On the other hand the brilliancy of Paris had not much power to
transfigure the impression made upon him by such intercourse with Paul
Muniment as he had enjoyed during the weeks that followed Pinnie’s
death—an impression considerably more severe than any idea of
renunciation or oblivion that could connect itself with Millicent. Why
it should have had the taste of sadness was not altogether clear, for
Muniment’s voice was as distinct as any in the chorus of approbation
excited by the news that Hyacinth was about to cultivate the most
characteristic of the pleasures of gentility—a sympathetic unanimity,
of which the effect was to place his journey to Paris in a light almost
ridiculous. What had got into them all, and did they think he was good
for nothing but to amuse himself? Mr Vetch had been the most zealous,
but the others clapped him on the back in almost exactly the same
manner as he had seen his mates in Soho bring their palms down on one
of their number when it was disclosed to them that his ‘missus’ had
made him yet once again a father. That had been Poupin’s tone, and his
wife’s as well; and even poor Schinkel, with his everlasting bandage,
whom he had met in Lisson Grove, appeared to think it necessary to
remark that a little run across the Rhine, while he was about it, would
open his eyes to a great many wonders. The Poupins shed tears of joy,
and the letters which have already been mentioned, and which lay day
after day on the mantel-shelf of the little room our hero occupied in a
_hôtel garni_, tremendously tall and somewhat lopsided, in the Rue
Jacob (that recommendation proceeded also from Lisson Grove, the
_garni_ being kept by a second cousin of Madame Eustache), these
valuable documents had been prepared by the obliging exile many days
before his young friend was ready to start. It was almost refreshing to
Hyacinth when old Crookenden, the sole outspoken dissentient, told him
he was a blockhead to waste his money on the bloody French. This worthy
employer of labour was evidently disgusted at such an innovation; if he
wanted a little recreation why couldn’t he take it as it had been taken
in Soho from the beginning of time, in the shape of a trip to Hampton
Court or two or three days of alcoholic torpor? Old Crookenden was
right. Hyacinth conceded freely that he was a blockhead, and was only a
little uncomfortable that he couldn’t explain why he didn’t pretend not
to be and had a kind of right to that compensatory luxury.
Paul guessed why, of course, and smiled approval with a candour which
gave Hyacinth a strange, inexpressible heartache. He already knew that
his friend’s view of him was that he was ornamental and adapted to the
lighter kinds of socialistic utility—constituted to show that the
revolution was not necessarily brutal and illiterate; but in the light
of the cheerful stoicism with which Muniment regarded the sacrifice our
hero was committed to, the latter had found it necessary to remodel a
good deal his original conception of the young chemist’s nature. The
result of this process was not that he admired it less but that he felt
almost awe-stricken in the presence of it. There had been an element of
that sort in his appreciation of Muniment from the first, but it had
been infinitely deepened by the spectacle of his sublime consistency.
Hyacinth felt that he himself could never have risen to that point. He
was competent to make the promise to Hoffendahl, and he was equally
competent to keep it; but he could not have had the same fortitude for
another, could not have detached himself from personal prejudice so
effectually as to put forward, in that way, for the terrible ‘job’, a
little chap he liked. That Muniment liked him it never occurred to
Hyacinth to doubt, and certainly he had all the manner of it to-day: he
had never been more good-humoured, more placidly talkative; he was like
an elder brother who knew that the ‘youngster’ was clever, and was
rather proud of it even when there was no one there to see. That air of
suspending their partnership for the moment, which had usually marked
him at the ‘Sun and Moon’, was never visible in other places; in Audley
Court he only chaffed Hyacinth occasionally for taking him too
seriously. To-day his young friend hardly knew just how to take him;
the episode of which Hoffendahl was the central figure had, as far as
one could see, made so little change in his life. As a conspirator he
was so extraordinarily candid, and bitterness and denunciation so
rarely sat on his lips. It was as if he had been ashamed to complain;
and indeed, for himself, as the months went on, he had nothing
particular to complain of. He had had a rise, at the chemical works,
and a plan of getting a larger room for Rosy was under serious
consideration. On behalf of others he never sounded the pathetic
note—he thought that sort of thing unbusiness-like; and the most that
he did in the way of expatiation on the wrongs of humanity was
occasionally to mention certain statistics, certain ‘returns’, in
regard to the remuneration of industries, applications for employment
and the discharge of hands. In such matters as these he was deeply
versed, and he moved in a dry statistical and scientific air in which
it cost Hyacinth an effort of respiration to accompany him. Simple and
kindly as he was, and thoughtful of the woes of beasts, attentive and
merciful to small insects, and addicted even to kissing dirty babies in
Audley Court, he sometimes emitted a short satiric gleam which showed
that his esteem for the poor was small and that if he had no illusions
about the people who had got everything into their hands he had as few
about those who had egregiously failed to do so. He was tremendously
reasonable, which was largely why Hyacinth admired him, having a desire
to be so himself but finding it terribly difficult.
