Hyacinth spent three days, after his return to London, in a process
which he supposed to be the quest of a lodging; but in reality he was
pulling himself together for the business of his livelihood—an effort
he found by no means easy or agreeable. As he had told the Princess, he
was demoralised, and the perspective of Mr Crookenden’s dirty staircase
had never seemed so steep. He lingered on the brink, before he plunged
again into Soho; he wished not to go back to the shop till he should be
settled, and he delayed to get settled in order not to go back to the
shop. He saw no one during this interval, not even Mr Vetch; he waited
to call upon the fiddler till he should have the appearance of not
coming as a beggar or a borrower—have recovered his employment and be
able to give an address, as he had heard Captain Sholto say. He went to
South Street—not meaning to go in at once but wishing to look at the
house—and there he had the surprise of perceiving a bill of sale in the
window of the Princess’s late residence. He had not expected to find
her in town (he had heard from her the last time three weeks before,
and then she said nothing about her prospects), but he was puzzled by
this indication that she had moved away altogether. There was something
in this, however, which he felt that at bottom he had looked for; it
appeared a proof of the justice of a certain suspicious, uneasy
sentiment from which one could never be quite free, in one’s
intercourse with the Princess—a vague apprehension that one might
suddenly stretch out one’s hand and miss her altogether from one’s
side. Hyacinth decided to ring at the door and ask for news of her; but
there was no response to his summons: the stillness of an August
afternoon (the year had come round again from his first visit) hung
over the place, the blinds were down and the caretaker appeared to be
absent. Under these circumstances Hyacinth was much at a loss; unless,
indeed, he should address a letter to his wonderful friend at Medley.
It would doubtless be forwarded, though her short lease of the
country-house had terminated, as he knew, several weeks before. Captain
Sholto was of course a possible medium of communication; but nothing
would have induced Hyacinth to ask such a service of him.
He turned away from South Street with a curious sinking of the heart;
his state of ignorance struck inward, as it were—had the force of a
vague, disquieting portent. He went to old Crookenden’s only when he
had arrived at his last penny. This, however, was very promptly the
case. He had disembarked at London Bridge with only seventeen pence in
his pocket, and he had lived on that sum for three days. The old
fiddler in Lomax Place was having a chop before he went to the theatre,
and he invited Hyacinth to share his repast, sending out at the same
time for another pot of beer. He took the youth with him to the play,
where, as at that season there were very few spectators, he had no
difficulty in finding him a place. He seemed to wish to keep hold of
him, and looked at him strangely, over his spectacles (Mr Vetch wore
the homely double glass in these latter years), when he learned that
Hyacinth had taken a lodging not in their old familiar quarter but in
the unexplored purlieus of Westminster. What had determined our young
man was the fact that from this part of the town the journey was
comparatively a short one to Camberwell; he had suffered so much,
before Pinnie’s death, from being separated by such a distance from his
best friends. There was a pang in his heart connected with the image of
Paul Muniment, but none the less the prospect of an evening hour in
Audley Court, from time to time, appeared one of his most definite
sources of satisfaction in the future. He could have gone straight to
Camberwell to live, but that would carry him too far from the scene of
his profession; and in Westminster he was much nearer to old
Crookenden’s than he had been in Lomax Place. He said to Mr Vetch that
if it would give him pleasure he would abandon his lodging and take
another in Pentonville. But the old man replied, after a moment, that
he should be sorry to put that constraint upon him; if he were to make
such an exaction Hyacinth would think he wanted to watch him.
“How do you mean, to watch me?”
Mr Vetch had begun to tune his fiddle, and he scraped it a little
before answering. “I mean it as I have always meant it. Surely you know
that in Lomax Place I had my eyes on you. I watched you as a child on
the edge of a pond watches the little boat he has constructed and set
afloat.”
“You couldn’t discover much. You saw, after all, very little of me,”
Hyacinth said.
“I made what I could of that little; it was better than nothing.”
Hyacinth laid his hand gently on the old man’s arm; he had never felt
so kindly to him, not even when he accepted the thirty pounds, before
going abroad, as at this moment. “Certainly I will come and see you.”
“I was much obliged to you for your letters,” Mr Vetch remarked,
without heeding these words, and continuing to scrape. He had always,
even into the shabbiness of his old age, kept that mark of English
good-breeding (which is composed of some such odd elements), that there
was a shyness, an aversion to possible phrase-making, in his manner of
expressing gratitude for favours, and that in spite of this cursory
tone his acknowledgment had ever the accent of sincerity.
Hyacinth took but little interest in the play, which was an inanimate
revival; he had been at the _Théâtre Français_ and the tradition of
that house was still sufficiently present to him to make any other
style of interpretation appear of the clumsiest. He sat in one of the
front stalls, close to the orchestra; and while the piece went
forward—or backward, ever backward, as it seemed to him—his thoughts
wandered far from the shabby scene and the dusty boards, revolving
round a question which had come up immensely during the last few hours.
