THE BROAD STONE OF HONOUR.
But where has Stangrave been all this while?
Where any given bachelor has been, for any given month, is difficult to
say, and no man's business but his own. But where he happened to be on a
certain afternoon in the first week of October, on which he had just
heard the news of Alma, was,--upon the hills between Ems and Coblentz.
Walking over a high table-land of stubbles, which would be grass in
England; and yet with all its tillage is perhaps not worth more than
English grass would be, thanks to that small-farm system much be-praised
by some who know not wheat from turnips. Then along a road, which might
be a Devon one, cut in the hill-side, through authentic "Devonian"
slate, where the deep chocolate soil is lodged on the top of the upright
strata, and a thick coat of moss and wood sedge clusters about the
oak-scrub roots, round which the delicate and rare oak-fern mingles its
fronds with great blue campanulas; while the "white admirals" and
silver-washed "fritillaries" flit round every bramble bed, and the great
"purple emperors" come down to drink in the road puddles, and sit,
fearless flashing off their velvet wings a blue as of that empyrean
which is "dark by excess of light."
Down again through cultivated lands, corn and clover, flax and beet, and
all the various crops with which the industrious German yeoman ekes out
his little patch of soil. Past the thrifty husbandman himself, as he
guides the two milch-kine in his tiny plough, and stops at the furrow's
end, to greet you with the hearty German smile and bow; while the little
fair-haired maiden, walking beneath the shade of standard cherries,
walnuts, and pears, all grey with fruit, fills the cows' mouths with
chicory, and wild carnations, and pink saintfoin, and many a fragrant
weed which richer England wastes.
Down once more, into a glen; but such a glen as neither England nor
America has ever seen; or, please God, ever will see, glorious as it is.
Stangrave, who knew all Europe well, had walked the path before; but he
stopped then, as he had done the first time, in awe. On the right, slope
up the bare slate downs, up to the foot of cliffs; but only half of
those cliffs God has made. Above the grey slate ledges rise cliffs of
man's handiwork, pierced with a hundred square black embrasures; and
above them the long barrack-ranges of a soldier's town; which a foeman
stormed once, when it was young: but what foeman will ever storm it
again [Transcriber's note: punctuation missing from the end of this
sentence in original. Possibly question mark.] What conqueror's foot
will ever tread again upon the "broad stone of honour," and call
Ehrenbreitstein his? On the left the clover and the corn range on,
beneath the orchard boughs, up to yon knoll of chestnut and acacia, tall
poplar, feathered larch:--but what is that stonework which gleams grey
beneath their stems'? A summer-house for some great duke, looking out
over the glorious Rhine vale, and up the long vineyards of the bright
Moselle, from whence he may bid his people eat, drink, and take their
ease, for they have much goods laid up for many years?--
Bank over bank of earth and stone, cleft by deep embrasures, from which
the great guns grin across the rich gardens, studded with standard
fruit-trees, which close the glacis to its topmost edge. And there,
below him, lie the vineyards: every rock-ledge and narrow path of soil
tossing its golden tendrils to the sun, grey with ripening clusters,
rich with noble wine; but what is that wall which winds among them, up
and down, creeping and sneaking over every ledge and knoll of vantage
ground, pierced with eyelet-holes, backed by strange stairs and
galleries of stone; till it rises close before him, to meet the low
round tower full in his path, from whose deep casemates, as from dark
scowling eye-holes, the ugly cannon-eyes stare up the glen?
Stangrave knows them all--as far as any man can know. The wards of the
key which locks apart the nations; the yet maiden Troy of Europe; the
greatest fortress of the world.
He walks down, turns into the vineyards, and lies down beneath the
mellow shade of vines. He has no sketch-book--articles forbidden; his
passport is in his pocket; and he speaks all tongues of German men. So,
fearless of gendarmes and soldiers, he lies down, in the blazing German
afternoon, upon the shaly soil; and watches the bright-eyed lizards hunt
flies along the roasting-walls, and the great locusts buzz and pitch and
leap; green locusts with red wings, and grey locusts with blue wings; he
notes the species, for he is tired and lazy, and has so many thoughts
within his head, that he is glad to toss them all away, and give up his
soul, if possible, to locusts and lizards, vines and shade.
