VANITAS VANITATUM.
There is a certain poet whose free-and-easy philosophy expressed in
verse, rippling and silvery, but slightly too luscious for Sunday
reading in a boarding-school conducted on correct principles, holds that
when far from the lips we love, we have but to make love to the lips we
are near. Our friend O'Hara, we fear, was much addicted to reading that
erotic bard, and had been so long removed by time and so far by distance
from his mistress, to whom belonged the tress of hair he wore over his
heart and under his watch-fob--fob without a watch--that he had not many
obstacles to conquer in persuading himself that Captain Chauvin's
unmarried _protégée_ was strikingly handsome. There was that high-bred
air about her, too, which plays such havoc with the feelings of a race
accustomed to set more store by blood than pelf. Her manners were
stamped by a refined self-respecting reserve not chilled to the point of
_hauteur_. She had a commanding figure, with brilliant eyes, and that
feature which is the greatest charm in woman--an even and undamaged set
of almond-white teeth, when her lips parted. Her hair, besides, was the
colour of his tress--as ebon and full, as thick and glossy.
'Frenchwomen make good housewives,' reflected Manus to himself, as he
smoked the pipe of meditation the morning after the marriage. 'They're
not very expansive at home, it is true, but they do adore their
children. Caroline is not insipid, anyhow. In case anything happened to
Bidelia, she would be just the woman to fall back upon. Besides, I have
neither leisure nor liking for billing and cooing. How is Bidelia, by
the way? What is she doing? Egad! I'll write to London, to my cousin
Hyacinth, to ask him.'
And he did write.
And this was the answer he got eight-and-forty hours afterwards:
'Doughty Street, London, W.C.
'April 27th, 1866.
'DEAR MANUS,
'Confound you, why don't you write oftener? As we used to say on
the old sod (by-the-way, is Ireland really older than any other
place?)--as we used to say, I repeat, only twisting the
phrase--it's good for sore eyes to see your crabbed fist. How am I
getting on? _More Hibernico_, I shall answer, your question by
asking one of my own. How are _you_ getting on? You haven't taken
your degree yet, with or without honours, that I can plainly
discern, _ma bouchal_. Taking lessons in anatomy from the living
subject at Bullier, I'm afraid, eh? you born divil of the O'Hara
breed and the pedigree without a blemish. Now, if you were a
suckling barrister you might have a chance of getting at the head
of your profession by phrenologically investigating the Chief
Justice's noddle; but studying the symmetry of the human form
divine from the contortions of Rigolboche and her friends is hardly
the way to rival Butcher or Brunton.
'Chaffing apart, old man, I do hope you stick to your profession,
and are not carried away by your ill-starred passion for
Literature. Like Art, she is but a sorry, wanton jade to pay court
to, and leaves you in the lurch when most you stand in need of a
helping hand. Better be a mediocre sawbones than a mediocre
paper-stainer. The mediocre sawbones can always take a shop, go to
India, marry a sickly widow, or invent a patent medicine. As for
poor paper-stainer, every day that he lives he is eating his way
into his capital. My boy, they won't lend money to a pressman in
this town, even on solvent security. The other day I went myself
_in propria personâ_ to ask for a small advance from an advertising
firm of usurers close to London Bridge, and after I had filled and
signed a pile of scored fools-cap, what did they tell me?--"If you
had informed us that your were a journalist at first you might
have saved yourself all that trouble. We make it a rule to have no
business transactions with journalists!" There was a pewter
inkstand at my elbow, and I imagine it would have had a business
transaction with a greasy little Hebrew's countenance if I didn't
happen to catch a glimpse of a couple of others, who were hiding
behind the tall desks, cut-and-dry witnesses in the event of
assault and battery, I presume. Here I must stop to drink a glass
to the memory of Titus. Wasn't he the fellow that brought about the
destruction of Jerusalem? Glory be his bed and birthright this
blessed day!
