to account for the safe keeping of his diamonds. Any person opening
the drawers in the nest would have found them full of old papers, and
would also have found that they would not come entirely out of their
places. Opening, however, the third drawer from the top, the auctioneer
pulled at it strongly, until it came out with a sharp snap, exposing
the opening into which it fitted. The back of this drawer was a movable
flap, working on hinges, and retained in its place by a powerful
spring, so that it required a considerable exertion of strength to
extract the drawer from the nest. Putting his hand into the aperture,
Mr Cross grasped an iron semicircular handle which fitted into a niche
in the wall at the back of the drawers, and drew it towards him. As he
did so, the seeming picture glided noiselessly away, leaving its frame
surrounding a dark opening. Through this he passed into what was in
effect a huge inner safe; a closet about four feet square by six in
height, lined throughout with inch-thick steel, and within that again
with four inches of fire-resisting composition contained in an iron
skin. The sliding door was steel, very thick and massive, fastening
with half-a-dozen spring catches, moving in a groove four inches in
depth, and absolutely impervious to any one not acquainted with the
machinery.
Every portion of this latter apparatus had been devised and constructed
by the auctioneer with his own hands, and placed in position by him
after the safe—made to his order by a famous maker—had been set up. The
rest was a mere matter of stone-masonry, completed by ordinary workmen
under his own eye; so that the secret was with him alone. Even now the
whole has not been revealed. Prior to withdrawing the semicircular
handle, it was necessary to turn it to the right, from a perpendicular
to a horizontal position. Unless this were done, the act of pulling
out the handle set in motion a clockwork apparatus, which at the end
of thirty seconds released a heavy counterpoise, the effect of which
was to close the sliding door of the inner safe smartly, and to throw
out of gear the machinery which worked it. It could then only be opened
by means of a second mechanical arrangement, connected with another
handle which was concealed behind a block of stone in the wall near the
roof. It is evident that any person entering the safe after opening
the door, unless in possession of the second part of this secret,
would be effectually trapped. His comrades, if any, would be unable to
deliver him, and he would have to abide an ignominious capture. This
device the auctioneer considered superior to any system of spring-guns
or such-like vulgarities, which are almost as likely to injure the
owner as the thief. Against each side of the safe were piled ordinary
deed-boxes, containing the various securities representing the bulk of
his fortune; but against the side opposite to the door was an iron box
weighing perhaps five hundredweight, and clamped firmly to the floor.
The auctioneer knelt down, and with a small key fastened to the handle
of the larger one, opened the box, disclosing a number of jewel-trays.
As he lifted them out one after the other, the light of the lantern
twinkled upon the rare and valuable gems, of all sizes and shapes,
which lay loose upon the satin cushions. He looked at them long and
earnestly, counting them over and over again, and flashing the more
precious of them to and fro against the light.
‘Ay!’ he muttered—‘all for her—for little Amy. What use in them now?
It’s all over—all over and done with for ever.’ But again came the
thought that if Amy were to become a widow, she might wear the diamonds
after all.
He closed and locked the box, rose from his knees, and went back to
the nest of drawers outside. As he forced the handle into its place,
the picture reappeared, and the sliding-door shut to with a click.
Pushing back the movable flap, he insinuated the drawer into its place,
replaced the papers taken from it, and closed it. Then, closing the
inner strong-door, he stepped again into the street, shutting the outer
door after him; and having satisfied himself that it was securely
closed, went into the house and to bed, where he slept heavily, being
quite tired out, until nearly ten o’clock in the morning.
* * * * *
Despite his vigils of the night before, Mr Cross was tolerably punctual
to his eleven o’clock appointment at the rooms occupied by Captain
Ferrard and his wife in Duke Street. That gentleman received him with
smooth looks and fair words, for it was by no means his cue to be the
first to quarrel. So he courteously hoped that Mr Cross was well,
invited him to a seat, making no allusion to the fact that this was the
first time they had met since the marriage, and then left his visitor
to state the reason of his call.
‘I’m a plain business man, sir,’ said the auctioneer after a moment or
two; ‘and I’ve got little time to spare, so I’ll come to the point at
once. It seems, from what my daughter told me last night, that you and
she don’t get on quite so well together as you should.’
‘Ay, ay!’ said the captain carelessly. The demon within him was being
aroused. He had not the slightest intention of allowing this tradesman
to lecture him. The latter waited for some further remark, but none
came.
‘That isn’t as it should be between man and wife, you know,’ said he at
last, somewhat nonplussed.
‘I’ll be as plain with you, Mr Cross, as you can possibly be with me,’
said the captain, turning round suddenly so as to face his visitor. ‘My
wife has been complaining to you, it seems. Well, I suppose we have
our trifling disagreements, like other couples, and scarcity of money
does not tend to sweeten the temper—does it? I quite agree with you
that this is not as it should be; but then, how few things are! Am I to
suppose that it is only on this subject that you wish to speak to me?’