And far below him fleets the mighty Rhine, rich with the memories of two
thousand stormy years; and on its further bank the grey-walled Coblentz
town, and the long arches of the Moselle-bridge, and the rich flats of
Kaiser Franz, and the long poplar-crested uplands, which look so gay,
and are so stern; for everywhere between the poplar-stems the
saw-toothed outline of the western forts cuts the blue sky.
And far beyond it all sleeps, high in air, the Eifel with its hundred
crater peaks; blue mound behind blue mound, melting into white haze.--
Stangrave has walked upon those hills, and stood upon the crater-lip of
the great Moselkopf, and dreamed beside the Laacher See, beneath the
ancient abbey walls; and his thoughts flit across the Moselle flats
towards his ancient haunts, as he asks himself--How long has that old
Eifel lain in such soft sleep? How long ere it awake again?
It may awake, geologists confess,--why not? and blacken all the skies
with smoke of Tophet, pouring its streams of boiling mud once more to
dam the Rhine, whelming the works of men in flood, and ash, and fire.
Why not? The old earth seems so solid at first sight: but look a little
nearer, and this is the stuff of which she is made!--The wreck of past
earthquakes, the leavings of old floods, the washings of cold cinder
heaps--which are smouldering still below.
Stangrave knew that well enough. He had climbed Vesuvius, Etna,
Popocatepetl. He had felt many an earthquake shock; and knew how far to
trust the everlasting hills. And was old David right, he thought that
day, when he held the earthquake and the volcano as the truest symbols
of the history of human kind, and of the dealings of their Maker with
them? All the magnificent Plutonic imagery of the Hebrew poets, had it
no meaning for men now? Did the Lord still uncover the foundations of
the world, spiritual as well as physical, with the breath of His
displeasure? Was the solfa-tara of Tophet still ordained for tyrants?
And did the Lord still arise out of His place to shake terribly the
earth? Or, had the moral world grown as sleepy as the physical one had
seemed to have done? Would anything awful, unexpected, tragical, ever
burst forth again from the heart of earth, or from the heart of man?
Surprising question! What can ever happen henceforth, save infinite
railroads and crystal palaces, peace and plenty, cockaigne and
dilettantism, to the end of time? Is it not full sixty whole years since
the first French revolution, and six whole years since the revolution of
all Europe? Bah!--change is a thing of the past, and tragedy a myth of
our forefathers; war a bad habit of old barbarians, eradicated by the
spread of an enlightened philanthropy. Men know now how to govern the
world far too well to need any divine visitations, much less divine
punishments; and Stangrave was an Utopian dreamer, only to be excused by
the fact that he had in his pocket the news that three great nations
were gone forth to tear each other as of yore.
Nevertheless, looking round upon those grim earth-mounds and embrasures,
he could not but give the men who put them there credit for supposing
that they might be wanted. Ah! but that might be only one of the direful
necessities of the decaying civilisation of the old world. What a
contrast to the unarmed and peaceful prosperity of his own country!
Thank heaven, New England needed no fortresses, military roads, or
standing armies! True, but why that flush of contemptuous pity for the
poor old world, which could only hold its own by such expensive and ugly
methods?
He asked himself that very question, a moment after, angrily; for he was
out of humour with himself, with his country, and indeed with the
universe in general. And across his mind flashed a memorable
conversation at Constantinople long since, during which he had made some
such unwise remark to Thurnall, and received from him a sharp answer,
which parted them for years.
It was natural enough that that conversation should come back to him
just then; for, in his jealousy, he was thinking of Tom Thurnall often
enough every day; and in spite of his enmity, he could not help
suspecting more and more that Thurnall had had some right on his side of
the quarrel.
He had been twitting Thurnall with the miserable condition of the
labourers in the south of England, and extolling his own country at the
expense of ours. Tom, unable to deny the fact, had waxed all the more
wroth at having it pressed on him; and at last had burst forth--
"Well, and what right have you to crow over us on that score? I suppose,
if you could hire a man in America for eighteen-pence a day instead of a
dollar and a half, you would do it? You Americans are not accustomed to
give more for a thing than it's worth in the market, are you?"
