It was an amazing week they spent in London. For a couple of days Nelly
was busied in getting "things" and "odds and ends," and, to her credit,
she dressed the part most admirably. She abjured all the imperial
purples, the Mediterranean blues, the shrieking lilacs that her class
usually affects, and appeared at last a model of neat gaiety.
In the meantime, while these shopping expeditions were in progress,
while Nelly consulted with those tall, dark-robed, golden-haired and
awful Elegances which preside over the last mysteries of the draper and
milliner, Ambrose sat at home in Little Russell Row and worked out the
outlines of some fantasies that had risen in his mind. It was, in fact,
during these days that he made the notes which were afterwards expanded
into the curious _Defence of Taverns_, a book which is now rare and
sought after by collectors. It is supposed that it was this work that
was in poor Palmer's mind when the earnest man referred with a sort of
gloomy reticence to Meyrick's later career. He had, in all probability,
not read a line of it; but the title was certainly not a very pleasing
one, judged by ordinary scholastic standards. And it must be said that
the critical reception of the book was not exactly encouraging. One
paper wondered candidly why such a book was ever written or printed;
another denounced the author in good, set terms as an enemy of the great
temperance movement; while a third, a Monthly Reviewer, declared that
the work made his blood boil. Yet even the severest moralists should
have seen by the epigraph that the Apes and Owls and Antiques hid
mysteries of some sort, since a writer whose purposes were really evil
and intemperate would never have chosen such a motto as: _Jalalud-Din
praised the behaviour of the Inebriated and drank water from the well_.
But the reviewers thought that this was unintelligible nonsense, and
merely a small part of the writer's general purpose to annoy.
The rough sketch is contained in the first of the _Note Books_, which
are still unpublished, and perhaps are likely to remain so. Meyrick
jotted down his hints and ideas in the dingy "first floor front" of the
Bloomsbury lodging-house, sitting at the rosewood "Davenport" which, to
the landlady, seemed the last word in beautiful furniture.
The menage rose late. What a relief it was to be free of the horrible
bells that poisoned one's rest at Lupton, to lie in peace as long as one
liked, smoking a matutinal cigarette or two to the accompaniment of a
cup of tea! Nelly was acquiring the art of the cigarette-smoker by
degrees. She did not like the taste at all at first, but the wild and
daring deviltry of the practice sustained her, and she persevered. And
while they thus wasted the best hours of the day, Ambrose would make to
pass before the bottom of the bed a long procession of the masters, each
uttering his characteristic word of horror and astonishment as he went
by, each whirled away by some invisible power in the middle of a
sentence. Thus would enter Chesson, fully attired in cassock, cap and
gown:
"Meyrick! It is impossible? Are you not aware that such conduct as this
is entirely inconsistent with the tone of a great Public School? Have
the Games ..." But he was gone; his legs were seen vanishing in a
whirlwind which bore him up the chimney.
Then Horbury rose out of the carpet:
"Plain living and clear thinking are the notes of the System. A Spartan
Discipline--Meyrick! Do you call this a Spartan Discipline? Smoking
tobacco and reposing with ..." He shot like an arrow after the Head.
"We discourage luxury by every means in our power. Boy! This is luxury!
Boy, boy! You are like the later Romans, boy! Heliogabalus was
accustomed ..." The chimney consumed Palmer also; and he gave place to
another.
"Roughly speaking, a boy should be always either in school or playing
games. He should never be suffered to be at a loose end. Is this your
idea of playing games? I tell you, Meyrick ..."
The game amused Nelly, more from its accompanying "business" and facial
expression than from any particular comprehension of the dialogue.
Ambrose saw that she could not grasp all the comedy of his situations,
so he invented an Idyll between the Doctor and a notorious and
flamboyant barmaid at the "Bell." The fame of this lady ran great but
not gracious through all Lupton. This proved a huge success; beginning
as a mere episode, it gathered to itself a complicated network of
incidents and adventures, of wild attempts and strange escapes, of
stratagems and ambushes, of disguises and alarms. Indeed, as Ambrose
instructed Nelly with great solemnity, the tale, at first an idyll, the
simple, pastoral story of the loves of the Shepherd Chesson and the
Nymph Bella, was rapidly becoming epical in its character. He talked of
dividing it into twelve books! He enlarged very elaborately the Defeat
of the Suitors. In this the dear old Head, disguised as a bookmaker,
drugged the whisky of the young bloods who were accustomed to throng
about the inner bar of the "Bell." There was quite a long passage
describing the compounding of the patent draught from various herbs, the
enormous cook at the Head's house enacting a kind of Canidia part, and
helping in the concoction of the dose.
"Mrs. Belper," the Doctor would observe, "This is _most_ gratifying. I
had no idea that your knowledge of simples was so extensive. Do I
understand you to affirm that those few leaves which you hold in your
hand will produce marked symptoms?"
"Bless your dear 'art, Doctor Chesson, and if you'll forgive me for
talking so to such a learned gentleman, and so good, I'm sure, but
you'll find there's nothing in the world like it. Often and often have I
'eard my pore old mother that's dead and gone these forty year come
Candlemas ..."
