Dataset Viewer (First 5GB)
text
string |
|---|
truth is, that the stage after the Restoration reflects only too
faithfully the manners and the sentiments of the only society which at
that period could boast of anything like organisation. The press, which
now enables public opinion to exercise so powerful a control over the
manners of the times, had then scarcely an existence. No standard of
female honour restrained the license of wit and debauchery. If the clergy
were shocked at the propagation of ideas so contrary to the whole spirit
of Christianity, their natural impulse to reprove them was checked by the
fear that an apparent condemnation of the practices of the Court might end
in the triumph of their old enemies, the Puritans. All the elements of an
old and decaying form of society that tended to atheism, cynicism, and
dissolute living, exhibited themselves, therefore, in naked shamelessness
on the stage. The audiences in the theatres were equally devoid of good
manners and good taste; they did not hesitate to interrupt the actors in
the midst of a serious play, while they loudly applauded their obscene
allusions. So gross was the character of comic dialogue that women could
not venture to appear at a comedy without masks, and under these
circumstances the theatre became the natural centre for assignations. In
such an atmosphere women readily cast off all modesty and reserve; indeed,
the choicest indecencies of the times are to be found in the epilogues to
the plays, which were always assigned to the female actors.
It at first sight seems remarkable that a society inveterately corrupt
should have contained in itself such powers of purification and vitality
as to discard the literary garbage of the Restoration period in favour of
the refined sobriety which characterises the writers of Queen Anne's
reign. But, in fact, the spread of the infection was confined within
certain well-marked limits. The Court moved in a sphere apart, and was
altogether too light and frivolous to exert a decided moral influence on
the great body of the nation. The country gentlemen, busied on their
estates, came seldom to town; the citizens, the lawyers, and the members
of the other professions steadily avoided the theatre, and regarded with
equal contempt the moral and literary excesses of the courtiers. Among
this class, unrepresented at present in the world of letters, except,
perhaps, by antiquarians like Selden, the foundations of sound taste were
being silently laid. The readers of the nation had hitherto been almost
limited to the nobility. Books were generally published by subscription,
and were dependent for their success on the favour with which they were
received by the courtiers. But, after the subsidence of the Civil War, the
nation began to make rapid strides in wealth and refinement, and the
moneyed classes sought for intellectual amusement in their leisure hours.
Authors by degrees found that they might look for readers beyond the
select circle of their aristocratic patrons; and the book-seller, who had
hitherto calculated his profits merely by the commission he might obtain
on the sale of books, soon perceived that they were becoming valuable as
property. The reign of Charles II. is remarkable not only for the great
increase in the number of the licensed printers in London, but for the
appearance of the first of the race of modern publishers, Jacob Tonson.
The portion of society whose tastes the publishers undertook to satisfy
was chiefly interested in history, poetry, and criticism. It was this for
which Dryden composed his _Miscellany_, this to which he addressed the
admirable critical essays which precede his _Translations from the Latin
Poets_ and his _Versifications of Chaucer_, and this which afterwards gave
the main support to the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. Ignorant of the
writings of the great classical authors, as well as of the usages of
polite society, these men were nevertheless robust and manly in their
ideas, and were eager to form for themselves a correct standard of taste
by reference to the best authorities. Though they turned with repugnance
from the playhouse and from the morals of the Court, they could not
avoid being insensibly affected by the tone of grace and elegance which
prevailed in Court circles. And in this respect, if in no other, our
gratitude is due to the Caroline dramatists, who may justly claim to be
the founders of the _social_ prose style in English literature. Before
them English prose had been employed, no doubt, with music and majesty by
many writers; but the style of these is scarcely representative; they had
used the language for their own elevated purposes, without, however,
attempting to give it that balanced fineness and subtlety which makes it a
fitting instrument for conveying the complex ideas of an advanced stage of
society. Dryden, Wycherley, and their followers, impelled by the taste of
the Court to study the French language, brought to English composition a
nicer standard of logic and a more choice selection of language, while the
necessity of pleasing their audiences with brilliant dialogue made them
careful to give their sentences that well-poised structure which Addison
afterwards carried to perfection in the _Spectator_.