Muniment’s absence of passion, his fresh-coloured coolness, his easy,
exact knowledge, the way he kept himself clean (except for the chemical
stains on his hands) in circumstances of foul contact, constituted a
group of qualities that had always appeared to Hyacinth singularly
enviable. Most enviable of all was the force that enabled him to sink
personal sentiment where a great public good was to be attempted and
yet keep up the form of caring for that minor interest. It seemed to
Hyacinth that if _he_ had introduced a young fellow to Hoffendahl for
his purposes, and Hoffendahl had accepted him on such a recommendation,
and everything had been settled, he would have preferred never to look
at the young fellow again. That was his weakness, and Muniment carried
it off far otherwise. It must be added that he had never made an
allusion to their visit to Hoffendahl; so that Hyacinth also, out of
pride, held his tongue on the subject. If his friend didn’t wish to
express any sympathy for him he was not going to beg for it (especially
as he didn’t want it) by restless references. It had originally been a
surprise to him that Muniment should be willing to countenance a
possible assassination; but after all none of his ideas were narrow
(Hyacinth had a sense that they ripened all the while), and if a
pistol-shot would do any good he was not the man to raise pedantic
objections. It is true that, as regards his quiet acceptance of the
predicament in which Hyacinth might be placed by it, our young man had
given him the benefit of a certain amount of doubt; it had occurred to
him that perhaps Muniment had his own reasons for believing that the
summons from Hoffendahl would never really arrive, so that he might
only be treating himself to the entertainment of judging of a little
bookbinder’s nerve. But in this case, why did he take an interest in
the little bookbinder’s going to Paris? That was a thing he would not
have cared for if he had held that in fact there was nothing to fear.
He despised the sight of idleness, and in spite of the indulgence he
had more than once been good enough to express on the subject of
Hyacinth’s epicurean tendencies what he would have been most likely to
say at present was, ‘Go to Paris? Go to the dickens! Haven’t you been
out at grass long enough for one while, didn’t you lark enough in the
country there with the noble lady, and hadn’t you better take up your
tools again before you forget how to handle them?’ Rosy had said
something of that sort, in her free, familiar way (whatever her
intention, she had been, in effect, only a little less sarcastic than
old Crookenden): that Mr Robinson was going in for a life of leisure, a
life of luxury, like herself; she must congratulate him on having the
means and the time. Oh, the time—that was the great thing! She could
speak with knowledge, having always enjoyed these advantages herself.
And she intimated—or was she mistaken?—that his good fortune emulated
hers also in the matter of his having a high-born and beneficent friend
(such a blessing, now he had lost dear Miss Pynsent), who covered him
with little attentions. Rose Muniment, in short, had been more
exasperating than ever.