"But," Stangrave had answered, "the glory of America is, that you cannot
get the man for less than the dollar and a half; that he is too well
fed, too prosperous, too well educated, to be made a slave of."
"And therefore makes slaves of the niggers instead? I'll tell you what,
I'm sick of that shallow fallacy--the glory of America! Do you mean by
America, the country, or the people? You boast, all of you, of your
country, as if you had made it yourselves; and quite forget that God
made America, and America has made you."
"Made us, sir?" quoth Stangrave fiercely enough.
"Made you!" replied Thurnall, exaggerating his half truth from anger.
"To what is your comfort, your high feeding, your very education, owing,
but to your having a thin population, a virgin soil, and unlimited means
of emigration? What credit to you if you need no poor laws, when you
pack off your children, as fast as they grow up, to clear more ground
westward? What credit to your yeomen that they have read more books than
our clods have, while they can earn more in four hours than our poor
fellows in twelve? It all depends on the mere physical fact of your
being in a new country, and we in an old one: and as for moral
superiority, I shan't believe in that while I see the whole of the
northern states so utterly given up to the 'almighty dollar,' that they
leave the honour of their country to be made ducks and drakes of by a
few southern slaveholders. Moral superiority? We hold in England that
an honest man is a match for three rogues. If the same law holds good in
the United States, I leave you to settle whether Northerners or
Southerners are the honester men."
Whereupon (and no shame to Stangrave) there was a heavy quarrel, and the
two men had not met since.
But now, those words of Thurnall's, backed by far bitterer ones of
Marie's, were fretting Stangrave's heart.--What if they were true? They
were not the whole truth. There was beside, and above them all, a
nobleness in the American heart, which could, if it chose, and when it
chose, give the lie to that bitter taunt: but had it done so already?
At least he himself had not.... If Thurnall and Marie were unjust to his
nation, they had not been unjust to him. He, at least, had been making,
all his life, mere outward blessings causes of self-congratulation, and
not of humility. He had been priding himself on wealth, ease, luxury,
cultivation, without a thought that these were God's gifts, and that God
would require an account of them. If Thurnall were right, was he himself
too truly the typical American? And bitterly enough he accused at once
himself and his people.
"Noble? Marie is right! We boast of our nobleness: better to take the
only opportunity of showing it which we have had since we have become a
nation! Heaped with every blessing which God could give; beyond the
reach of sorrow, a check, even an interference; shut out from all the
world in God's new Eden, that we might freely eat of all the trees of
the garden, and grow and spread, and enjoy ourselves like the birds of
heaven--God only laid on us one duty, one command, to right one simple,
confessed, conscious wrong....
"And what have we done?--what have even I done? We have steadily,
deliberately cringed at the feet of the wrong-doer, even while we
boasted our superiority to him at every point, and at last, for the sake
of our own selfish ease, helped him to forge new chains for his victims,
and received as our only reward fresh insults. White slaves! We,
perhaps, and not the English peasant, are the white slaves! At least, if
the Irishman emigrates to England, or the Englishman to Canada, he is
not hunted out with blood-hounds, and delivered back to his landlord to
be scourged and chained. He is not practically out of the pale of law,
unrepresented, forbidden even the use of books; and even if he were,
there is an excuse for the old country; for she was founded on no
political principles, but discovered what she knows step by step, a sort
of political Topsy, as Claude Mellot calls her, who has 'kinder growed,'
doing from hand to mouth what seemed best. But that we, who profess to
start as an ideal nation, on fixed ideas of justice, freedom, and
equality--that we should have been stultifying ever since every great
principle of which we so loudly boast!--"
* * * * *
"The old Jew used to say of his nation, 'It is God that hath made us,
and not we ourselves.' We say, 'It is we that have made ourselves, while
God--?'--Ah, yes; I recollect. God's work is to save a soul here and a
soul there, and to leave America to be saved by the Americans who made
it. We must have a broader and deeper creed than that if we are to work
out our destiny. The battle against Middle Age slavery was fought by the
old Catholic Church, which held the Jewish notion, and looked on the
Deity as the actual King of Christendom, and every man in it as God's
own child. I see now!--No wonder that the battle in America has as yet
been fought by the Quakers, who believe that there is a divine light and
voice in every man; while the Calvinist preachers, with their isolating
and individualising creed, have looked on with folded hands, content to
save a negro's soul here and there, whatsoever might become of the
bodies and the national future of the whole negro race. No wonder, while
such men have the teaching of the people, that it is necessary still in
the nineteenth century, in a Protestant country, amid sane human beings,
for such a man as Mr. Sumner to rebut, in sober earnest, the argument
that the negro was the descendant of Canaan, doomed to eternal slavery
by Noah's curse!"