‘Don’t be hasty,’ replied Mr Cross. ‘I’m not saying it’s your fault,
nor anybody’s fault. I come to you in a friendly way, not to have words
about it. I’ve been thinking the matter over a good deal since last
night, and I’ve come to fancy things might somehow be arranged between
us, after all.’
Ferrard pricked up his ears. ‘Very good of you to say so,’ he said
politely.
‘I don’t say that I’ve quite thought it out, and I don’t say what I
will do, you understand, or what I won’t. But no doubt there’s a good
deal of truth in your remark about money and temper. I’m a rough,
cross-grained sort of fellow, and perhaps I may have been too quick
over this affair. I’m afraid I wasn’t too civil to you that day; and
you must own _you_ were a bit aggravating too. I only want my girl to
be happy.’
‘I assure you, Mr Cross,’ said the captain, with engaging frankness,
‘that in that respect we are entirely at one. I have every desire
for your daughter’s happiness—and, I may add, for my own; of course,
in a secondary degree. But I have already pointed out to you, and
you have been good enough to agree with me, that good temper and
easy circumstances are intimately allied; and I think you will also
admit that bad temper and happiness are entirely incompatible. And
considering our respective tastes and habits, five hundred a year can
scarcely be considered affluence.’
For all his desire to be conciliatory, he could not entirely repress
the slight sneer which pervaded his tone and manner.
The auctioneer looked steadily and gravely at him as he replied: ‘I
daresay we shall find some way of getting rid of the inconvenience,
sir. But I’m due in the City long before this, so I’ll only say that I
hope we shall be better acquainted, and we can’t be that without seeing
more of one another. What do you say to a bit of dinner at my house on
Thursday and staying the night? Then you and I can talk this little
matter over by ourselves, between man and man. I’m going out of town
for a week on Friday; and if you don’t mind, I’ll arrange for Amy to
meet me at London Bridge and keep me company—she looks as if a whiff of
the sea wouldn’t hurt her—and then, you know, you could think over any
proposal I might make to you, alone and quietly; and tell me what you
say to it, when we come back.’
The captain’s heart leaped within him at these proposals. Pressing
claims were at this moment hanging over him, which it seemed that he
might now be able to meet. He could ask no fairer opportunity for
captivating his father-in-law and so turning his dearth into plenty. So
he responded to the invitation with great heartiness, professed himself
delighted at the prospect of so pleasant a trip for his wife; and they
shook hands and parted.
Mr Cross stood on the doorstep for a moment, deep in thought. His mind
sadly misgave him. He mistrusted his power of dealing with this cool,
sarcastic, easy-mannered vagabond, as he would have dealt with one of
his own class. He shook his head as he walked away. If the man would
but die!
That night, feeling weary and worn out, he thought he would indulge in
a little tinkering of some sort in his workshop—to him a never-failing
source of relaxation. For some time past he had been engaged in
making a duplicate set of keys for the doors of the strong-room and
the iron box which held the diamonds, as a useful precaution in case
the originals should be lost or mislaid. So, after dinner, he put on
his leathern apron and again set to work, pipe in mouth. When he had
finished the work, he paid the usual evening visit to his diamonds,
using the new keys. With a touch or two of the small file which he
carried in his hand, he found that they fitted perfectly.
Amy had been the same day to her father in the City, all anxiety to
learn the result of the interview, as her husband declined to tell her
anything. Mr Cross had, as we know, but little to tell; he could only
bid her, as before, keep a good heart, and it would all come right.
He informed her of the arrangements which had been made for Thursday
and Friday next, named the hour at which she was to meet him at London
Bridge, and sent her away a little perplexed, but rejoicing greatly
at the prospect of the trip, and trusting implicitly in her father’s
wisdom.
THE ART OF CONVERSATION.
Certain things are supposed to come by the grace of nature and the
free gift of providence; and the Art of Conversation is one of them.
No one dreams of cultivating this art, either in its perfected form or
in those rudiments which stand as a ‘grammar in use for beginners;’
that is—correct diction, just expression, that inflection of the voice
which shall be eloquent without being theatrical, and that emphasis
which shall be indicative without being exaggerated. People drawl out
their words into long tails or clip them into docked stumps; they loop
them on to the other with a running chain of ‘_er_s,’ or they bite them
off short, each word falling plumb and isolated, disconnected from
all the rest; they let their labials go by the board, and bury their
_r_s in the recesses of their larynx; they throw the accent on the
wrong syllable, and transform their vowels according to their liking;
they say ‘wuz’ for ‘was,’ ‘onnibus’ for ‘omnibus,’ and ‘y’ are’ for
‘you are;’ they shoulder out all the middle aspirates and some of
the initial, and forget that words ending in ‘ing’ have a final _g_
which is neither to be burked out of existence nor hardened into a
ringing _k_. All which lingual misdemeanours they commit with a clear
conscience and a light heart, because ignorant that they have committed
any misdemeanour at all.