The boulevard became even more brilliant as the evening went on, and
Hyacinth wondered whether he had a right to occupy the same table for
so many hours. The theatre on the other side discharged its multitude;
the crowd thickened on the wide asphalt, on the terrace of the café;
gentlemen, accompanied by ladies of whom he knew already how to
characterise the type—_des femmes très-chic_—passed into the portals of
Tortoni. The nightly emanation of Paris seemed to rise more richly, to
float and hang in the air, to mingle with the universal light and the
many-voiced sound, to resolve itself into a thousand solicitations and
opportunities, addressed however mainly to those in whose pockets the
chink of a little loose gold might respond. Hyacinth’s retrospections
had not made him drowsy, but quite the reverse; he grew restless and
excited, and a kind of pleasant terror of the place and hour entered
into his blood. But it was nearly midnight, and he got up to walk home,
taking the line of the boulevard toward the Madeleine. He passed down
the Rue Royale, where comparative stillness reigned; and when he
reached the Place de la Concorde, to cross the bridge which faces the
Corps Législatif, he found himself almost isolated. He had left the
human swarm and the obstructed pavements behind, and the wide spaces of
the splendid square lay quiet under the summer stars. The plash of the
great fountains was audible, and he could almost hear the wind-stirred
murmur of the little wood of the Tuileries on one side, and of the
vague expanse of the Champs Elysées on the other. The place itself—the
Place Louis Quinze, the Place de la Révolution—had given him a sensible
emotion, from the day of his arrival; he had recognised so quickly its
tremendously historic character. He had seen, in a rapid vision, the
guillotine in the middle, on the site of the inscrutable obelisk, and
the tumbrils, with waiting victims, were stationed round the circle now
made majestic by the monuments of the cities of France. The great
legend of the French Revolution, sanguinary and heroic, was more real
to him here than anywhere else; and, strangely, what was most present
was not its turpitude and horror, but its magnificent energy, the
spirit of life that had been in it, not the spirit of death. That
shadow was effaced by the modern fairness of fountain and statue, the
stately perspective and composition; and as he lingered, before
crossing the Seine, a sudden sense overtook him, making his heart sink
with a kind of desolation—a sense of everything that might hold one to
the world, of the sweetness of not dying, the fascination of great
cities, the charm of travel and discovery, the generosity of
admiration. The tears rose to his eyes, as they had done more than once
in the past six months, and a question, low but poignant, broke from
his lips, ending in nothing: “How could he—how _could_ he—?” It may be
explained that ‘he’ was a reference to Paul Muniment; for Hyacinth had
dreamed of the religion of friendship.
Three weeks after this he found himself in Venice, whence he addressed
to the Princess Casamassima a letter of which I reproduce the principal
passages.
‘This is probably the last time I shall write to you before I return to
London. Of course you have been in this place, and you will easily
understand why here, especially here, the spirit should move me. Dear
Princess, what an enchanted city, what ineffable impressions, what a
revelation of the exquisite! I have a room in a little _campo_ opposite
to a small old church, which has cracked marble slabs let into the
front; and in the cracks grow little wild delicate flowers, of which I
don’t know the name. Over the door of the church hangs an old battered
leather curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress, and with
buttons in it, like a sofa; and it flops to and fro, laboriously, as
women and girls, with shawls on their heads and their feet in little
wooden shoes which have nothing but toes, pass in and out. In the
middle of the campo is a fountain, which looks still older than the
church; it has a primitive, barbaric air, and I have an idea it was put
there by the first settlers—those who came to Venice from the mainland,
from Aquileia. Observe how much historical information I have already
absorbed; it won’t surprise you, however, for you never wondered at
anything after you discovered I knew something of Schopenhauer. I
assure you, I don’t think of that musty misogynist in the least to-day,
for I bend a genial eye on the women and girls I just spoke of, as they
glide, with a small clatter and with their old copper water-jars, to
the fountain. The Venetian girl-face is wonderfully sweet and the
effect is charming when its pale, sad oval (they all look under-fed) is
framed in the old faded shawl. They also have very fascinating hair,
which never has done curling, and they slip along together, in couples
or threes, interlinked by the arms and never meeting one’s eye (so that
its geniality doesn’t matter), dressed in thin, cheap cotton gowns,
whose limp folds make the same delightful line that everything else in
Italy makes. The weather is splendid and I roast—but I like it;
apparently, I was made to be spitted and “done”, and I discover that I
have been cold all my life, even when I thought I was warm. I have seen
none of the beautiful patricians who sat for the great painters—the
gorgeous beings whose golden hair was intertwined with pearls; but I am
studying Italian in order to talk with the shuffling, clicking maidens
who work in the bead-factories—I am determined to make one or two of