"Mrs. Belper, Mrs. Belper, I am surprised at you! Are you not aware that
the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has pronounced the
observance of the festival you so lightly name to be of a highly
superstitious nature? Your deceased mother, you were saying, will have
entered into her reward forty years ago on February the second of next
year? Is not this the case?"
"These forty years came Febbymas, I mean, and a good woman she was, and
never have I seen a larger wart on the nose and her legs bad as bad for
years and years!"
"These details, though, no doubt, of high personal interest, seem hardly
germane to our present undertaking. However, Mrs. Belper, proceed in
your remarks."
"And thank you kindly, Sir, and not forgetting you are a clergyman--but
there! we can't all of us be everything. And my pore mother, as I was
saying, Sir, she said, again and again, that if she'd been like some
folks she'd a made a fortune in golden money from this very yarb I'm
a-showing you, Sir."
"Dear me, Mrs. Belper! You interest me deeply. I have often thought how
wrong it is of us to neglect, as undoubtedly we _do_ neglect, the
bounteous gifts of the kindly earth. Your lamented mother used this
specific with remarkable success?"
"Lord a mercy, Doctor 'Chesson! elephants couldn't a stood against it,
nor yet whales, being as how it's stronger than the strongest gunpowder
that was ever brewed or blasted, and miles better than the nasty
rubbidge you get in them doctors' shops, and a pretty penny they make
you pay for it and no better than calomel, if you ask me, Sir. But be
it the strongest of the strong, I'll take my Gospel oath it's weak to
what my pore mother made, and that anybody in Much Moddle parish would
tell you, for man, woman or child who took one of Mrs. Marjoram's
Mixtures and got over it, remember it, he would, until his dying day.
And my pore old mother, she was that funny--never was a cheerfuller
woman, I do believe, and when Tom Copus, the lame fiddler, he got
married, pore mother! though she could hardly walk, her legs was that
bad, come she would, and if she didn't slip a little of the mixture into
the beer when everybody was looking another way! Pore, dear soul! as she
said herself afterwards, 'mirth becomes marriage,' and so to be sure it
does, and merry they all were that day that didn't touch the beer,
preferring spirits, which pore mother couldn't get at, being locked
up--a nasty, mean trick, I call it, and always will."
"Enough, Mrs. Belper, enough! You have amply satisfied me as to the
potency of the late Mrs. Marjoram's pharmacopoeia. We will, if you have
no objection, Mrs. Belper, make the mixture--to use the words of
Shakespeare--'slab and thick.'"
"And bless your kind 'art, Sir, and a good, kind master you've always
been to me, if you 'aven't got enough 'ere to lay out all the Lupton
town, call me a Dutchwoman, and that I never was, nor pore Belper
neither."
"Certainly not, Mrs. Belper. The Dutch belong to a different branch of
the great Teutonic stock, or, if identity had ever existed, the two
races have long been differentiated. I think, Mrs. Belper, that the most
eminent physicians have recognised the beneficial effects of a gentle
laxative during the treacherous (though delightful) season of spring?"
"Law bless you, Sir, you're right, as you always are, or why, Doctor? As
my pore mother used to say when she made up the mixture: 'Scour 'em out
is the right way about!' And laugh she would as she pounded the stuff up
till I really thought she would 'a busted, and shaking like the best
blancmanges all the while."
"Mrs. Belper, you have removed a weight from my mind. You think, then,
that I shall be freed from all unfair competition while I pay my
addresses to my young friend, Miss Floyer?"
"As free you will be, Doctor Chesson, Sir, as the little birds in the
air; for not one of them young fellers will stand on his feet for days,
and groans and 'owls will be the best word that mortal man will speak,
and bless you they will with their dying breath. So, Sir, you'll 'ave
the sweet young lady, bless her dear 'art, all to yourself, and if it's
twins, don't blame me!"
"Mrs. Belper, your construction, if I may say so, is somewhat proleptic
in its character. Still, I am sure that your meaning is good. Ha! I hear
the bell for afternoon school."
The Doctor's voice happened to be shrill and piercing, with something of
the tone of the tooth-comb and tissue-paper; while the fat cook spoke in
a suety, husky contralto. Ambrose reproduced these peculiarities with
the gift of the born mimic, adding appropriate antic and gesture to
grace the show, and Nelly's appreciation of its humours was intense.
Day by day new incidents and scenes were added. The Head, in the pursuit
of his guilty passion, hid in the coal-cellar of the "Bell," and,
rustling sounds being heard, evaded detection for a while by imitating
the barks of a terrier in chase of a rat. Nelly liked to hear the "Wuff!
wuff! wuff!" which was introduced at this point. She liked also the
final catastrophe, when the odd man of the "Bell" burst into the bar and
said: "Dang my eyes, if it ain't the Doctor! I seed his cap and gown as
he run round and round the coals on all fours, a-growling 'orrible." To
which the landlady rejoined: "Don't tell your silly lies here! How
_could_ he growl, him being a clergyman?" And all the loafers joined in
the chorus: "That's right, Tom; why _do_ you talk such silly lies as
that--him being a clergyman?"