* * * * *
He would rouse himself. He would act, speak, write, as many a noble
fellow-countryman was doing. He had avoided them of old as bores and
fanatics who would needs wake him from his luxurious dreams. He had even
hated them, simply because they were more righteous than he. He would be
a new man henceforth.
He strode down the hill through the cannon-guarded vineyards, among the
busy groups of peasants.
"Yes, Marie was right. Life is meant for work, and not for ease; to
labour in danger and in dread; to do a little good ere the night comes,
when no man can work: instead of trying to realise for oneself a
Paradise; not even Bunyan's shepherd-paradise, much less Fourier's
Casino-paradise; and perhaps least of all, because most selfish and
isolated of all, my own heart-paradise--the apotheosis of loafing, as
Claude calls it. Ah, Tennyson's Palace of Art is a true word--too true,
too true!
"Art? What if the most necessary human art, next to the art of
agriculture, be, after all, the art of war? It has been so in all ages.
What if I have been befooled--what if all the Anglo-Saxon world has been
befooled by forty years of peace? We have forgotten that the history of
the world has been as yet written in blood; that the story of the human
race is the story of its heroes and its martyrs--the slayers and the
slain. Is it not becoming such once more in Europe now? And what divine
exemption can we claim from the law? What right have we to suppose that
it will be aught else, as long as there are wrongs unredressed on earth;
as long as anger and ambition, cupidity and wounded pride, canker the
hearts of men? What if the wise man's attitude, and the wise nation's
attitude, is that of the Jews rebuilding their ruined walls,--the tool
in one hand, and the sword in the other; for the wild Arabs are close
outside, and the time is short, and the storm has only lulled awhile in
mercy, that wise men may prepare for the next thunder-burst? It is an
ugly fact: but I have thrust it away too long, and I must accept it now
and henceforth. This, and not luxurious Broadway; this, and not the
comfortable New England village, is the normal type of human life; and
this is the model city!--Armed industry, which tills the corn and vine
among the cannons' mouths; which never forgets their need, though it may
mask and beautify their terror: but knows that as long as cruelty and
wrong exist on earth, man's destiny is to dare and suffer, and, if it
must be so, to die....
"Yes, I will face my work; my danger, if need be. I will find Marie. I
will tell her that I accept her quest; not for her sake, but for its
own. Only I will demand the right to work at it as I think best,
patiently, moderately, wisely if I can; for a fanatic I cannot be, even
for her sake. She may hate these slaveholders,--she may have her
reasons,--but I cannot. I cannot deal with them as _feras naturae_. I
cannot deny that they are no worse men than I; that I should have done
what they are doing, have said what they are saying, had I been bred up,
as they have been, with irresponsible power over the souls and bodies of
human beings. God! I shudder at the fancy! The brute that I might have
been--that I should have been!
"Yes; one thing at least I have learnt, in all my experiments on poor
humanity;--never to see a man do a wrong thing, without feeling that I
could do the same in his place. I used to pride myself on that once,
fool that I was, and call it comprehensiveness. I used to make it an
excuse for sitting by, and seeing the devil have it all his own way, and
call that toleration. I will see now whether I cannot turn the said
knowledge to a better account, as common sense, patience, and charity;
and yet do work of which neither I nor my country need be ashamed."
He walked down, and on to the bridge of boats. They opened in the
centre; as he reached it a steamer was passing. He lounged on the rail
as the boat passed through, looking carelessly at the groups of
tourists.
Two ladies were standing on the steamer; close to him; looking up at
Ehrenbreitstein. Was it?--yes, it was Sabina, and Marie by her!