By this brief sketch the reader may be enabled to judge of the distracted
state of society, both in politics and taste, in the reign of Charles II.
On the one side, the Monarchical element in the Constitution was
represented by the Court Party, flushed with the recent restoration;
retaining the old ideas and principles of absolutism which had prevailed
under James I., without being able to perceive their inapplicability to
the existing nature of things; feeding its imagination alternately on
sentiments derived from the decayed spirit of chivalry, and on artistic
representations of fashionable debauchery in its most open form--a party
which, while it fortunately preserved the traditions of wit, elegance, and
gaiety of style, seemed unaware that these qualities could be put to any
other use than the mitigation of an intolerable _ennui_. On the other
side, the rising power of Democracy found its representatives in austere
Republicans opposed to all institutions in Church and State that seemed to
obstruct their own abstract principles of government; gloomy fanatics,
who, with an intense intellectual appreciation of eternal principles of
religion and morality, sought to sacrifice to their system the most
permanent and even innocent instincts of human nature. Between the two
extreme parties was the unorganised body of the nation, grouped round old
customs and institutions, rapidly growing in wealth and numbers, conscious
of the rise in their midst of new social principles, but perplexed how to
reconcile these with time-honoured methods of religious, political, and
literary thought. To lay the foundations of sound opinion among the people
at large; to prove that reconciliation was possible between principles
hitherto exhibited only in mutual antagonism; to show that under the
English Constitution monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy might all be
harmonised, that humanity was not absolutely incompatible with religion or
morality with art, was the task of the statesmen, and still more of the
men of letters, of the early part of the eighteenth century.
CHAPTER II.
ADDISON'S FAMILY AND EDUCATION.
Joseph Addison was born on the 1st of May, 1672. He was the eldest son of
Lancelot Addison, at the time of his birth rector of Milston, near
Amesbury, in Wiltshire, and afterwards Dean of Lichfield. His father was a
man of character and accomplishments. Educated at Oxford, while that
University was under the control of the famous Puritan Visitation, he made
no secret of his contempt for principles to which he was forced to submit,
or of his preferences for Monarchy and Episcopacy. His boldness was not
agreeable to the University authorities, and being forced to leave Oxford,
he maintained himself for a time near Petworth, in Sussex, by acting as
chaplain or tutor in families attached to the Royalist cause. After the
Restoration he obtained the appointment of chaplain to the garrison of
Dunkirk, and when that town was ceded to France in 1662, he was removed in
a similar capacity to Tangier. Here he remained eight years, but,
venturing on a visit to England, his post was bestowed upon another, and
he would have been left without resources had not one of his friends
presented him with the living of Milston, valued at £120 a year. With the
courage of his order he thereupon took a wife, Jane, daughter of Dr.
Nathaniel Gulston, and sister of William Gulston, Bishop of Bristol, by
whom he had six children, three sons and three daughters, all born at
Milston. In 1675 he was made a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral and
Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King; and in 1683 he was promoted to the
Deanery of Lichfield, as a reward for his services at Tangier, and out of
consideration of losses which he had sustained by a fire at Milston. His
literary reputation stood high, and it is said that he would have been
made a bishop, if his old zeal for legitimacy had not prompted him to
manifest in the Convocation of 1689 his hostility to the Revolution. He
died in 1703.