* * * * *
'Well, 'tis time to tell you how I am getting on. _Imprimis_, I
have _not_ set the Thames ablaze, and, honestly, I must admit that
it was not for the lack of inflammable properties in the liquid.
One may be a Triton in his own parish pond, and a very minute
minnow in this huge ocean of London. The streets are not paved with
gold, nor the houses roofed with rubies. The streets are more
usually paved like those of another spot, but with big ambitions
instead of good intentions, and as to the houses, he's a lucky dog
who has one he can call his own. I have tried my hand at anything
and everything not requiring a strict preliminary training--bar
stone-breaking. I had aspirations towards the stage, but I never
got beyond the front door--that is to say, I was hired as a
check-taker at the Vaudeville once. I thought I would write a
melodrama--an Irish one, of course--and I took it to one Mrs.
Selby, a dear old lady, who had a house devoted to comedietta and
extravaganza, legs and upholstery--how innocent of all these things
I was, you may guess from this--and she kindly recommended me to
cart it to the Surrey. I did. It was accepted on conditions, after
sundry hums and haws. The theatre was burnt down two nights
afterwards. The theatre was insured, but, alas! the manuscript of
"The Terryalts" was not, and I hadn't a copy of it.
I next became a cab-driver; that is, as soon as I got to have the
map of the town sunk in _bas-relief_ on my cranium. A hard life,
precarious, harassing, and not very profitable. The novelty of the
thing kept me up for a while, but I had to give in after a course
of three months. The deuce of an adventure I had but once, and that
was with a distinguished member of the craft I at present honour
with my patronage. It was outside Stone's, in Panton Street. A
portly man, with a nose the hue of a danger-signal, hailed me.
"Barnes, cabby," he said, "and look alive about it." "All right,
sir," and away I rattled till I got to Barnes, a village on the
south bank of the river, between Putney and Mortlake. I opened the
spy-hole at the top of the hansom to ask at what house I was to
stop, and, lo and behold you! there was my fare snoring the snore
of the just. I got down and roused him. "Where are we?" he asked. I
told him. "Drat you!" he cried, "I meant Barnes' Tavern, in the
Haymarket--I wanted to borrow some tin there." I apologized. "All
right, watchman," he cried, "drive on!" and dropped back again into
the corner as sound asleep as a curled hedgehog. I drove to the
middle of Barnes Common, tenderly lifted my customer out of the
cab, and gently bedded him on his back in the shadow of a
furze-bush.
'My next essay at fortune took a military turn. I went down to
Charles Street, Westminster, met a recruiting sergeant, declared my
enthusiastic yearning to join the sappers and miners, and soiled my
palm with the Saxon shilling. My martial career was not remarkably
lengthened. I failed to "pass the doctor" next morning--he told me
I had varicose veins! Bad manners to his impudence, the pursy
little humbug! I only wished you and I had him alongside us up
Keeper Hill, on one of our boyhood's rambles, and we'd soon take
the wind and the conceit out of him.
'What was I to do now? I was fairly at my wits' end. To rob I was
not able--it requires genius here; to beg I was ashamed. I had
serious thoughts of trying my hand at the fine arts. I heard that
those fellows who chalk mackerel on the pavement make a tidy living
out of it, and it struck me that a new departure in that direction
might bring me fame and fortune. My notion--it may turn up a trump
yet for somebody--was to paint caricatures in distemper on the
backs of tortoises. But I had no spare cash to lay out on stock,
either in pigments or specimens of the genus _testudo_.
'At last I met Providence in the form of Dan McCarthy, of Doonas.
"Hyacinth," said he, "do you know anything of boxing?" I was
puzzled, for I wasn't sure but he meant boxing the compass, but I
found I had got into the wrong box there. The long and short of it
was, a friend of his had asked him to look up a smart man with a
ready pen and a vigorous imagination, who would undertake to write
racy accounts of some of the renowned fisticuff fights of old, for
a publican's newspaper. That's what I am doing now, God forgive me!