them look at me. When they have filled their old water-pots at the
fountain it is jolly to see them perch them on their heads and patter
away over the polished Venetian stones. It’s a charm to be in a country
where the women don’t wear the hideous British bonnet. Even in my own
class (excuse the expression—I remember it used to offend you), I have
never known a young female, in London, to put her nose out of the door
without it; and if you had frequented such young females as much as I
have you would have learned of what degradation that dreary necessity
is the source. The floor of my room is composed of little brick tiles,
and to freshen the air, in this temperature, one sprinkles it, as you
no doubt know, with water. Before long, if I keep on sprinkling, I
shall be able to swim about; the green shutters are closed, and the
place makes a very good tank. Through the chinks the hot light of the
campo comes in. I smoke cigarettes, and in the pauses of this
composition recline on a faded magenta divan in the corner. Convenient
to my hand, in that attitude, are the works of Leopardi and a
second-hand dictionary. I am very happy—happier than I have ever been
in my life save at Medley—and I don’t care for anything but the present
hour. It won’t last long, for I am spending all my money. When I have
finished this I shall go forth and wander about in the splendid
Venetian afternoon; and I shall spend the evening in that enchanted
square of St Mark’s, which resembles an immense open-air drawing-room,
listening to music and feeling the sea-breeze blow in between those two
strange old columns, in the piazzetta, which seem to make a portal for
it. I can scarcely believe that it’s of myself that I am telling these
fine things; I say to myself a dozen times a day that Hyacinth Robinson
is not in it—I pinch my leg to see if I’m not dreaming. But a short
time hence, when I have resumed the exercise of my profession, in sweet
Soho, I shall have proof enough that it has been my very self: I shall
know that by the terrible grind I shall feel my work to be.
‘That will mean, no doubt, that I’m deeply demoralised. It won’t be for
you, however, in this case, to cast the stone at me; for my
demoralisation began from the moment I first approached you. Dear
Princess, I may have done you good, but you haven’t done me much. I
trust you will understand what I mean by that speech, and not think it
flippant or impertinent. I may have helped you to understand and enter
into the misery of the people (though I protest I don’t know much about
it), but you have led my imagination into quite another train. However,
I don’t mean to pretend that it’s all your fault if I have lost sight
of the sacred cause almost altogether in my recent adventures. It is
not that it has not been there to see, for that perhaps is the clearest
result of extending one’s horizon—the sense, increasing as we go, that
want and toil and suffering are the constant lot of the immense
majority of the human race. I have found them everywhere, but I haven’t
minded them. Excuse the cynical confession. What has struck me is the
great achievements of which man has been capable in spite of them—the
splendid accumulations of the happier few, to which, doubtless, the
miserable many have also in their degree contributed. The face of
Europe appears to be covered with them, and they have had much the
greater part of my attention. They seem to me inestimably precious and
beautiful, and I have become conscious, more than ever before, of how
little I understand what, in the great rectification, you and Poupin
propose to do with them. Dear Princess, there are things which I shall
be sorry to see you touch, even you with your hands divine; and—shall I
tell you _le fond de ma pensée_, as you used to say?—I feel myself
capable of fighting for them. You can’t call me a traitor, for you know
the obligation that I recognise. The monuments and treasures of art,
the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste,
the general fabric of civilisation as we know it, based, if you will,
upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies
and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the
world is less impracticable and life more tolerable—our friend
Hoffendahl seems to me to hold them too cheap and to wish to substitute
for them something in which I can’t somehow believe as I do in things
with which the aspirations and the tears of generations have been
mixed. You know how extraordinary I think our Hoffendahl (to speak only
of him); but if there is one thing that is more clear about him than
another it is that he wouldn’t have the least feeling for this
incomparable, abominable old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of
the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece.
I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything, and I have a
great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom
of the idea of a redistribution. You will say that I talk of it at my
ease, while, in a delicious capital, I smoke cigarettes on a magenta
divan; and I give you leave to scoff at me if it turns out that, when I
come back to London without a penny in my pocket, I don’t hold the same
language. I don’t know what it comes from, but during the last three
months there has crept over me a deep mistrust of that same grudging
attitude—the intolerance of positions and fortunes that are higher and
brighter than one’s own; a fear, moreover, that I may, in the past,
have been actuated by such motives, and a devout hope that if I am to
pass away while I am yet young it may not be with that odious stain
upon my soul.’