XI

She desired at last to raise their common experience to a loftier

level, to enjoy what she called a high-class treat. Their conversation

was condemned, for the most part, to go forward in the streets, the

wintry, dusky, foggy streets, which looked bigger and more numerous in

their perpetual obscurity, and in which everything was covered with

damp, gritty smut, an odour extremely agreeable to Miss Henning.

Happily she shared Hyacinth’s relish of vague perambulation, and was

still more addicted than he to looking into the windows of shops,

before which, in long, contemplative halts, she picked out freely the

articles she shouldn’t mind calling her own. Hyacinth always pronounced

the objects of her selection hideous, and made no scruple to tell her

that she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing that he

could say to her affronted her so much, as her pretensions in the way

of a cultivated judgment were boundless. Had not, indeed, her natural

aptitude been fortified, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace

(there was scarcely anything they didn’t sell in the great shop of

which she was an ornament), by daily contact with the freshest products

of modern industry? Hyacinth laughed this establishment to scorn, and

told her there was nothing in it, from top to bottom, that a real

artist would look at. She inquired, with answering derision, if this

were a description of his own few inches; but in reality she was

fascinated, as much as she was provoked, by his air of being difficult

to please, of seeing indescribable differences among things. She had

given herself out, originally, as very knowing, but he could make her

feel stupid. When once in a while he pointed out a commodity that he

condescended to like (this didn’t happen often, because the only shops

in which there was a chance of his making such a discovery were closed

at nightfall) she stared, bruised him more or less with her elbow, and

declared that if any one should give her such a piece of rubbish she

would sell it for fourpence. Once or twice she asked him to be so good

as to explain to her in what its superiority consisted—she could not

rid herself of a suspicion that there might be something in his

opinion, and she was angry at not finding herself as positive as any

one. But Hyacinth replied that it was no use attempting to tell her;

she wouldn’t understand, and she had better continue to admire the

insipid productions of an age which had lost the sense of quality—a

phrase which she remembered, proposing to herself even to make use of

it, on some future occasion, but was quite unable to interpret.

When her companion demeaned himself in this manner it was not with a

view of strengthening the tie which united him to his childhood’s

friend; but the effect followed, on Millicent’s side, and the girl was

proud to think that she was in possession of a young man whose

knowledge was of so high an order that it was inexpressible. In spite

of her vanity she was not so convinced of her perfection as not to be

full of ungratified aspirations; she had an idea that it might be to

her advantage some day to exhibit a sample of that learning; and at the

same time, when, in consideration, for instance, of a jeweller’s

gas-lighted display in Great Portland Street, Hyacinth lingered for

five minutes in perfect silence, while she delivered herself according

to her wont at such junctures, she was a thousand miles from guessing

the feelings which made it impossible for him to speak. She could long

for things she was not likely to have; envy other people for possessing

them, and say it was a regular shame (she called it a _shime_); draw

brilliant pictures of what she should do with them if she did have

them; and pass immediately, with a mind unencumbered by superfluous

inductions, to some other topic, equally intimate and personal. The

sense of privation, with her, was often extremely acute; but she could

always put her finger on the remedy. With the imaginative,

irresponsible little bookbinder the case was very different; the

remedy, with him, was terribly vague and impracticable. He was liable

to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all that he would have

liked most to enjoy in life settled upon him like a pall. They had a

bitterness, but they were not invidious—they were not moods of

vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of

paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflection, in which he felt

that in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the

spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and that a sordid

struggle, in which one should go down to the grave without having

tasted them, was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull

demoralisation it would entail.

In such hours the great, roaring, indifferent world of London seemed to

him a huge organisation for mocking at his poverty, at his inanition;