The Princess was a _capricciosa_—that, at least, was Madame Grandoni’s
account of her; and was that blank, expressionless house in South
Street a sign that an end had come to the particular caprice in which
he had happened to be involved? He had returned to London with an ache
of eagerness to be with her again on the same terms as at Medley, a
throbbing sense that unless she had been abominably dishonest he might
count upon her. This state of mind was by no means complete security,
but it was so sweet that it mattered little whether it were sound.
Circumstances had favoured in an extraordinary degree his visit to her,
and it was by no means clear that they would again be so accommodating
or that what had been possible for a few days should be possible with
continuity, in the midst of the ceremonies and complications of London.
Hyacinth felt poorer than he had ever felt before, inasmuch as he had
had money and spent it, whereas in previous times he had never had it
to spend. He never for an instant regretted his squandered fortune, for
he said to himself that he had made a good bargain and become master of
a precious equivalent. The equivalent was a rich experience—an
experience which would become richer still as he should talk it over,
in a low chair, close to hers, with the all-comprehending,
all-suggesting lady of his life. His poverty would be no obstacle to
their intercourse so long as he should have a pair of legs to carry him
to her door; for she liked him better shabby than when he was furbished
up, and she had given him too many pledges, they had taken together too
many appointments, worked out too many programmes, to be disconcerted
(on either side) by obstacles that were merely a part of the general
conventionality. He was to go with her into the slums, to introduce her
to the worst that London contained (he should have, precisely, to make
acquaintance with it first), to show her the reality of the horrors of
which she dreamed that the world might be purged. He had ceased,
himself, to care for the slums, and had reasons for not wishing to
spend his remnant in the contemplation of foul things; but he would go
through with his part of the engagement. He might be perfunctory, but
any dreariness would have a gilding that should involve an association
with her. What if she should have changed, have ceased to care? What
if, from a kind of royal insolence which he suspected to lurk somewhere
in the side-scenes of her nature, though he had really not once seen it
peep out, she should toss back her perfect head with a movement
signifying that he was too basely literal and that she knew him no
more? Hyacinth’s imagination represented her this evening in places
where a barrier of dazzling light shut her out from access, or even
from any appeal. He saw her with other people, in splendid rooms, where
‘the dukes’ had possession of her, smiling, satisfied, surrounded,
covered with jewels. When this vision grew intense he found a
reassurance in reflecting that after all she would be unlikely to throw
him personally over so long as she should remain mixed up with what was
being planned in the dark, and that it would not be easy for her to
liberate herself from that entanglement. She had of course told him
more, at Medley, of the manner in which she had already committed
herself, and he remembered, with a strange perverse elation, that she
had gone very far indeed.
In the intervals of the foolish play Mr Vetch, who lingered in his
place in the orchestra while his mates descended into the little hole
under the stage, leaned over the rail and asked his young friend
occasional questions, carrying his eyes at the same time up about the
dingy house, at whose smoky ceiling and tarnished galleries he had been
staring for so many a year. He came back to Hyacinth’s letters, and
said, “Of course you know they were clever; they entertained me
immensely. But as I read them I thought of poor Pinnie: I wished she
could have listened to them; they would have made her so happy.”
“Yes, poor Pinnie,” Hyacinth murmured, while Mr Vetch went on—
“I was in Paris in 1840; I stayed at a small hotel in the Rue Mogador.
I judge everything is changed, from your letters. Does the Rue Mogador
still exist? Yes, everything is changed. I dare say it’s all much
finer, but I liked it very much as it was then. At all events, I am
right in supposing—am I not?—that it cheered you up considerably, made
you really happy.”
“Why should I have wanted any cheering? I was happy enough,” Hyacinth
replied.
The fiddler turned his old white face upon him; it had the unhealthy
smoothness which denotes a sedentary occupation, thirty years spent in
a close crowd, amid the smoke of lamps and the odour of stage-paint. “I
thought you were sad about Pinnie,” he remarked.
“When I jumped, with that avidity, at your proposal that I should take
a tour? Poor old Pinnie!” Hyacinth added.
“Well, I hope you think a little better of the world. We mustn’t make
up our mind too early in life.”
“Oh, I have made up mine: it’s an awfully jolly place.”
“Awfully jolly, no; but I like it as I like an old pair of shoes—I like
so much less the idea of putting on the new ones.”
“Why should I complain?” Hyacinth asked. “What have I known but
kindness? People have done such a lot for me.”
“Oh, well, of course, they have liked you. But that’s all right,”
murmured Mr Vetch, beginning to scrape again. What remained in
Hyacinth’s mind from this conversation was the fact that the old man,
whom he regarded distinctly as cultivated, had thought his letters
clever. He only wished that he had made them cleverer still; he had no
doubt of his ability to have done so.