The pay is good, but the work does not like me, I am wise in the
"upper-cut," and am known to every "scrapper" in the "drums" of the
East and West End, and all the rest; in short, I am comparatively
comfortable, but completely demoralized. When you come over next, I
can take you, perhaps, to a "merry little mill," for I am always in
the "know."
'Don't come, though, an you're sensible, in such weather as we have
now. Fog! fog!! fog!!! How I envy you the clear skies of the one
city in the world outside Ireland worth living in--wicked,
delightful Paris. D----n the London fog! It caught me by the larynx
and laid me by the heels three days last November. It steals on you
like a garrotter, throttles you, chokes your lungs, clogs your
fancy, clouds your good-humour, and sets your drunken landlady
stealing your coal by the scuttle and your gin by the quartern.
'Your affectionate coz,
'HYACINTH BLAKE.
'P.S.--And so it is after Bidelia Blake you'd be asking, Mr.
Slyboots? Faith! she has changed her name. Bidelia, or "Biddy," as
we knew her, transmogrified herself into Beatrice when she came
over here. Not satisfied with that, she has altered her surname to
Clarke. A fine, handsome, wealthy, warm-hearted husband he is, and
no fool. He's a deal better than Biddy deserved. They have a
mansion in Mayfair, and I have the run of the house, but I seldom
go there, as I do not wish to make myself too cheap. I met them in
the Park yesterday. Dash my buttons! as Li-Chung, the Chinaman,
says, if you'd recognise Biddy. She was rosy with health and
spirits (Nature's, not Kinahan's), and burning with jewels. I don't
know if her husband chains her up at night, but she had a something
like a brass dog-collar round her neck. And her wool--I believe you
got a tress of it once--is not black now, but yellow--the effect,
I am seriously afraid, not so much of London sunshine or London
fog, as of golden hairwash. You had better ask her for another
tress.
'H. B.'
O'Hara's face, as he perused this letter, would have served as a model
for an actor charged with the duty of reading a similar epistle on the
stage. He liked his cousin, but he did not seek to conceal his
impatience--nobody else was present--at Blake's recital of his
meanderings in quest of a social position. The letter was humorous here
and there, but he did not appreciate the humour. He wanted to hear of
Bidelia; and when he did hear of her, in the abrupt way Hyacinth put it
in his postscript,--well, his face was a study. He coloured, he re-read
the passage, he clutched the paper tightly in his palm, he laughed, he
sat down in his arm-chair, he read the postscript for the third time,
and then he lit his pipe.
It is an excellent plan to light one's pipe in moments of vexation.
O'Hara _was_ vexed, more vexed than sorry. He puffed and thought, and
thought and puffed, and knit his brows, and occasionally took the amber
mouthpiece from between his lips and grinned in a scornful fashion, like
the baffled villain of tragedy in a show-booth. He stood up at length,
took the paper in which the tress of hair was confined, did not kiss it
as his wont was, but flung it into the stove, where it lit up, as if it
were well preserved in pomatum, crackled crisply, flared, and left a
sharp ugly smell of singed goose behind it. O'Hara thought there was a
peculiar repulsiveness in the odour. It was the result of his frame of
mind. The perfumed locks of Cleopatra would have smelled as foul. The
laws of nature are not affected by our prejudices. The body of the hero
putrefies by the same process as the body of Hodge.