Even people of birth and breeding, who should be without offence in
those matters, fail in their grammar, and say the queerest things in
the world. ‘These sort of things;’ ‘Who have you asked?’ ‘Every one of
them know you;’ ‘Between you and I;’ ‘Neither men or women;’ ‘No one’
as the antecedent, and ‘they’ as the relative—these are just a few of
the commonest errors of daily speech of which no one is ashamed, and
to which were you to make a formal objection, you would be thought a
pedant for your pains, and laughed at when your back was turned. If
these things are done in the green tree of method, what may not be
looked for in the dry of substance? And sure it is that we find very
queer things indeed in that dry of substance, and prove for ourselves
how the Art of Conversation is reduced to its primitive elements,
which few give themselves the trouble to embellish, and fewer still to
perfect.
To begin at the beginning, how seldom people pay undivided attention to
the conversation on hand, and how often their thoughts wander and stray
everywhere but where they should be! The most absurd, the most trivial,
thing distracts them. A spider on the wall breaks the thread of an
enthralling narrative, and a butterfly on the lawn breaks into the
gravest, or the most poetic, talk as ruthlessly as the proverbial bull
smashes into the proverbial china-shop. Another alumnus in the same
school, though of a different class, will not let you speak without
interruption. Like a cockerel, spurring and springing at its brother,
this kind dashes at you with an answer before you have half stated your
case. ‘You mean this?’ he says, performing that feat called ‘taking
the words out of your mouth.’ And forthwith he begins his refutation
of that which you have not said and probably had no intention of
saying. Another will not wait until you have finished. His words cross
and intermingle with yours in hopeless confusion of both sound and
sense. You both speak together, and neither listens to the other—you,
because you ‘have the floor,’ and he, because he wishes to have it.
Conversation with such is impossible. It is a battle of words—mere
words—like a heap of loose stones shot pell-mell out of a cart; and
not that orderly interchange of ideas which is what true conversation
should be.
Others, cousins-german to these, interfere in talk with which they
have no business. They do not join in; thus enlarging the basis and
enriching the superstructure; but they break in with something quite
irrelevant, destroying the most interesting discussion on the most
puerile pretence, as a feather whisk might knock down a Sèvres vase.
This form of bad-breeding is much in use among women when they are
jealous, and want to make themselves unpleasant to each other. The
poet or the lord, the bishop or the general, that grand name or this
great fortune—the man who is the feminine cynosure and whose attention
confers distinction—is talking to some one singled out from the rest.
He has to be detached and made to transfer himself. Accordingly, one of
the boldest of the discontented outsiders goes up to the charge, and
in the midst of a talk on literature, art, politics, on his travels or
her experiences, cuts in with a question about the next flower-show or
the last murder; with Who? What? When? How? no nearer to the subject
on hand than the moon is near to Middlesex. This is an offence of
daily occurrence, even among well-bred people—human nature having the
ugly trick of breaking out of the delicate swaddling-clothes in which
education and refinement would fain confine it.
Sometimes your interlocutor is a mother abnormally occupied with her
children, and unable for two consecutive minutes to free her thoughts
from the petty details of their lives. She does not even pretend to
listen to what you are saying. All the time you are speaking, her eyes
are wandering about the room, to make sure that Tom is not forgetting
his manners, and that Jane is not making holes in hers—that Frank is
where he should be, and Sarah not where she should not be—that Edith
is not talking too much, and that Charley is not talking too little:
it does not matter what she is anxious about, seeing that if it be not
one thing it will be another. And you need not be offended, nor take
her inattention as a slight special to yourself. The Golden-mouthed
himself could not fix her thoughts, wandering as they always are over
the pathless spaces of her maternal fear. She is one of the most
disagreeable of the whole tribe of the conversational awkward-squad.
You have nothing for it but to stop dead—in the midst of a sentence,
if need be—until she has brought her roving eyes back to the point
which presupposes attention, and appears to be conscious that you are
speaking to her.