Lancelot was a writer at once voluminous and lively. In the latter part of
his life he produced several treatises on theological subjects, the most
popular of which was called _An Introduction to the Sacrament_. This book
passed through many editions. The doctrine it contains leans rather to the
Low Church side. But much the most characteristic of his writings were his
works on Mahommedanism and Judaism, the results of his studies during his
residence in Barbary. These show not only considerable industry and
research and powers of shrewd observation, but that genuine literary
faculty which enables a writer to leave upon a subject of a general nature
the impression of his own character. While there is nothing forced or
exaggerated in his historical style, a vein of allegory runs through the
narrative of the _Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco_, which
must have had a piquant flavour for the orthodox English reader of that
day. Recollections of the Protectorate would have taken nothing of its
vividness from the portrait of the Moorish priest who "began to grow into
reputation with the people by reason of his high pretensions to piety and
fervent zeal for their law, illustrated by a stubborn rigidity of
conversation and outward sanctity of life." When the Zeriffe, with
ambitious designs on the throne, sent his sons on a pilgrimage to Mecca,
the religious buffooneries practised by the young men must have recalled
to the reader circumstances more recent and personal than those which the
author was apparently describing. "Much was the reverence and reputation
of holiness which they thereby acquired among the superstitious people,
who could hardly be kept from kissing their garments and adoring them as
saints, while they failed not in their parts, but acted as much devotion
as high contemplative looks, deep sighs, tragical gestures, and other
passionate interjections of holiness could express. 'Allah, allah!' was
their doleful note, their sustenance the people's alms." And when these
impostors had inveigled the King of Fez into a religious war, the
description of those who "mistrusted their own safety, and began, but too
late, to repent their approving of an armed hypocrisy," was not more
applicable to the rulers of Barbary than to the people of England. "Puffed
up with their successes, they forgot their obedience, and these saints
denied the king the fifth part of their spoils.... By which it appeared
that they took up arms, not out of love for their country and zeal for
their religion, but out of desire of rule." There is, indeed, nothing in
these utterances which need have prevented the writer from consistently
promoting the Revolution of 1688; yet his principles seem to have carried
him far in the opposite direction; and it is interesting to remember that
the assertor in Convocation of the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary
right was the father of the author of the _Whig Examiner_ and the
_Freeholder_. However decidedly Joseph may have dissented from his
father's political creed, we know that he entertained admiration and
respect for his memory, and that death alone prevented him from
completing the monument afterwards erected in Lancelot's honour in
Lichfield Cathedral.
Of Addison's mother nothing of importance is recorded. His second brother,
Gulston, became Governor of Fort St. George, in the East Indies; and the
third, Lancelot, followed in Joseph's footsteps so far as to obtain a
Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. His sisters, Jane and Anna, died
young; but Dorothy was twice married, and Swift records in her honour that
she was "a kind of wit, and very like her brother." We may readily believe
that a writer so lively as Lancelot would have had clever children, but
Steele was perhaps carried away by the zeal of friendship or the love of
epigram when he said, in his dedication to the _Drummer_: "Mr. Dean
Addison left behind him four children, each of whom, for excellent talents
and singular perfections, was as much above the ordinary world as their
brother Joseph was above them." But that Steele had a sincere admiration
for the whole family is sufficiently shown by his using them as an example
in one of his early _Tatlers_:
"I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I have thought
to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace. He had
three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all the care imaginable
in a liberal and ingenuous way. I have often heard him say he had the
weakness to love one much better than the other, but that he took as
much pains to correct that as any other criminal passion that could
arise in his mind. His method was to make it the only pretension in
his children to his favour to be kind to each other, and he would tell
them that he who was the best brother he would reckon the best son.
This turned their thoughts into an emulation for the superiority in
kind and tender affection towards each other. The boys behaved
themselves very early with a manly friendship; and their sister,
instead of the gross familiarities and impertinent freedoms in
behaviour usual in other houses, was always treated by them with as
much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. It
was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in that family.
I have often seen the old man's heart flow at his eyes with joy upon
occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to
the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident, wherein he saw his
children's good-will to one another, created in him the god-like
pleasure of loving them because they loved each other. This great
command of himself in hiding his first impulse to partiality at last
improved to a steady justice towards them, and that which at first was
but an expedient to correct his weakness was afterwards the measure of
his virtue."[5]
This, no doubt, is the set description of a moralist, and to an age in
which the liberty of manners has grown into something like license it may
savour of formalism and priggishness; but when we remember that the writer
was one of the most warm-hearted of men, and that the subject of his
panegyric was himself, full of vivacity and impulse, it must be admitted
that the picture which it gives us of the Addison family in the rectory of
Milston is a particularly amiable one.
