A SAVAGE SPUR
John Murray, _anax_ of publishers, sat that evening in his shop in
Fleet Street. He was in excellent humor, having dined both wisely and
well. His hair was sparse above a smooth-shaven, oval face, in which
lurked good-humor and the wit which brought to his drawing-room the
most brilliant men of literary London, as his genius as a publisher had
given him the patronage of the greatest peers of the kingdom, and even
of the prince regent. His black coat was of the plainest broadcloth and
his neck-cloth of the finest linen. Dallas sat opposite, his scholarly
face keen and animated. The frayed waistcoat was no longer in evidence,
and the worn hat had given place to a new broad brim.
“Yes,” said the man of books, “we shall formally publish to-morrow.
I wrote his lordship, asking him to come up to town, to urge him to
eliminate several of the stanzas in case we reprint soon. They will
only make him more enemies. He has enough now,” he added ruefully.
“You still think as well of it?”
The publisher pushed back his glasses with enthusiasm. “It is
splendid--unique.” He pulled out a desk-drawer and took therefrom a
printed volume, poising it proudly, as a father dandles his first-born,
and, turning its pages, with lifted forefinger and rolling voice read:
“Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,
And long accustomed bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilom did await,
The hopeless warriors of the willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylæ’s sepulchral strait--
Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?
Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;
Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,
Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;
Art, glory, freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought.
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!
True, they may lay your proud despoiler low,
But not for you will freedom’s altars flame.
Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe!
Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;
Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thine years of shame.”
He broke off abruptly. “The pamphleteers have been busy since he
landed,” he admitted, a trace of shrewdness edging his tone, “but the
abuse seems to have dulled now. I have been waiting for that to issue.”
“His lordship, sir,” announced a clerk, and the proprietor sprang to
his feet to greet his visitor.
Gordon’s eyes lighted with pleasure as they fell on Dallas, noting the
change the few months of relief from the galling pressure of poverty
had wrought in the features no less than the attire. “Are the types
ready?” he asked the publisher.
“Yes, my lord. We distribute to-morrow. I have marked a few stanzas,
however, that I hesitate to include in a further edition. Here they
are. You will guess my reason.”
The other looked, his eyes reading, but his mind thinking further than
the page.
“London! Right well thou know’st the hour of prayer;
Then thy spruce citizen, washed artisan
And smug apprentice gulp their weekly air.”
The lines were bitter indeed! They had been written when he was still
smarting under the lash of his earlier critics, in the first months of
his journeyings, before the great wind of travel had swept his mind
clear and sweet for the latter harmonies of his poesy. In them lay the
hurt sneer of a personal resentment--the resentment that had been in
his soul when he sailed from England; that had sprung alive again on
his return, when he learned that his enemies had employed his absence
to bespatter his name with lying tales.
Yet that was past. He had cast it behind him. And should he carry the
old spirit into this better and nobler work, to deflect his message
from its significance into cheaper channels of abuse? His thought
recurred to the youth in the bare room of the Fleet. Even there, in a
debtors’ prison, Shelley had forgot his own plight, and sunk individual
resentment in desire for wider justice! Should he be less big in
tolerance than that youth? So he asked himself, as the publisher
casually fluttered the leaves of an uncut review which the clerk had
laid on his desk.
All at once John Murray’s eyes stopped, fixed on a page. He made an
exclamation of irritation and chagrin, and pushed it out toward Gordon.
It was a fresh copy of the _Scourge_, and the leader Gordon read, while
the publisher paced the floor with nervously angry strides, was the one
in which had been steeped the anonymous venom of William Godwin the
bookseller--a page whose caption was his own name:
“It may be asked whether to be a simple citizen is more disgraceful
than to be the illegitimate descendant of a murderer; whether to
labor in an honorable profession be less worthy than to waste the
property of others in vulgar debauchery; whether to be the son
of parents of no title be not as honorable as to be the son of a
profligate father and a mother of demoniac temper, and, finally,
whether a simple university career be less indicative of virtue than
to be held up to the derision and contempt of his fellow students,
as a scribbler of doggerel and a bear-leader, to be hated for
repulsiveness of manners and shunned by every man who would not be
deemed a profligate without wit and trifling without elegance.”
A cold dead look of mingled pain and savagery grew on his face as he
read. Then he sprang up and went to the door. Behind him Dallas had
seized the review and was reading it with indignation. The publisher
was still pacing the floor: “What an unfortunate advertisement!” he was
muttering.
Gordon stared out into the lamp-lighted street. The bitter malignancy
which had spared not even the grave in its slander, numbed and
maddened him. His breath came hard and a mist was before his eyes.
Opposite the shop loomed the blackened front of the old church of St.
Dunstan’s-in-the-West; as he stood, the two wooden figures of wild
men on the clock which projected over the street struck the hour with
their clubs, and a late newsboy passed crying tiredly: “_News_ and
_Chronicle_! All about the Frame-Breakers shot in Nottingham!”
The volume the publisher had given him was still in Gordon’s hand. He
turned into the room and flung it on the desk.