Others yawn in your face with frank and undisguised weariness; and
some put up the transparent screen of a fan or two fingers; others,
again, make that constrained grimace which accompanies the eating
and the swallowing of the yawn, and think that their sudden gulp and
hesitation will pass unobserved. Some give wrong answers, with their
eyes fixed on yours, as if listening devoutly to all you say, and
absorbed in your conversation. They have mastered this part of the
form, and can look as if drinking in to the last verbal drop. The
reality is analogous to that condition of Baron Münchhausen’s horse
with which we are all familiar, and which we express by the phrase:
‘Going in at one ear and out by another.’ One who had learned this art
of looking attention without giving it, once fell into a pit whence was
no possible extraction. ‘Do you call gentlemen in England It?’ said
an English-speaking German who thought his sweet companion had been
entirely interested in his talk. Her eyes—and what eyes they were!—had
been all he could desire—fixed, listening, interested. Meanwhile, her
ears had been occupied elsewhere. At her back, on the ottoman where
she was sitting, was being carried on a conversation in which she was
deeply interested. Before her sat her German, labouring heavily among
the stiff clay-clods of his imperfect English. Her answer to his remark
betrayed the absence of the mind underneath all the steadfastness
of her bewildering eyes. ‘Do you call gentlemen in England It?’ he
repeated with mingled reproach, sorrow, and—enlightenment. That random
answer to his previous question cost her the offer of a spray of orange
blossom—and him the pain of its refusal.
Beyond these rudiments comes the higher art reaching into grace, and
needing enlightened intelligence for its perfection. The section which
we have been considering belongs only to the grammar, the beginning,
the mere infancy of things, like the New Zealander’s tattoo for
personal decoration, or his hideous idol for representative art. Beyond
the good-breeding of attention comes the supreme art, we had almost
said the science of conversation—of all things the most difficult, to
judge by its rarity at least in England. It is more common in France,
where it is better understood, and where a good conversationalist
is prized as a Master in his own degree. And be it observed—a good
conversationalist is not the same thing as a good anecdotist, a good
debater, a good talker—this last too often sinning with Coleridge in
monopolising all the talk to himself, and granting only some ‘brilliant
flashes of silence’ wherein the ruck may have their innings. A good
conversationalist, on the contrary, is essentially reciprocal. He
flings his own ball, but he catches the return and waits for its throw.
He has a light touch, and that kind of skill which glances off rather
than hits fair and square. He has also the power of suggestiveness
and direction, as perfect in its way as the skill with which certain
adepts can make a ball wind in and out of stumps and stakes by the
clever twist of their first throw off. He is not one of those who run
a subject to earth and finish it all the same as one would finish a
fox; but he keeps it alive and going with the neatest, deftest, little
fillips possible—as the Japanese keep up their paper butterflies
with airy puffs of their flimsy fans, or as a thaumaturgist guides
his spinning-plates with the tip of his forefinger. When it is all
over, and you ask yourself what you have got by it, you are forced
to confess, Nothing. You have been superficially amused, and for the
moment interested; but you have learned nothing, and are no richer
mentally than you were before the verbal butterfly began to flutter and
the wordy plate to spin.
We in England, however, know but little of this kind of talk. We have
men who argue, and men who assert; and we have men, and women too,
who come down with a thud on the toes of all whom they encounter in
the various walks of conversation. But of the light bright thrust and
parry, the brilliant quarte and tierce, the flashing ‘pinked’ and quick
_riposte_ characteristic of the palmy days of Parisian society, we have
but very little. For foils we use bludgeons; for paper butterflies,
leaden bullets. We are too much in earnest to be graceful, and too
anxious about our subject to be careful of our method. Hence we have
better dialecticians than conversationalists, and better fighters than
fencers. But really, say, at a dinner, or in the crowded corners of a
fashionable soirée, you cannot go into the mazes of ‘evidences,’ nor
discuss the value of esoteric Buddhism, nor yet winnow your sheaf of
political economy, beginning with Adam Smith and ending with Henry
George. You can only play with words and toss up airy bubbles of ideas.
And he who can play with most dexterity, and whose airy bubbles have
the brightest iridescence, is the hero of the moment and the master of
the situation.
As a rule, authors are but dull dogs in conversation. They keep their
good things for their books. Those who expect in literary society the
feast of reason and the flow of soul, find themselves for the most part
wofully disappointed. More is to be got out of the amateurist set—that
fringe which would be if it could, and which hangs on to the main
body as the best thing it can do in the circumstances. But authors
of the professional and bread-winning class will talk only of things
already known, repeating what they have written, but taking care not to
forestall what they have not yet printed. They, and all professionals
of any denomination whatsoever, are also given to talk shop among
themselves; and shop is usually disagreeable to the outsider.
We might do worse than cultivate Conversation as an Art. Time has room
for all things in his hand, and life has need of variety. Desperately
busy and terribly in earnest as we may be, blowing bubbles has yet
its value. Moreover, the true art of conversation is a lesson in
good-breeding, which, in its turn, is the _fine fleur_ of civilisation;
and thus, from the rootwork of manner to the efflorescence of matter,
there is something to be gained by the perfection of the art.
IN QUEER COMPANY.
IN TWO PARTS.—PART I.
If the following account of what happened to me a few years ago serves
no other purpose, it may pass muster as an illustration of two old
sayings, namely, that ‘One half of the world does not know how the
other half lives,’ and that ‘Truth is often stranger than fiction.’