They laughed so loud and so merrily over their morning tea and these
lunacies that the landlady doubted gravely as to their marriage lines.
She cared nothing; they had paid what she asked, money down in advance,
and, as she said: "Young gentlemen _will_ have their fun with the young
ladies--so what's the good of talking?"
Breakfast came at length. They gave the landlady a warning bell some
half-hour in advance, so the odd food was, at all events, not cold.
Afterwards Nelly sallied off on her shopping expeditions, which, as
might have been expected, she enjoyed hugely, and Ambrose stayed alone,
with his pen and ink and a fat notebook which had captured his eye in a
stationer's window.
Under these odd circumstances, then, he laid the foundations of his rare
and precious _Defence of Taverns_, which is now termed by those
fortunate enough to possess copies as a unique and golden treatise.
Though he added a good deal in later years and remodelled and rearranged
freely, there is a certain charm of vigour and freshness about the first
sketch which is quite delightful in its way. Take, for example, the
description of the whole world overwhelmed with sobriety: a deadly
absence of inebriation annulling and destroying all the works and
thoughts of men, the country itself at point to perish of the want of
good liquor and good drinkers. He shows how there is grave cause to
dread that, by reason of this sad neglect of the Dionysiac Mysteries,
humanity is fast falling backward from the great heights to which it had
ascended, and is in imminent danger of returning to the dumb and blind
and helpless condition of the brutes.
"How else," he says, "can one account for the stricken state in which
all the animal world grows and is eternally impotent? To them, strange,
vast and enormous powers and faculties have been given. Consider, for
example, the curious equipments of two odd extremes in this sphere--the
ant and the elephant. The ant, if one may say so, is very near to us. We
have our great centres of industry, our Black Country and our slaves
who, if not born black, become black in our service. And the ants, too,
have their black, enslaved races who do their dirty work for them, and
are, perhaps, congratulated on their privileges as sharing in the
blessings of civilisation--though this may be a refinement. The ant
slaves, I believe, will rally eagerly to the defence of the nest and the
eggs, and they say that the labouring classes are Liberal to the core.
Nay; we grow mushrooms by art, and so they. In some lands, I think, they
make enormous nests which are the nuisance and terror of the country. We
have Manchester and Lupton and Leeds, and many such places--one would
think them altogether civilised.
"The elephant, again, has many gifts which we lack. Note the curious
instinct (or intuition, rather) of danger. The elephant knows, for
example, when a bridge is unsafe, and refuses to pass, where a man would
go on to destruction. One might examine in the same way all the
creatures, and find in them singular capacities.
"Yet--they have no art. They see--but they see not. They hear--and they
hear not. The odour in their nostrils has no sweetness at all. They have
made no report of all the wonders that they knew. Their houses are,
sometimes, as ingenious as a Chemical Works, but never is there any
beauty for beauty's sake.
"It is clear that their state is thus desolate, because of the heavy
pall of sobriety that hangs over them all; and it scarcely seems to have
occurred to our 'Temperance' advocates that when they urge on us the
example and abstinence of the beasts they have advanced the deadliest of
all arguments against their nostrum. The Laughing Jackass is a
teetotaller, doubtless, but no sane man should desire to be a Laughing
Jackass.
"But the history of the men who have attained, who have done the
glorious things of the earth and have become for ever exalted is the
history of the men who have quested the Cup. Dionysius, said the Greeks,
_civilised_ the world; and the Bacchic Mystery was, naturally, the heart
and core of Greek civilisation.
"Note the similitudes of Vine and Vineyard in Old Testament.
"Note the Quest of the San Graal.
"Note Rabelais and _La Dive Bouteille_.
"Place yourself in imagination in a Gothic Cathedral of the thirteenth
century and assist at High Mass. Then go to the nearest Little Bethel,
and look, and listen. Consider the difference in the two buildings, in
those who worship in one and listen and criticise in the other. You have
the difference between the Inebriated and the Sober, displayed in their
works. As Little Bethel is to Tintern, so is Sobriety to Inebriation.
"Modern civilisation has advanced in many ways? Yes. Bethel has a stucco
front. This material was quite unknown to the builders of Tintern Abbey.
Advanced? What is advancement? Freedom from excesses, from
extravagances, from wild enthusiasms? Small Protestant tradesmen are
free from all these things, certainly. But is the joy of Adulteration
to be the last goal, the final Initiation of the Race of Men? _Caelumque
tueri_--to sand the sugar?
"The Flagons of the Song of Songs did not contain ginger-beer.
"But the worst of it is we shall not merely descend to the beasts. We
shall fall very far below the beasts. A black fellow is good, and a
white fellow is good. But the white fellow who 'goes Fantee' does not
become a negro--he becomes something infinitely worse, a horrible mass
of the most putrid corruption.
"If we can clear our minds of the horrible cant of our 'civilisation,'
if we can look at a modern 'industrial centre' with eyes purged of
illusions, we shall have some notion of the awful horror to which we are
descending in our effort to become as the ants and bees--creatures who
know nothing of