Though the eighteenth century had little of that feeling for natural
beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of Addison's imagination could
hardly fail to be impressed by the character of the scenery in which his
childhood was passed. No one who has travelled on a summer's day across
Salisbury plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its open tracts of
undulating downland, relieved by no shadows except such as are thrown by
the passing cloud, the grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge,
will forget the delightful sense of refreshment and repose produced by the
descent into the valley of the Avon. The sounds of human life rising from
the villages after the long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep
woods, the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the chalk,
clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense and the
imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection of these scenes that
inspired Addison in his paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm:
"The Lord my pasture shall prepare,
And feed me with a shepherd's care.
* * * * *
When in the sultry glebe I faint,
Or on the thirsty mountain pant,
To fertile vales and dewy meads
My weary wandering steps he leads,
Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow,
Amid the verdant landscape flow."
At Amesbury he was first sent to school, his master being one Nash; and
here, too, he probably met with the first recorded adventure of his life.
It is said that having committed some fault, and being fearful of the
consequences, he ran away from school, and, taking up his abode in a
hollow tree, maintained himself as he could till he was discovered and
brought back to his parents. He was removed from Amesbury to Salisbury,
and thence to the Grammar School at Lichfield, where he is said to have
been the leader in a "barring out." From Lichfield he passed to the
Charter House, then under the charge of Dr. Ellis, a man of taste and
scholarship. The Charter House at that period was, after Westminster, the
best-known school in England, and here was laid the foundation of that
sound classical taste which perfected the style of the essays in the
_Spectator_.
Macaulay labours with much force and ingenuity to prove that Addison's
classical acquirements were only superficial, and, in his usual
epigrammatic manner, hazards the opinion that "his knowledge of Greek,
though doubtless such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford,
was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year
from Eton and Rugby." That Addison was not a scholar of the class of
Bentley or Porson may be readily admitted. But many scattered allusions in
his works prove that his acquaintance with the Greek poets of every
period, if cursory, was wide and intelligent: he was sufficiently master
of the language thoroughly to understand the spirit of what he read; he
undertook while at Oxford a translation of Herodotus, and one of the
papers in the _Spectator_ is a direct imitation of a _jeu d'esprit_ of
Lucian's. The Eton or Rugby boy who, in these days, with a normal appetite
for cricket and football, acquired an equal knowledge of Greek literature,
would certainly be somewhat of a prodigy.
No doubt, however, Addison's knowledge of the Latin poets was, as Macaulay
infers, far more extensive and profound. It would have been strange had it
been otherwise. The influence of the classical side of the Italian
Renaissance was now at its height, and wherever those ideas became
paramount Latin composition was held in at least as much esteem as poetry
in the vernacular. Especially was this the case in England, where certain
affinities of character and temperament made it easy for writers to adopt
Roman habits of thought. Latin verse composition soon took firm root in
the public schools and universities, so that clever boys of the period
were tolerably familiar with most of the minor Roman poets. Pope, in the
Fourth Book of the _Dunciad_, vehemently attacked the tradition as
confining the mind to the study of words rather than of things; but he had
himself had no experience of a public school, and only those who fail to
appreciate the influence of Latin verse composition on the style of our
own greatest orators, and of poets like Milton and Gray, will be inclined
to undervalue it as an instrument of social and literary training.
