THE HOUSE OF CATILINE
AMONG those friends of Lord Alistair’s who did not neglect him in his
fallen state was the moving spirit of the Legitimist Guild.
The Comte des Louvres visited the house in Beers Cooperage, and
professed himself enchanted with everything about it, but most of all
with its nearness to Chestnut-Tree Walk.
“We are neighbours now,” he declared, “and I shall expect you to look
me up very often. Drop in whenever you have nothing better to do.”
The Frenchman threw a flattering deference into his manner towards
Molly now that her position seemed to be established. He was keen
enough to see the direction in which her ambitions pointed, and he
threw out hints of his ability to help her.
By way of a beginning he invited her to his house to meet some of
the ladies who had held stalls at the famous bazaar. Lady Alistair
did not refuse the invitations. She appeared in the Count’s shabby
drawing-room, flaunting in the extravagance of the past, and scored a
feminine triumph over women whose whole yearly dress allowance would
not have paid for one of her frocks. But Molly was too shrewd to
mistake these gatherings, at which tea was handed round by the two
Vanes, and the conversation turned chiefly on the Legitimist cause and
its prospects, for the kind of society she had aspired to. The women
to whom Des Louvres introduced her were as much outside the pale as
herself, though for different reasons, and in the end they tired her by
their pretentious gentility, and she left off trying to mix with them.
It was borne in upon the poor little woman that her dream of
respectability was never likely to be realized. The cruel frankness of
the Duchess had broken her spirit. The dismal vision of the Home began
to rise up before her as a final destiny. Very often she cried now when
she was alone. It seemed to her that life could never be jolly again.
Nothing had turned out as she had hoped. Marriage seemed to have made
things worse instead of better. Alistair left her to herself as much as
formerly, and when he was with her they had less and less to say to one
another. And they became really poor. The Duke’s intentions as regards
his brother’s allowance remained undeclared. In the meantime the South
Kensington furniture, the copper saucepans, and the Cromwellian oak
had been bought on the hire system, and there was trouble about the
instalments. Once or twice already they had had to dine at home on
slices of ham brought in from a shop in the Westminster Bridge Road,
because they could not afford a meal at a restaurant. And now the
winter was upon them.
After all, Molly had not returned Miss Vanbrugh’s call. And this was
not because she was jealous of her, but because when it came to the
point she found she had not the courage. In Hero’s presence, in the
light of her candid eyes, the pretence of being a lady could not be
kept up. Perhaps Hero guessed how matters stood, for when she found
that Lady Alistair did not come to her she made the experiment of
coming again to Beers Cooperage. And Molly was very glad to see her. To
her own surprise, she found her once dreaded rival was her only friend.
They grew to call each other by their Christian names. And by degrees
Molly opened her heart to Hero, and told her everything; told her one
day, with tears and sobs, the story of her miserable life, and wound up
with the despairing cry:
“I shall never be any better; I know I shan’t. I can’t be sorry. I
can’t repent.”
Hero held out her arms. When she reached home that evening she found
the bosom of her dress all streaked with rouge.
Alistair’s wife was not blinded by the respectful homage of the Comte
des Louvres to his true character. Her instinct told her that the Count
had no friendships which did not serve some purpose of his own, and she
warned Alistair against him.
“Beware of that man,” she said one day after the Frenchman had been to
see them. “He pretends to be your friend, but he is scheming to get
something out of you.”
“Most friends are,” was Alistair’s retort. “Of course, Des Louvres is a
scoundrel, but he is an interesting one. Honest men are such bores.”
And in that remark Alistair expressed more of his character than he
knew. Perhaps the strongest of all the motives that stirred him to
quarrel with the social order in which he had been reared was that he
found it dull. He judged of life like a novel--it is the villain who is
the soul of the plot.
If he had been born fifty years before, Alistair Stuart might have been
happily engaged among those who were struggling for the emancipation of
Europe from the old Legitimist régime. Political liberty, the liberty
that Shelley had hymned, and Mazzini plotted, and Garibaldi fought for,
seemed a Dead Sea fruit to his taste, but yet at least the struggle for
it had been worth waging. To-day nothing interesting, nothing heroic,
was going on in the world. The glorious dawn of the nineteenth century
had been succeeded by a commonplace day. The struggles of the hour were
for markets and mines; the question that moved men’s souls was whether
Mike Finigan should be compelled to hide his glass of beer from the
respectable sight of Mr. Stiggins.