O'Hara then sat down and set himself a-thinking anew. This was the sum
of his thoughts; being literary, they wandered into quotation:
'"Frailty, thy name is woman!"' (Shakespeare; this is good to begin
with!) 'Bidelia never had an ounce of sentiment in her. D----n
sentiment! I don't regret her. Pshaw! not I; in fact, I'm
pleased--pleased, no, rejoiced, that she's well married. What's this
Noll says? "She who makes her husband happy leaves nowhere in the
running the novel-reading hussy, whose sole aim is to murder mankind
with shafts from her quiver."' (This is better: substantially, it is
Goldsmith, but it has been very, very queerly committed to memory. Poor
fellow! his nerves must have been unstrung.) 'To Connaught with Bidelia
I'll marry the Frenchwoman through spite. I'll throw myself at her feet
next week, or next year--I'll swear I love, I do love her--that is to
say, I do not dislike her--and I'll send Missus Beatrice Clarke--oh,
the short-sightedness of some girls!--an invitation to the ceremony and
the wedding-breakfast to follow, with a promise of a bit of bride-cake
to cheer her if she is debarred by previous engagements from the
pleasure of accepting my very kind invitation. Good! "Remove far from me
vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food
convenient for me."' (Holy Writ; this is getting serious, friend
O'Hara.) 'Caroline was evidently designed for me by nature. My mind is
made up.'
O'Hara rose, and nearly tripped over Pat, his faithful dog, the last
henchman of the clan. He stroked him fondly on the back; and Pat,
jumping up, licked his master's hand with his moist red tongue, and then
went through a favourite gymnastic exercise--that of pursuing his own
tail. When he was tired of this canine form of search for a chimera, he
stood still, panting, and yelped and agitated his tail like a fan.
'Biscuits as usual,' said O'Hara to the quadruped. 'By my troth, it
would be a great saving to me if _you_ were in love, but you're not.
You've the appetite of an ogre.
* * * * *
O'Hara and the O'Hoolohan might have been discovered outside the Café de
Suède one evening a month afterwards. They were deep in conversation.
'I do not believe in the constancy of woman--you know my reasons; but I
do in the necessity of marriage. You know Caroline intimately now. Do
you admire her?'
It was O'Hara who spoke.
'Much,' answered O'Hoolohan; 'but some people are prejudiced in favour
of brunettes.'
'Ah! you mistake me. I referred to disposition, to mind--which, after
all, counts more in a union than complexion, or figure, or hair. Can I
confide in you?'
'You are not obliged to give your confidence if you mistrust.'
'Then I shall give it. I have spoken to her of marriage. She frankly
told me that she felt she could not love, and I as frankly told her that
neither could I.'
'Then the affair is finished?'
'Yes, but not as you think. We have agreed to marry, and trust to love
to come afterwards.'
'Mother of Moses! I hope it may,' and O'Hoolohan leant back surprised.
'Ah! friend, have you forgotten what Moore sang?'
'That poodle of literature,' said O'Hara, 'he sang any amount of
nonsense, like the rest of them. Which of his verses are you thinking of
now?'
'Have it, if you must:
'"In France, when the heart of a woman sets sail
On the ocean of wedlock its fortune to try,
Love seldom goes far in a vessel so frail,
But just pilots her off, and then bids her good-bye!"'
'Is that _your_ experience?' queried O'Hara.
'Respect your seniors, _blanc-bec_,'[12] growled O'Hoolohan.
'At your excellency's orders,' returned O'Hara, with mock
obsequiousness. 'But I can cap your quotation with another from Master
Tommy Little, which will give us an excuse for fresh bocks at all
events:
'"----fill the cup--where'er, boy,
Our choice may fall, our choice may fall;
We're sure to find Love there, boy,
So drink them all, so drink them all!"'
'I don't mind pledging that,' assented O'Hoolohan, 'but I wish all the
same the lass and you had got spooney on each other. This sort of
nuptial knot has a kink in it. As for Berthe and myself, we're happy as
Midsummer Day, but conscientiously I can offer _you_ no
congratulations.'
'Your good wishes are all I want. There are marriages of affection, of
interest, of spite, and of necessity; but this is the first time, I
venture to say, you have heard of a marriage of esteem,' and O'Hara
folded his arms and looked philosophic.
'By my hand,' remarked O'Hoolohan, 'you're an original. I can't make you
out. I give you up.'