_soyez tranquille!_ It will be
one of those experiments that constitute a proof.”
Hyacinth wondered what they were talking about, and perceived that it
must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who would
take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck with
him—he could see that he was remarkable—and felt slightly aggrieved
that he should be a stranger: that is, that he should be, apparently, a
familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought
his young friend from Lomax Place worthy, up to this time, to be made
acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the other
chair discovered these reflections in Hyacinth’s face, but after a
moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly
diffident way, a way our hero liked, “And do you know, too?”
“Do I know what?” asked Hyacinth, wondering.
“Oh, if you did, you would!” the young man exclaimed, laughing again.
Such a rejoinder, from any one else, would have irritated our sensitive
hero, but it only made Hyacinth more curious about his interlocutor,
whose laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay.
“_Mon ami_, you ought to present _ces messieurs_,” Madame Poupin
remarked.
“_Ah ça_, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?” her husband
cried out, without heeding her. Then he went on, in a different tone: “
M. Hyacinthe is a gifted child, _un enfant très-doué_, in whom I take a
tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping
big one! Isn’t it so, _mon petit?_”
This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without
knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly, “Oh, I only want them
to let me alone!”
“He is very young,” said Eustache Poupin.
“He is the person we have seen in this country whom we like the best,”
his wife added.
“Perhaps you are French,” suggested the strange young man.
The trio seemed to Hyacinth to be waiting for his answer to this; it
was as if a listening stillness had fallen upon them. He found it a
difficult moment, partly because there was something exciting and
embarrassing in the attention of the other visitor, and partly because
he had never yet had to decide that important question. He didn’t
really know whether he were French or English, or which of the two he
should prefer to be. His mother’s blood, her suffering in an alien
land, the unspeakable, irremediable misery that consumed her, in a
place, among a people, she must have execrated—all this made him
French; yet he was conscious at the same time of qualities that did not
mix with it. He had evolved, long ago, a legend about his mother, built
it up slowly, adding piece to piece, in passionate musings and
broodings, when his cheeks burned and his eyes filled; but there were
times when it wavered and faded, when it ceased to console him and he
ceased to trust it. He had had a father too, and his father had
suffered as well, and had fallen under a blow, and had paid with his
life; and him also he felt in his mind and his body, when the effort to
think it out did not simply end in darkness and confusion, challenging
still even while they baffled, and inevitable freezing horror. At any
rate, he seemed rooted in the place where his wretched parents had
expiated, and he knew nothing about any other. Moreover, when old
Poupin said, ‘M. Hyacinthe’, as he had often done before, he didn’t
altogether enjoy it; he thought it made his name, which he liked well
enough in English, sound like the name of a hairdresser. Our young
friend was under a cloud and a stigma, but he was not yet prepared to
admit that he was ridiculous. “Oh, I dare say I ain’t anything,” he
replied in a moment.
“_En v’là des bêtises!_” cried Madame Poupin. “Do you mean to say you
are not as good as any one in the world? I should like to see!”
“We all have an account to settle, don’t you know?” said the strange
young man.
He evidently meant this to be encouraging to Hyacinth, whose quick
desire to avert M. Poupin’s allusions had not been lost upon him; but
our hero could see that he himself would be sure to be one of the first
to be paid. He would make society bankrupt, but he would be paid. He
was tall and fair and good-natured looking, but you couldn’t tell—or at
least Hyacinth couldn’t—whether he were handsome or ugly, with his
large head and square forehead, his thick, straight hair, his heavy
mouth and rather vulgar nose, his admirably clear, bright eye,
light-coloured and set very deep; for though there was a want of
fineness in some of its parts, his face had a marked expression of
intelligence and resolution, and denoted a kind of joyous moral health.
He was dressed like a workman in his Sunday toggery, having evidently
put on his best to call in Lisson Grove, where he was to meet a lady,
and wearing in particular a necktie which was both cheap and
pretentious, and of which Hyacinth, who noticed everything of that
kind, observed the crude, false blue. He had very big shoes—the shoes,
almost, of a country labourer—and spoke with a provincial accent, which
Hyacinth believed to be that of Lancashire. This didn’t suggest
cleverness, but it didn’t prevent Hyacinth from perceiving that he was
the reverse of stupid; that he probably, indeed, had a tremendous head.