Liberalism was dead, and the social democracy marching over its corpse
had discarded every noble watchword, every lofty ideal, and proclaimed
the naked issue of more wages and less work. They and the millionaires
might fight it out between them as far as such as Alistair were
concerned. Neither side seemed likely to add anything to the beauty of
life.
In the house in Chestnut-Tree Walk he found himself brought into touch
with an altogether different world. It was a strange underground world,
a world of decayed races, and lost causes, and fallen dynasties,
and overthrown gods. Sometimes it seemed to him a world of pure
make-believe, in which everything was pasteboard and tinsel, and at
other times it seemed to him that there was a meaning hidden beneath
the make-believe, that there was a strength in all this decay capable
of assailing and overcoming in time the strength of the world of
triumphant causes and conquering races; that from this concealed and
stagnant source a power of corruption might arise, like the pestilence
that issues from the slums of Canton or the pilgrim-ships of Mecca and
devastates Asia and Europe.
Alistair became a more and more frequent visitor to the house hidden
behind the grimy chestnut-trees. Des Louvres was never a dull
companion. He possessed a unique knowledge of contemporary European
history, especially of that part of history which does not get into
books, and which the underbred provincials who compile scholastic
histories seem never to understand. His memory for royal genealogies
was equal to that of a German Court Chamberlain. And he was not
ignorant of British pedigrees either.
On one occasion he surprised Stuart by asking him:
“You are related to the Earls of Mar, are you not?”
“My grandmother was an Erskine,” Alistair replied. “Why do you ask?”
“Your ancestor headed the first Jacobite rising on behalf of James
III,” said Des Louvres, with a significant glance.
“It is sometimes called the Earl of Mar’s Rebellion,” responded
Alistair. “But I don’t think my ancestor distinguished himself very
much. He made his arrangements very badly, and quarrelled with the
Pretender when he came over.”
The other did not pursue the subject. But his remark had taken effect
on Stuart’s mind.
In addition to Des Louvres there were often other interesting figures
to be met with at Chestnut-Tree House: Frenchmen fresh from the
boulevards; Austrians and Spaniards with the latest gossip of their
capitals; urbane Roman priests, affecting the diplomatist rather than
the cleric, and anxious that the Duke of Trent’s brother should take an
interest in the absorbing question of the Temporal Power.
“There never was a more interesting State than the Pope’s,” Stuart was
told. “It was government by the refined and intellectual class, the
aristocracy of mind and birth combined. There was no public opinion,
which, as you know, always means vulgar middle-class opinion. There
was no Puritan inquisition; Garibaldi and his brigands made it their
chief complaint against us that we did not persecute the sinner. Every
man could do as he pleased, in short, provided that he did not openly
assail the Church. Of course, no Sovereign can tolerate rebellion. For
artists and poets, for all men of taste and originality, the Rome of
the Popes was an almost perfect home.”
Alistair grew more and more inclined to believe it. More and more
he came to feel that he had no quarrel with the Church of Rome. It
had never persecuted him. On the contrary, it had treated him with
consideration at a time when he had received no consideration from
those who owed it to him most.
He would have been glad enough to believe that a restored Papal State
would afford him the city of refuge for which he yearned, and if he
raised objections the tempters easily swept them away.
“Was not the press muzzled?” he would ask. “Was there not a censorship
of books?”
And the answer would be that the democratic press was equally muzzled,
only it was muzzled by a golden muzzle. A paper could not be launched,
except at a cost only within the means of the very rich. It could not
be carried on at all without the revenue derived from the pill-makers
and the soap-makers; and the pill-maker would permit nothing to appear
in it that might by any possibility offend his bilious customers.
The rich man would not tolerate any paper that did not pander to
the passionate greed which was fast becoming more than a disease--a
veritable possession.
And there was a censorship of books as well, a censorship
administered, not by educated men, but by policemen hounded to
their work by rabid zealots in whom sexual perversion took the form
of prudery. There were commercial censorships and voluntary ones.
A tradesman, sitting in his office, held in his hands the fate of
half the books brought out in England. The committees of the Free
Libraries were more intolerant than any Roman congregation. Were not
their shelves choked with the rubbish of evangelical serialists,
and barred to the masterpieces of De Maupassant and D’Annunzio? The
real censorships of books in every age had been exercised by human
stupidity. The Index Expurgatorius of ignorance and spite was vaster
than the British Museum Catalogue.