and then its vulgarest ornaments, the windows of third-rate jewellers,

the young man in a white tie and a crush-hat who dandled by, on his way

to a dinner-party, in a hansom that nearly ran over one—these familiar

phenomena became symbolic, insolent, defiant, took upon themselves to

make him smart with the sense that _he_ was out of it. He felt,

moreover, that there was no consolation or refutation in saying to

himself that the immense majority of mankind were out of it with him,

and appeared to put up well enough with the annoyance. That was their

own affair; he knew nothing of their reasons or their resignation, and

if they chose neither to rebel nor to compare, he, at least, among the

disinherited, would keep up the standard. When these fits were upon the

young man, his brothers of the people fared, collectively, badly at his

hands; their function then was to represent in massive shape precisely

the grovelling interests which attracted one’s contempt, and the only

acknowledgment one owed them was for the completeness of the

illustration. Everything which, in a great city, could touch the

sentient faculty of a youth on whom nothing was lost ministered to his

conviction that there was no possible good fortune in life of too

‘quiet’ an order for him to appreciate—no privilege, no opportunity, no

luxury, to which he should not do justice. It was not so much that he

wished to enjoy as that he wished to know; his desire was not to be

pampered, but to be initiated. Sometimes, of a Saturday, in the long

evenings of June and July, he made his way into Hyde Park at the hour

when the throng of carriages, of riders, of brilliant pedestrians, was

thickest; and though lately, on two or three of these occasions, he had

been accompanied by Miss Henning, whose criticism of the scene was rich

and distinct, a tremendous little drama had taken place, privately, in

his soul. He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every

horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place.

In the midst of this his sense was vivid that he belonged to the class

whom the upper ten thousand, as they passed, didn’t so much as rest

their eyes upon for a quarter of a second. They looked at Millicent,

who was safe to be looked at anywhere, and was one of the handsomest

girls in any company, but they only reminded him of the high human

walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege

and dense layers of stupidity, which fenced him off from social

recognition.

And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a

jealousy that could not be intelligent; his personal discomfort was the

result of an exquisite admiration for what he had missed. There were

individuals whom he followed with his eyes, with his thoughts,

sometimes even with his steps; they seemed to tell him what it was to

be the flower of a high civilisation. At moments he was aghast when he

reflected that the cause he had secretly espoused, the cause from which

M. Poupin and Paul Muniment (especially the latter) had within the last

few months drawn aside the curtain, proposed to itself to bring about a

state of things in which that particular scene would be impossible. It

made him even rather faint to think that he must choose; that he

couldn’t (with any respect for his own consistency) work, underground,

for the enthronement of the democracy, and continue to enjoy, in

however platonic a manner, a spectacle which rested on a hideous social

inequality. He must either suffer with the people, as he had suffered

before, or he must apologise to others, as he sometimes came so near

doing to himself, for the rich; inasmuch as the day was certainly near

when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple. Hyacinth

thought himself obliged, at present, to have reasons for his feelings;

his intimacy with Paul Muniment, which had now grown very great, laid a

good deal of that sort of responsibility upon him. Muniment laughed at

his reasons, whenever he produced them, but he appeared to expect him,

nevertheless, to have them ready, on demand, and Hyacinth had an

immense desire to do what he expected. There were times when he said to

himself that it might very well be his fate to be divided, to the point

of torture, to be split open by sympathies that pulled him in different

ways; for hadn’t he an extraordinarily mingled current in his blood,

and from the time he could remember was there not one half of him that

seemed to be always playing tricks on the other, or getting snubs and

pinches from it?

That dim, dreadful, confused legend of his mother’s history, as regards

which what Pinnie had been able to tell him when he first began to

question her was at once too much and too little—this stupefying

explanation had supplied him, first and last, with a hundred different

theories of his identity. What he knew, what he guessed, sickened him,

and what he didn’t know tormented him; but in his illuminated ignorance

he had fashioned forth an article of faith. This had gradually emerged

from the depths of darkness in which he found himself plunged as a

consequence of the challenge he had addressed to Pinnie—while he was

still only a child—on the memorable day which transformed the whole

face of his future. It was one January afternoon. He had come in from a

walk; she was seated at her lamp, as usual with her work, and she began

to tell him of a letter that one of the lodgers had got, describing the

manner in which his brother-in-law’s shop, at Nottingham, had been

rifled by burglars. He listened to her story, standing in front of her,

and then, by way of response, he said to her, “Who was that woman you

took me to see ever so long ago?” The expression of her white face, as

she looked up at him, her fear of such an attack all dormant, after so

many years—her strange, scared, sick glance was a thing he could never

forget, any more than the tone, with her breath failing her, in which

she had repeated, “That woman?”