Our little hero had a great desire to know superior people, and he
interested himself on the spot in this strong, humorous fellow, who had
the complexion of a ploughboy and the glance of a commander-in-chief
and who might have been (Hyacinth thought) a distinguished young
_savant_ in the disguise of an artisan. The disguise would have been
very complete, for he had several brown stains on his fingers.
Hyacinth’s curiosity, on this occasion, was both excited and gratified;
for after two or three allusions, which he didn’t understand, had been
made to a certain place where Poupin and the stranger had met and
expected to meet again, Madame Poupin exclaimed that it was a shame not
to take in M. Hyacinthe, who, she would answer for it, had in him the
making of one of the pure.
“All in good time, in good time, _ma bonne_,” the invalid replied. “M.
Hyacinthe knows that I count upon him, whether or no I make him an
_interne_ to-day or wait a while longer.”
“What do you mean by an _interne?_” Hyacinth asked.
“_Mon Dieu_, what shall I say!” and Eustache Poupin stared at him
solemnly, from his pillow. “You are very sympathetic, but I am afraid
you are too young.”
“One is never too young to contribute one’s _obole_,” said Madame
Poupin.
“Can you keep a secret?” asked the other visitor, smilingly.
“Is it a plot—a conspiracy?” Hyacinth broke out.
“He asks that as if he were asking if it’s a plum-pudding,” said M.
Poupin. “It isn’t good to eat, and we don’t do it for our amusement.
It’s terribly serious, my child.”
“It’s a kind of society, to which he and I and a good many others
belong. There is no harm in telling him that,” the young man went on.
“I advise you not to tell it to Mademoiselle; she is quite in the old
ideas,” Madame Poupin suggested to Hyacinth, tasting her _tisane_.
Hyacinth sat baffled and wondering, looking from his fellow-labourer in
Soho to his new acquaintance opposite. “If you have some plan,
something to which one can give one’s self, I think you might have told
me,” he remarked, in a moment, to Poupin.
The latter merely gazed at him a while; then he said to the strange
young man, “He is a little jealous of you. But there is no harm in
that; it’s of his age. You must know him, you must like him. We will
tell you his history some other day; it will make you feel that he
belongs to us in fact. It is an accident that he hasn’t met you here
before.”
“How could _ces messieurs_ have met, when M. Paul never comes? He
doesn’t spoil us!” Madame Poupin cried.
“Well, you see I have my little sister at home to take care of, when I
ain’t at the shop,” M. Paul explained. “This afternoon it was just a
chance; there was a lady we know came in to sit with her.”
“A lady—a real lady?”
“Oh yes, every inch,” said M. Paul, laughing.
“Do you like them to thrust themselves into your apartment like that,
because you have the _désagrément_ of being poor? It seems to be the
custom in this country, but it wouldn’t suit me at all,” Madame Poupin
continued. “I should like to see one of _ces dames_—the real
ones—coming in to sit with me!”
“Oh, you are not a cripple; you have got the use of your legs!”
“Yes, and of my arms!” cried the Frenchwoman.
“This lady looks after several others in our court, and she reads to my
sister.”
“Oh, well, you are patient, you English.”
“We shall never do anything without that,” said M. Paul, with
undisturbed good-humour.
“You are perfectly right; you can’t say that too often. It will be a
tremendous job, and only the strong will prevail,” his host murmured, a
little wearily, turning his eyes to Madame Poupin, who approached
slowly, holding the _tisane_ in a rather full bowl, and tasting it
again and yet again as she came.
Hyacinth had been watching his fellow-visitor with deepening interest;
a fact of which M. Paul apparently became aware, for he said,
presently, giving a little nod in the direction of the bed, “He says we
ought to know each other. I’m sure I have nothing against it. I like to
know folk, when they’re worth it!”
Hyacinth was too pleased with this even to take it up; it seemed to
him, for a moment, that he couldn’t touch it gracefully enough. But he
said, with sufficient eagerness, “Will you tell me all about your
plot?”
“Oh, it’s no plot. I don’t think I care much for plots.” And with his
mild, steady, light-blue English eye, M. Paul certainly had not much
the appearance of a conspirator.
“Isn’t it a new era?” asked Hyacinth, rather disappointed.
“Well, I don’t know; it’s just a little movement.”