Stuart found himself more than half committed to the cause already. His
effort on behalf of Don Juan, slight and unsuccessful as it had been,
had brought him a letter of thanks from the Prince, and an invitation
to call on him if Lord Alistair should ever find himself in Rome. Des
Louvres continued to speak hopefully of the Pretender’s prospects. And
in the meanwhile it became more and more clear to Alistair that Don
Juan’s cause, and all these romantic causes and whispering conspiracies
centred in the one supreme cause and the one secular conspiracy
represented by that immemorial figure, crowned with the triple crown of
Ra, grasping the keys of Sheol and Amenti, and pursuing in the name of
the Crucified One the empire of the Conqueror.
In the same measure that Alistair Stuart was attracted to the camp of
these rebels against the established order he was repelled from that
rival camp whose red flag was the symbol of an international Jacquerie.
Every poet is at heart an anarchist, but his vocation bids him be a
transcendental one, perceiving that sympathy is stronger than violence,
and the seed that bursts unseen and silently is a more formidable
engine than the bomb. Alistair found in the proletarian propaganda, so
far as it had come under his notice, a leaven of envy and hatred of
the best. The spirit of Marat’s bloody apostolate lurked under words
like brotherhood and humanity. It was not only against the rich and the
tyrannical that the red flag waved; it menaced equally knowledge and
genius. Archimedes would fare no better at such hands than he had fared
at the hands of the soldier of Marcellus. The policy of these helot
Tarquins was to strike down the tall flowers of the garden, roses and
nettles together.
His three months’ sojourn in Beers Cooperage had taught Alistair that
he could not really be the brother of his humble neighbours. He was
not nearer to them in spirit than if he were dwelling in Colonsay
House. He was too kind-hearted not to wish to befriend them, but he
could only do so as he befriended children and animals--without feeling
himself as one of them. His common sense, or, what is the same thing,
his sense of humour, saved him from trying to elevate them by means of
wireless telegraphy and the Andaman Islands. The simple truth was that
he no more wanted to change their natures than to change his own. He
was that rare thing, an individualist who respected the individuality
of others. He was the only person who had ever bestowed money in the
Cooperage without asking whether it was to be spent on tea or on beer.
In his mother’s opinion he was doing harm to the neighbourhood. Among
the beneficiaries a suspicion had begun to germinate that he must have
his eye on a seat in the County Council. His favourite manifestation
of interest was to call in passing organ-grinders, who played in the
Cooperage by the hour together, while the children danced.
Alistair could make his poor neighbours happy, but they could not make
him happy.
The poet searching for his Eden places it ever in some environment
which he has not yet tried. Whole generations of priest-ridden Italians
had placed the home of freedom in Puritan-ridden England; it was
natural that Alistair should place it in Papal Rome.
Des Louvres, the Catiline of this conspiracy, had just that touch of
the bohemian in his own character which enabled him to understand
Stuart. He did not hope to rouse in him any active enthusiasm for the
small territorial ambitions of the Catholic Pretenders, clerical or
lay. But he saw that what Stuart wanted was a stick with which to beat
society, and the Legitimist stick was as good as any other. Little
by little he drew his proselyte on to the view that all the elements
that made the Victorian Order hateful to him were personified in
the reigning House itself. The Hanoverian dynasty was a Protestant
dynasty--or, at least, it was required to pose as such in public. The
Act of Settlement was the work of the Low Church party, supported by
the Nonconformists; in other words, it was the Puritan settlement.
All English history, all English literature, all English society,
had rested hitherto on the basis that the Low Church party was in
the right, and that its standards ought to govern Great Britain, and
Ireland, and India, and ultimately the whole world.
Alistair himself had been brought up in an atmosphere where that
assumption was not supposed to be even subject to discussion. The whole
world, to his youthful mind, had been divided into two classes--those
who were Low Churchmen, and those who ought to be, and knew it. He,
Alistair, knew it, so did the others, from the General of the Jesuits
to the stone-breaker suspected of being a Plymouth Brother, and from
the condemned murderer to the author of the “Origin of Species.” The
Sultan of Turkey knew it in his heart, and so did every follower of
every other faith, except, possibly, the Grand Lama, protected by
geographical barriers from the enterprise of the Low Church Missionary
Society.