But ah, how changed! The cheeks were pale and hollow; dark rings--he
could see them but too plainly as the face was lifted up toward the
light--were round those great eyes, bright no longer. Her face was
listless, careworn; looking all the more sad and impassive by the side
of Sabina's, as she pointed smiling and sparkling, up to the fortress;
and seemed trying to interest Marie in it, but in vain.
He called out. He waved his hand wildly, to the amusement of the
officers and peasants who waited by his side; and who, looking first at
his excited face, and then at the two beautiful women, were not long in
making up their minds about him; and had their private jests
accordingly.
They did not see him, but turned away to look at Coblentz; and the
steamer swept by.
Stangrave stamped with rage--upon a Prussian officer's thin boot.
"Ten thousand pardons!"
"You are excused, dear sir, you are excused," says the good-natured
German, with a wicked smile, which raises a blush on Stangrave's cheek.
"Your eyes were dazzled; why not? it is not often that one sees two such
suns together in the same sky. But calm yourself; the boat stops at
Coblentz."
Stangrave could not well call the man of war to account for his
impertinence; he had had his toes half crushed, and had a right to
indemnify himself as he thought fit. And with a hundred more apologies,
Stangrave prepared to dart across the bridge as soon as it was closed.
Alas! after the steamer, as the fates would have it, came lumbering down
one of those monster timber rafts; and it was a full half hour before
Stangrave could get across, having suffered all the while the torments
of Tantalus, as he watched the boat sweep round to the pier, and
discharge its freight, to be scattered whither he knew not. At last he
got across, and went in chase to the nearest hotel: but they were not
there; thence to the next, and the next, till he had hunted half the
hotels in the town; but hunted all in vain.
He is rushing wildly back again, to try if he can obtain any clue at the
steam-boat pier, through the narrow, dirty street at the back of the
Rhine Cavalier, when he is stopped short by a mighty German embrace, and
a German kiss on either cheek, as the kiss of a housemaid's broom; while
a jolly voice shouts in English:--
"Ah, my dear, dear friend! and you would pass me! Whither the hangman so
fast are you running in the mud!"
"My dear Salomon! But let me go, I beseech you; I am in search--"
"In search?" cries the jolly Jew banker,--"for the philosopher's stone?
You had all that man could want a week since, except that. Search no
more, but come home with me; and we will have a night as of the gods on
Olympus!"
"My dearest fellow, I am looking for two ladies!"
"Two? ah, rogue! shall not one suffice?"
"Don't, my dearest fellow! I am looking for two English ladies."
"Potz! You shall find two hundred in the hotels, ugly and fair; but the
two fairest are gone this two hours."
"When?--which?" cries Stangrave, suspecting at once.
"Sabina Mellot, and a Sultana--I thought her of The Nation, and would
have offered my hand on the spot: but Madame Mellot says she is a
Gentile."
"Gone? And you have seen them! Where?"
"To Bertrich. They had luncheon with my mother, and then started by
private post."
"I must follow."
"_Ach lieber_? But it will be dark in an hour."
"What matter?"
"But you shall find them to-morrow, just as well as to-day. They stay at
Bertrich for a fortnight more. They have been there now a month, and
only left it last week for a pleasure tour, across to the Ahrthal, and
so back by Andernach."
"Why did they leave Coblentz, then, in such hot haste?"
"Ah, the ladies never give reasons. There were letters waiting for them
at our house; and no sooner read, but they leaped up, and would forth.
Come home now, and go by the steamer to-morrow morning."
"Impossible! most hospitable of Israelites."
"To go to-night,--for see the clouds!--Not a postilion will dare to
leave Coblentz, under that quick-coming _allgemein und ungeheuer
henker-hund-und-teufel's-gewitter_."
Stangrave looked up, growling; and gave in. A Rhine-storm was rolling up
rapidly.
"They will be caught in it."
"No. They are far beyond its path by now; while you shall endure the
whole visitation; and if you try to proceed, pass the night in a
flea-pestered post-house, or in a ditch of water."
So Stangrave went home with Herr Salomon, and heard from him, amid
clouds of Latakia, of wars and rumours of wars, distress of nations, and
perplexity, seen by the light, not of the Gospel, but of the
stock-exchange; while the storm fell without in lightning, hail, rain,
of right Rhenish potency.