It may be imagined whether the first hours he spent at old
Crookenden’s, after he took up work again, were altogether to his
taste, and what was the nature of the reception given him by his former
comrades, whom he found exactly in the same attitudes and the same
clothes (he knew and hated every article they wore), and with the same
primitive pleasantries on their lips. Our young man’s feelings were
mingled; the place and the people appeared to him loathsome, but there
was something delightful in handling his tools. He gave a little
private groan of relief when he discovered that he still liked his work
and that the pleasant swarm of his ideas (in the matter of sides and
backs) returned to him. They came in still brighter, more suggestive
form, and he had the satisfaction of feeling that his taste had
improved, that it had been purified by experience, and that the covers
of a book might be made to express an astonishing number of high
conceptions. Strange enough it was, and a proof surely, of our little
hero’s being a genuine artist, that the impressions he had accumulated
during the last few months appeared to mingle and confound themselves
with the very sources of his craft and to be susceptible of technical
representation. He had quite determined, by this time, to carry on his
life as if nothing were hanging over him, and he had no intention of
remaining a little bookbinder to the end of his days; for that medium,
after all, would translate only some of his conceptions. Yet his trade
was a resource, an undiminished resource, for the present, and he had a
particular as well as a general motive in attempting new flights—the
prevision of the exquisite work which he was to do during the coming
year for the Princess and which it was very definite to him he owed
her. When that debt should have been paid and his other arrears made up
he proposed to himself to write something. He was far from having
decided as yet what it should be; the only point settled was that it
should be very remarkable and should not, at least on the face of it,
have anything to do with a fresh deal of the social pack. That was to
be his transition—into literature; to bind the book, charming as the
process might be, was after all much less fundamental than to write it.
It had occurred to Hyacinth more than once that it would be a fine
thing to produce a brilliant death-song.
It is not surprising that among such reveries as this he should have
been conscious of a narrow range in the tone of his old workfellows.
They had only one idea: that he had come into a thousand pounds and had
gone to spend them in France with a regular high one. He was aware, in
advance, of the diffusion of this legend, and did his best to allow for
it, taking the simplest course, which was not to contradict it but to
catch the ball as it came and toss it still further, enlarging and
embroidering humorously until Grugan and Roker and Hotchkin and all the
rest, who struck him as not having washed since he left them, seemed
really to begin to understand how it was he could have spent such a
rare sum in so short a time. The impressiveness of this achievement
helped him greatly to slip into his place; he could see that, though
the treatment it received was superficially irreverent, the sense that
he was very sharp and that the springs of his sharpness were somehow
secret gained a good deal of strength from it. Hyacinth was not
incapable of being rather pleased that it _should_ be supposed, even by
Grugan, Roker and Hotchkin, that he could get rid of a thousand pounds
in less than five months, especially as to his own conscience the fact
had altogether yet to be proved. He got off, on the whole, easily
enough to feel a little ashamed, and he reflected that the men at
Crookenden’s, at any rate, showed no symptoms of the social jealousy
lying at the bottom of the desire for a fresh deal. This was doubtless
an accident, and not inherent in the fact that they were highly skilled
workmen (old Crookenden had no others), and therefore sure of constant
employment; for it was impossible to be more skilled, in one’s own
line, than Paul Muniment was, and yet he (though not out of jealousy,
of course) went in for the great restitution. What struck him most,
after he had got used again to the sense of his apron and bent his back
a while over his battered table, was the simple, synthetic patience of
the others, who had bent _their_ backs and felt the rub of that dirty
drapery all the while he was lounging in the halls of Medley, dawdling
through boulevards and museums, and admiring the purity of the Venetian
girl-face. With Poupin, to be sure, his relations were special; but the
explanations that he owed the sensitive Frenchman were not such as
could make him very unhappy, once he had determined to resist as much
as possible the friction of his remaining days. There was moreover more
sorrow than anger in Poupin’s face when he learned that his young
friend and pupil had failed to cultivate, in Paris, the rich
opportunities he had offered him. “You are cooling off, my child; there
is something about you! Have you the weakness to flatter yourself that
anything has been done, or that humanity suffers a particle less?
_Enfin_, it’s between you and your conscience.”
“Do you think I want to get out of it?” Hyacinth asked, smiling;
Eustache Poupin’s phrases about humanity, which used to thrill him so,
having grown of late strangely hollow and _rococo_.
“You owe me no explanations; the conscience of the individual is
absolute, except, of course, in those classes in which, from the very
nature of the infamies on which they are founded, no conscience can
exist. Speak to me, however, of my Paris; _she_ is always divine,”
Poupin went on; but he showed signs of irritation when Hyacinth began
to praise to him the magnificent creations of the arch-fiend of
December. In the presence of this picture he was in a terrible dilemma:
he was gratified as a Parisian and a patriot but he was disconcerted as
a lover of liberty; it cost him a pang to admit that anything in the
sacred city was defective, yet he saw still less his way to concede
that it could owe any charm to the perjured monster of the second
Empire, or even to the hypocritical, mendacious republicanism of the
régime before which the sacred Commune had gone down in blood and fire.
“Ah, yes, it’s very fine, no doubt,” he remarked at last, “but it will
be finer still when it’s ours!”—a speech which caused Hyacinth to turn
back to his work with a slight feeling of sickness. Everywhere,
everywhere, he saw the ulcer of envy—the passion of a party which hung
together for the purpose of despoiling another to its advantage. In old
Eustache, one of the ‘pure’, this was particularly sad.