“_Ah bien, voilà du propre;_ between us we have thrown him into a
fever!” cried Madame Poupin, who had put down her bowl on a table near
her husband’s bed and was bending over him, with her hand on his
forehead. Eustache was flushed, he had closed his eyes, and it was
evident there had been more than enough conversation. Madame Poupin
announced as much, with the addition that if the young men wished to
make acquaintance they must do it outside; the invalid must be
perfectly quiet. They accordingly withdrew, with apologies and promises
to return for further news on the morrow, and two minutes afterward
Hyacinth found himself standing face to face with his new friend on the
pavement in front of M. Poupin’s residence, under a street-lamp which
struggled ineffectually with the brown winter dusk.
“Is that your name—M. Paul?” he asked, looking up at him.
“Oh, bless you, no; that’s only her Frenchified way of putting it. My
name _is_ Paul, though—Paul Muniment.”
“And what’s your trade?” Hyacinth demanded, with a jump into
familiarity; for his companion seemed to have told him a great deal
more than was usually conveyed in that item of information.
Paul Muniment looked down at him from above broad shoulders. “I work at
a wholesale chemist’s, at Lambeth.”
“And where do you live?”
“I live over the water, too; in the far south of London.”
“And are you going home now?”
“Oh yes, I am going to toddle.”
“And may I toddle with you?”
Mr Muniment considered him further; then he gave a laugh. “I’ll carry
you, if you like.”
“Thank you; I expect I can walk as far as you,” said Hyacinth.
“Well, I admire your spirit, and I dare say I shall like your company.”
There was something in his face, taken in connection with the idea that
he was concerned in a little movement, which made Hyacinth feel the
desire to go with him till he dropped; and in a moment they started
away together and took the direction Muniment had mentioned. They
discoursed as they went, and exchanged a great many opinions and
anecdotes; but they reached the south-westerly court in which the young
chemist lived with his infirm sister before he had told Hyacinth
anything definite about his little movement, or Hyacinth, on his side,
had related to him the circumstances connected with his being,
according to M. Poupin, one of the disinherited. Hyacinth didn’t wish
to press him; he would not for the world have appeared to him
indiscreet; and, moreover, though he had taken so great a fancy to
Muniment, he was not quite prepared, as yet, to be pressed. Therefore
it did not become very clear to him how his companion had made Poupin’s
acquaintance and how long he had enjoyed it. Paul Muniment nevertheless
was to a certain extent communicative about himself, and forewarned
Hyacinth that he lived in a very poor little corner. He had his sister
to keep—she could do nothing for herself; and he paid a low rent
because she had to have doctors, and doses, and all sorts of little
comforts. He spent a shilling a week for her on flowers. It was better,
too, when you got upstairs, and from the back windows you could see the
dome of St Paul’s. Audley Court, with its pretty name, which reminded
Hyacinth of Tennyson, proved to be a still dingier nook than Lomax
Place; and it had the further drawback that you had to pass through a
narrow alley, a passage between high, black walls, to enter it. At the
door of one of the houses the young men paused, lingering a little, and
then Muniment said, “I say, why shouldn’t you come up? I like you well
enough for that, and you can see my sister; her name is Rosy.” He spoke
as if this would be a great privilege, and added, humorously, that Rosy
enjoyed a call from a gentleman, of all things. Hyacinth needed no
urging, and he groped his way, at his companion’s heels, up a dark
staircase, which appeared to him—for they stopped only when they could
go no further—the longest and steepest he had ever ascended. At the top
Paul Muniment pushed open a door, but exclaimed, “Hullo, have you gone
to roost?” on perceiving that the room on the threshold of which they
stood was unlighted.
“Oh, dear, no; we are sitting in the dark,” a small, bright voice
instantly replied. “Lady Aurora is so kind; she’s here still.”
The voice came out of a corner so pervaded by gloom that the speaker
was indistinguishable. “Dear me, that’s beautiful!” Paul Muniment
rejoined. “You’ll have a party, then, for I have brought some one else.
We are poor, you know, but I dare say we can manage a candle.”
At this, in the dim firelight, Hyacinth saw a tall figure erect
itself—a figure angular and slim, crowned with a large, vague hat,
surmounted, apparently, with a flowing veil. This unknown person gave a
singular laugh, and said, “Oh, I brought some candles; we could have
had a light if we had wished it.” Both the tone and the purport of the
words announced to Hyacinth that they proceeded from the lips of Lady
Aurora.