“No,” he said with harsh bluntness. “Not a line shall be altered! If
every syllable were a rattlesnake and every letter a pestilence, they
should not be expunged! Let those who cannot swallow, chew it. I will
have none of your damned cutting and slashing, Murray. I will battle my
way against them all, like a porcupine!”
Then he wheeled and plunged into the clack and babble of Fleet Street’s
pedestrians.
London would be reading his effusion when his book appeared
to-morrow--reading it and talking about it. “The curs!” he said to
himself, as he walked fiercely down the Strand.
The cry of the newsboy ahead came back to him like a dulled refrain. He
turned into Whitehall at Charing Cross, and looked up to find himself
opposite Melbourne House. He remembered suddenly the clear-eyed girl
to whom he had offered his Satire and whose coin was still in his
waistcoat pocket; she had said “Melbourne House” that day to the
coachman. He wondered with a curious levity whether she would read the
_Scourge_.
Before the Houses of Parliament stood a double line of carriages.
“It’s the debate in the Lords on the Frame-Breakers bill,” he heard
one passer-by inform another, as he stared frowning at the high Gothic
entrance. That was the measure against which Shelley’s pamphlet had
been written.
The pain was dulling and the old unyielding devil of challenge and
fight was struggling uppermost. “‘The illegitimate descendant of
a murderer!’”--Gordon muttered--“‘a scribbler of doggerel and a
bear-leader!’”
Then suddenly he raised his head. His eyes struck fire like gray flint.
“I am a peer,” he said through his teeth, and strode through the door
which he had never entered in his life, but once.
* * * * *
An hour later there was a sensation in John Murray’s shop, where Dallas
still sat. It was furnished by Sheridan, who came in taking snuff and
shaking his gray head with delight.
“Heard the news?” he cried, chuckling. “George Gordon just made a great
speech--best speech by a lord since the Lord knows when! I was in the
gallery with Lady Melbourne and Lady Caroline Lamb. He opposed the
Frame-Breakers bill. They say it means the death of the measure. You
should have seen the big-wigs flock to offer congratulations! Why, even
the Lord Chancellor came down from the woolsack to shake hands with
him!” He paused out of breath, with a final “What d’ye think of that?”
“Well, well!” ejaculated the publisher, taking off his glasses and
polishing them with vigor. He looked at Dallas.
“What an unfortunate advertisement!” quoth that gentleman, pulling his
nose. “Eh?”
John Murray brought his fist down on the desk with a force that made
the ink-well leap. “By the foot of Pharaoh!” he swore, “we’ll take
advantage of it; it will discount that attack in the _Scourge_. The
papers have their copies of the book already. I’ll send them word.
We’ll not wait till to-morrow. We’ll issue TO-NIGHT!”
He rang the bell sharply and gave a clerk hurried orders which in a few
moments made the office a scene of confusion.
When Lady Melbourne entered Melbourne House with her daughter-in-law
that evening--about the time a swarm of messengers were departing
from the Fleet Street shop carrying packages of books addressed to
the greatest houses of London--she found her stately niece, Annabel
Milbanke, reading in the drawing-room.
Lady Caroline’s eyes were very bright as she threw off her wraps.
She went to the piano and played softly--long dissolving arpeggios
that melted into a rich minor chord. Presently she began to sing the
same Greek air that she had sung once before with a pathos that had
surprised and stirred even the colder, calculate Annabel.
“Caro, what is that?” asked Lady Melbourne, unclasping her sables
before the fireplace. The singer did not hear her.
“It’s a song Mr. Hobhouse sent her when he was traveling in the East,”
Annabel volunteered.
Lady Melbourne’s thoughts were not wholly on the song. She had seen the
book her niece had been reading--it was George Gordon’s long famous
Satire. She picked it up, noting the name on the title-page with
approval. She had been pondering since she left the ladies’ gallery
of the House of Lords, and her thoughts had concerned themselves
intimately with its author, the young peer whose maiden speech had
challenged such surprise and admiration. His name went perpetually
accompanied by stories of eccentricities and wild life at college, of
tamed bears and hidden orgies at Newstead with Paphian dancing girls,
of a secret establishment at Brighton, of adventures and _liaisons_ the
most reckless in cities of the Orient. Yet he had stanch supporters,
too.
“Annabel,” she said presently, and with singular emphasis, “George
Gordon is in town. He spoke in Parliament this evening. I am going to
ask him to dinner here to-morrow--to meet you.”
The refrain Lady Caroline was singing broke queerly in the middle, and
her fingers stumbled on the keys. The others did not see the expression
that slipped swiftly across her face, the rising flush, the indrawn,
bitten under lip, nor did they catch the undertone in her laugh as she
ran up the stair.
In her own room she unlocked a metal frame that stood on her
dressing-table. It held a pencil portrait, begged long before from
Hobhouse. A vivid, conscious flush was in her cheeks as she looked at
it.
“For a woman of fire and dreams!” she murmured. “Not for a thing of
snow! Never--never!”