And now all these assumptions were breaking up and melting away so
rapidly that the mere statement of them sounded more like satire than
sober record. Histories of England were being written, and were being
used in the schools, which failed to teach that the Revolution of 1688
was the most glorious event in the annals of the human race. It was no
longer universally deemed an act of oppression on the part of James I.
to permit the peasantry to dance on Sunday. Even the Reformation had
ceased to be the subject of unmitigated eulogy. The rising generation
were being allowed to perceive that some bigotry goes to the making of
a martyr, as well as of a heretic-hunter. The failings of the leading
Reformers were no longer veiled, and the virtues of their opponents
were lovingly conceded.
Every revelation passes through three stages: first, it is a heresy;
next, a commonplace; and last, a superstition. The mind of man revolves
like his planet, and truths rise and set like the stars.
Protestantism had survived into the third stage. The great Protestant
Churches still flourished, but they no longer professed the Protestant
religion. The Church of England was suing for recognition by the
Church of Rome. The Dissenting Churches, founded by men who were more
willing to endure poverty and prison than to wear a surplice, or to
use a ring in the marriage ceremony, were adopting liturgies and
vestments. The evangelical organizations, the Missionary Societies,
the Bible Societies, the Tract Societies, were still in full activity,
but they had ceased to evangelize. Like the Churches, they lived on
their inheritance; they were kept going by the dead hand. Frock-coated
committees were called together by well-salaried secretaries to dispose
of funds too large for the shrunken field of endeavour; but, wiser
than the augurs of old Rome, the secretaries never smiled.
The machinery went on with well-oiled wheels, but the spirit was gone.
The foundation stone of the building had been almost accidentally
mined. The picks of excavators toiling at the dust-heaps beside the
Tigris and Euphrates that once were Nineveh and Babylon, had turned
up a handful of arrow-stamped bricks, and the Protestant Bible had
become a mere human document. The whole of English society was engaged
in a conspiracy to suppress the fact that the world was changing. The
schools and universities went on teaching that it never changed; the
pulpits proved that it could not; the newspapers were positive that
it had not; yet underneath all this loud shouting of the cohorts of
respectability could be heard a murmur like the whisper of Galileo
before the Inquisition--_But it does move_.
It was the close of the Victorian Age. It was an age which had recorded
its own praises on a myriad monuments, and chanted them in thunder
on the days of jubilee. It was an age which had gazed round upon its
mighty works, and boasted itself like Nebuchadnezzar. Nevertheless, in
this age, so glorious in its own conceit, so fruitful in many respects,
one rank weed had been suffered to grow up unchecked, till it poisoned
the breathing-room of the human spirit.
The name of this weed was Cant.
The Victorian world had been satirized unconsciously by the Victorian
poet. In his “Idylls of the King” Tennyson had depicted a man without
passions trying to impose his own cold virtues on men of warmer
temperament, and producing first hypocrisy and deceit, and in the end a
deeper corruption. The Victorian world had been like Arthur’s Court.
In this world Cant became a religion, and hypocrisy was enforced by
law. It was a world whose literature and art were adjusted to the
mental and moral level of the Sunday-school. It was a world in which
a terrible disease, bred of moral corruption, scourged the race, and
every effort to stay its ravages was fought against tooth and nail
by the mænads of social purity. It was a world in which selfishness
was inculcated in a million sermons, and slander and persecution were
reckoned as good works. It was a world in which blackmailing became
a recognized profession. It was a world in which men sent sailors to
be drowned in rotten ships, and built chapels with the proceeds. It
was a world which overthrew kings and set up millionaire monopolists;
which suppressed slavery and invented sweating; which substituted the
prostitute for the concubine; which imposed a curfew on beer at home
and sold opium abroad at the point of the bayonet. A great pirate
Empire ravaged the seas, with a crucifix at the masthead, and stole
pagan continents.
One night when Alistair Stuart went round to the house in Chestnut-Tree
Walk he found its master waiting for him in a state of excited
expectation.
“Have you heard the news?” Des Louvres asked in a whisper, as soon
as Stuart had sat down. “They are trying to keep it out of the papers
as long as possible, but it has reached me from a source that I can
absolutely depend upon. Queen Victoria is dying.”