“That woman, in the prison, years ago—how old was I?—who was dying, and

who kissed me so—as I have never been kissed, as I never shall be

again! Who _was_ she, who WAS she?” Poor Pinnie, to do her justice, had

made, after she recovered her breath, a gallant fight: it lasted a

week; it was to leave her spent and sore for evermore, and before it

was over Anastasius Vetch had been called in. At his instance she

retracted the falsehoods with which she had tried to put him off, and

she made, at last, a confession, a report, which he had reason to

believe was as complete as her knowledge. Hyacinth could never have

told you why the crisis occurred on such a day, why his question broke

out at that particular moment. The strangeness of the matter to himself

was that the germ of his curiosity should have developed so slowly;

that the haunting wonder, which now, as he looked back, appeared to

fill his whole childhood, should only after so long an interval have

crept up to the air. It was only, of course, little by little that he

had recovered his bearings in his new and more poignant consciousness;

little by little that he reconstructed his antecedents, took the

measure, so far as was possible, of his heredity. His having the

courage to disinter, in the _Times_, in the reading-room of the British

Museum, a report of his mother’s trial for the murder of Lord Frederick

Purvis, which was very copious, the affair having been quite a _cause

célèbre;_ his resolution in sitting under that splendid dome, and, with

his head bent to hide his hot eyes, going through every syllable of the

ghastly record, had been an achievement of comparatively recent years.

There were certain things that Pinnie knew which appalled him; and

there were others, as to which he would have given his hand to have

some light, that it made his heart ache supremely to find she was

honestly ignorant of. He scarcely knew what sort of favour Mr Vetch

wished to make with him (as a compensation for the precious part he had

played in the business years before), when the fiddler permitted

himself to pass judgment on the family of the wretched young nobleman

for not having provided in some manner for the infant child of his

assassin. Why should they have provided, when it was evident that they

refused absolutely to recognise his lordship’s responsibility? Pinnie

had to admit this, under Hyacinth’s terrible cross-questioning; she

could not pretend, with any show of evidence, that Lord Whiteroy and

the other brothers (there had been no less than seven, most of them

still living) had, at the time of the trial, given any symptom of

believing Florentine Vivier’s asseverations. That was their affair; he

had long since made up his mind that his own was very different. One

couldn’t believe at will, and fortunately, in the case, he had no

effort to make; for from the moment he began to consider the

established facts (few as they were, and poor and hideous) he regarded

himself, irresistibly, as the son of the recreant, sacrificial Lord

Frederick.

He had no need to reason about it; all his nerves and pulses pleaded

and testified. His mother had been a daughter of the wild French people

(all that Pinnie could tell him of her parentage was that Florentine

had once mentioned that in her extreme childhood her father had fallen,

in the blood-stained streets of Paris, on a barricade, with his gun in

his hand); but on the other side it took an English aristocrat—though a

poor specimen, apparently, had to suffice—to account for him. This,

with its further implications, became Hyacinth’s article of faith; the

reflection that he was a bastard involved in a remarkable manner the

reflection that he was a gentleman. He was conscious that he didn’t

hate the image of his father, as he might have been expected to do; and

he supposed this was because Lord Frederick had paid so tremendous a

penalty. It was in the exaction of that penalty that the moral proof,

for Hyacinth, resided; his mother would not have armed herself on

account of any injury less cruel than the episode of which her

miserable baby was the living sign. She had avenged herself because she

had been thrown over, and the bitterness of that wrong had been in the

fact that he, Hyacinth, lay there in her lap. _He_ was the one to have

been killed: that remark our young man often made to himself. That his

attitude on this whole subject was of a tolerably exalted, transcendent

character, and took little account of any refutation that might be

based on a vulgar glance at three or four obtrusive items, is proved by

the importance that he attached, for instance, to the name by which his

mother had told poor Pinnie (when this excellent creature consented to

take him) that she wished him to be called. Hyacinth had been the name

of her father, a republican clockmaker, the martyr of his opinions,

whose memory she professed to worship; and when Lord Frederick

insinuated himself into her confidence he had reasons for preferring to

be known as plain Mr Robinson—reasons, however, which, in spite of the

light thrown upon them at the trial, it was difficult, after so many

years, to enter into.

Hyacinth never knew that Mr Vetch had said more than once to Pinnie,

“If her contention as regards that dissolute young swell was true, why

didn’t she make the child bear his real name, instead of his false

one?”—an inquiry which the dressmaker answered with some ingenuity, by

remarking that she couldn’t call him after a man she had murdered, and

that she supposed the unhappy girl didn’t wish to publish to every one

the boy’s connection with a crime that had been so much talked about.

If Hyacinth had assisted at this little discussion it is needless to

say that he would have sided with Miss Pynsent; though that his

judgment was independently formed is proved by the fact that Pinnie’s

fearfully indiscreet attempts at condolence should not have made him

throw up his version in disgust. It was after the complete revelation

that he understood the romantic innuendoes with which his childhood had

been surrounded, and of which he had never caught the meaning; they

having seemed but part and parcel of the habitual and promiscuous

divagations of his too constructive companion. When it came over him

that, for years, she had made a fool of him, to himself and to others,

he could have beaten her, for grief and shame; and yet, before he

administered this rebuke he had to remember that she only chattered

(though she professed to have been extraordinarily dumb) about a matter

which he spent nine-tenths of his time in brooding over. When she tried

to console him for the horror of his mother’s history by descanting on

the glory of the Purvises, and reminding him that he was related,

through them, to half the aristocracy of England, he felt that she was

turning the tragedy of his life into a monstrous farce; and yet he none

the less continued to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman born.

He allowed her to tell him nothing about the family in question, and

his stoicism on this subject was one of the reasons of the deep

dejection of her later years. If he had only let her idealise him a

little to himself she would have felt that she was making up, by so

much, for her grand mistake. He sometimes saw the name of his father’s

relations in the newspaper, but he always turned away his eyes from it.

He had nothing to ask of them, and he wished to prove to himself that

he could ignore them (who had been willing to let him die like a rat)

as completely as they ignored him. Decidedly, he cried to himself at

times, he was with the people, and every possible vengeance of the

people, as against such shameless egoism as that; but all the same he

was happy to feel that he had blood in his veins which would account

for the finest sensibilities.

He had no money to pay for places at a theatre in the Strand; Millicent

Henning having made it clear to him that on this occasion she expected

something better than the pit. “Should you like the royal box, or a

couple of stalls at ten shillings apiece?” he asked of her, with a

frankness of irony which, with this young lady, fortunately, it was

perfectly possible to practise. She had answered that she would content

herself with a seat in the second balcony, in the very front; and as

such a position involved an expenditure which he was still unable to

meet, he waited one night upon Mr Vetch, to whom he had already, more

than once, had recourse in moments of pecuniary embarrassment. His

relations with the caustic fiddler were peculiar; they were much better

in fact than they were in theory. Mr Vetch had let him know—long before

this, and with the purpose of covering Pinnie to the utmost—the part he

had played when the question of the child’s being taken to Mrs

Bowerbank’s institution was so distressingly presented; and Hyacinth,

in the face of this information, had inquired, with some sublimity,

what the devil the fiddler had to do with his private affairs.

Anastasius Vetch had replied that it was not as an affair of his, but

as an affair of Pinnie’s, that he had considered the matter; and

Hyacinth afterwards had let the question drop, though he had never been

formally reconciled to his officious neighbour. Of course his feeling

about him had been immensely modified by the trouble Mr Vetch had taken

to get him a place with old Crookenden; and at the period of which I

write it had long been familiar to him that the fiddler didn’t care a

straw what he thought of his advice at the famous crisis, and

entertained himself with watching the career of a youth put together of

such queer pieces. It was impossible to Hyacinth not to perceive that

the old man’s interest was kindly; and to-day, at any rate, our hero

would have declared that nothing could have made up to him for not

knowing the truth, horrible as the truth might be. His miserable

mother’s embrace seemed to furnish him with an inexhaustible fund of

motive, and under the circumstances that was a benefit. What he chiefly

objected to in Mr Vetch was a certain air of still regarding him as

extremely juvenile; he would have got on with him much better if the

fiddler had consented to recognise the degree in which he was already a

man of the world. Vetch knew an immense deal about society, and he

seemed to know the more because he never swaggered—it was only little

by little you discovered it; but that was no reason for his looking as

if his chief entertainment resided in a private, diverting commentary

on the conversation of his young friend. Hyacinth felt that he himself

gave considerable evidence of liking his fellow-resident in Lomax Place

when he asked him to lend him half-a-crown. Somehow, circumstances, of

old, had tied them together, and though this partly vexed the little

bookbinder it also touched him; he had more than once solved the

problem of deciding how to behave (when the fiddler exasperated him) by

simply asking him some service. The old man had never refused. It was

satisfactory to Hyacinth to remember this, as he knocked at his door,

very late, after he had allowed him time to come home from the theatre.

He knew his habits: Mr Vetch never went straight to bed, but sat by his

fire an hour, smoking his pipe, mixing a grog, and reading some old

book. Hyacinth knew when to go up by the light in his window, which he

could see from a court behind.

“Oh, I know I haven’t been to see you for a long time,” he said, in

response to the remark with which the fiddler greeted him; “and I may

as well tell you immediately what has brought me at present—in addition

to the desire to ask after your health. I want to take a young lady to

the theatre.”

Mr Vetch was habited in a tattered dressing-gown; his apartment smelt

strongly of the liquor he was consuming. Divested of his evening-gear

he looked to our hero so plucked and blighted that on the spot Hyacinth

ceased to hesitate as to his claims in the event of a social

liquidation; he, too, was unmistakably a creditor. “I’m afraid you find

your young lady rather expensive.”

“I find everything expensive,” said Hyacinth, as if to finish that

subject.

“Especially, I suppose, your secret societies.”

“What do you mean by that?” the young man asked, staring.

“Why, you told me, in the autumn, that you were just about to join a

few.”

“A few? How many do you suppose?” And Hyacinth checked himself. “Do you

suppose if I had been serious I would tell?”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mr Vetch murmured, with a sigh. Then he went on:

“You want to take her to my shop, eh?”

“I’m sorry to say she won’t go there. She wants something in the

Strand: that’s a great point. She wants very much to see the _Pearl of

Paraguay_. I don’t wish to pay anything, if possible; I am sorry to say

I haven’t a penny. But as you know people at the other theatres, and I

have heard you say that you do each other little favours, from place to

place—_à charge de revanche_, as the French say—it occurred to me that

you might be able to get me an order. The piece has been running a long

time, and most people (except poor devils like me) must have seen it:

therefore there probably isn’t a rush.”

Mr Vetch listened in silence, and presently he said, “Do you want a

box?”

“Oh no; something more modest.”

“Why not a box?” asked the fiddler, in a tone which Hyacinth knew.

“Because I haven’t got the clothes that people wear in that sort of

place, if you must have such a definite reason.”

“And your young lady—has she got the clothes?”

“Oh, I dare say; she seems to have everything.”

“Where does she get them?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She belongs to a big shop; she has to be fine.”

“Won’t you have a pipe?” Mr Vetch asked, pushing an old tobacco-pouch

across the table to his visitor; and while the young man helped himself

he puffed a while in silence. “What will she do with you?” he inquired

at last.

“What will who do with me?”

“Your big beauty—Miss Henning. I know all about her from Pinnie.”

“Then you know what she’ll do with me!” Hyacinth returned, with rather

a scornful laugh.

“Yes, but, after all, it doesn’t very much matter.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Hyacinth.

“Well, now the other matter—the International—are you very deep in

that?” the fiddler went on, as if he had not heard him.

“Did Pinnie tell you all about that?” his visitor asked.

“No, our friend Eustace has told me a good deal. He knows you have put

your head into something. Besides, I see it,” said Mr Vetch.

“How do you see it, pray?”

“You have got such a speaking eye. Any one can tell, to look at you,

that you have become a nihilist, that you’re a member of a secret

society. You seem to say to every one, ‘Slow torture won’t induce me to

tell where it meets!’”

“You won’t get me an order, then?” Hyacinth said, in a moment.

“My dear boy, I offer you a box. I take the greatest interest in you.”

They smoked together a while, and at last Hyacinth remarked, “It has

nothing to do with the International.”

“Is it more terrible—more deadly secret?” his companion inquired,

looking at him with extreme seriousness.

“I thought you pretended to be a radical,” answered Hyacinth.

“Well, so I am—of the old-fashioned, constitutional, milk-and-water,

jog-trot sort. I’m not an exterminator.”

“We don’t know what we may be when the time comes,” Hyacinth rejoined,

more sententiously than he intended.

“Is the time coming, then, my dear boy?”

“I don’t think I have a right to give you any more of a warning than

that,” said our hero, smiling.

“It’s very kind of you to do so much, I’m sure, and to rush in here at

the small hours for the purpose. Meanwhile, in the few weeks, or

months, or years, or whatever they are, that are left, you wish to put

in as much enjoyment as you can squeeze, with the young ladies: that’s

a very natural inclination.” Then, irrelevantly, Mr Vetch inquired, “Do

you see many foreigners?”

“Yes, I see a good many.”

“And what do you think of them?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. I rather like Englishmen better.”

“Mr Muniment, for example?”

“I say, what do you know about him?” Hyacinth asked.

“I’ve seen him at Eustace’s. I know that you and he are as thick as

thieves.”

“He will distinguish himself some day, very much,” said Hyacinth, who

was perfectly willing, and indeed very proud, to be thought a close

ally of the chemist’s assistant.

“Very likely—very likely. And what will _he_ do with you?” the fiddler

inquired.

Hyacinth got up; the two men looked at each other for an instant. “Do

get me two good places in the second balcony,” said Hyacinth.

Mr Vetch replied that he would do what he could, and three days

afterwards he gave the coveted order to his young friend. As he placed

it in his hands he said, “You had better put in all the fun you can,

you know!”