Proficiency in this art may at least be said to have laid the foundation
of Addison's fortunes. Leaving the Charter House in 1687, at the early age
of fifteen, he was entered at Queen's College, Oxford, and remained a
member of that society for two years, when a copy of his Latin verses fell
into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, then Fellow and afterwards Provost of the
College. Struck with their excellence, Lancaster used his influence to
obtain for him a demyship at Magdalen. The subject of this fortunate set
of verses was "Inauguratio Regis Gulielmi," from which fact we may
reasonably infer that even in his boyhood his mind had acquired a Whig
bias. Whatever inclination he may have had in this direction would have
been confirmed by the associations of his new college. The fluctuations of
opinion in Magdalen had been frequent and extraordinary. Towards the close
of Elizabeth's reign it was notorious for its Calvinism, but under the
Chancellorship of Laud it appears to have adopted, with equal ardour, the
cause of Arminianism, for it was among the colleges that offered the
stoutest opposition to the Puritan visitors in 1647-48. The despotic
tendencies of James II., however, again cooled its loyalty, and its
spirited resistance to the king's order for the election of a Roman
Catholic President had given a mortal blow to the Stuart dynasty. Hough
was now President, but in consequence of the dispute with the king there
had been no election of demies in 1688, so that twice the usual number was
chosen in the following year, and the occasion was distinguished by the
name of the "golden election." From Magdalen Addison proceeded to his
master's degree in 1693; the College elected him probationary Fellow in
1697, and actual Fellow the year after. He retained his Fellowship till
1711.
Of his tastes, habits, and friendships at Oxford there are few records.
Among his acquaintance were Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of
Dublin--whose memory is unenviably perpetuated, in company with Ambrose
Phillips, in Pope's _Epistle to Arbuthnot_,
"Does not one table Bavius still admit,
Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?"--
and possibly the famous Sacheverell.[6] He is said to have shown in the
society of Magdalen some of the shyness that afterwards distinguished him;
he kept late hours, and read chiefly after dinner. The walk under the
well-known elms by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though
he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part of his quiet
life at the University was doubtless occupied in study. A proof of his
early maturity is seen in the fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young
man of birth and fortune, Mr. Rushout, who was being educated at Magdalen,
was placed under his charge.
His reputation as a scholar and a man of taste soon extended itself to the
world of letters in London. In 1693, being then in his twenty-second year,
he wrote his _Account of the Greatest English Poets_; and about the same
time he addressed a short copy of verses to Dryden, complimenting him on
the enduring vigour of his poetical faculty, as shown in his translations
of Virgil and other Latin poets, some of which had recently appeared in
Tonson's _Miscellany_. The old poet appears to have been highly gratified,
and to have welcomed the advances thus made to him, for he returned
Addison's compliment by bestowing high and not unmerited praise on the
translation of the Fourth Book of the _Georgics_, which the latter soon
after undertook, and by printing, as a preface to his own translation, a
discourse written by Addison on the _Georgics_, as well as arguments to
most of the books of the _Æneid_.
Through Dryden, no doubt, he became acquainted with Jacob Tonson. The
father of English publishing had for some time been a well-known figure in
the literary world. He had purchased the copyright of _Paradise Lost_; he
had associated himself with Dryden in publishing before the Revolution two
volumes of _Miscellanies_; encouraged by the success which these obtained,
he put the poet, in 1693, on some translations of Juvenal and Persius, and
two new volumes of _Miscellanies_; while in 1697 he urged him to undertake
a translation of the whole of the works of Virgil. Observing how strongly
the public taste set towards the great classical writers, he was anxious
to employ men of ability in the work of turning them into English; and it
appears from existing correspondence that he engaged Addison, while the
latter was at Oxford, to superintend a translation of Herodotus. He also
suggested a translation of Ovid. Addison undertook to procure coadjutors
for the work of translating the Greek historian. He himself actually
translated the books called _Polymnia_ and _Urania_, but for some
unexplained reason the work was never published. For Ovid he seems, on the
whole, to have had less inclination. At Tonson's instance he translated
the Second Book of the _Metamorphoses_, which was first printed in the
volume of _Miscellanies_ that appeared in 1697; but he wrote to the
publisher that "Ovid had so many silly stories with his good ones that he
was more tedious to translate than a better poet would be." His study of
Ovid, however, was of the greatest use in developing his critical faculty;
the excesses and want of judgment in that poet forced him to reflect, and
his observations on the style of his author anticipate his excellent
remarks on the difference between True and False Wit in the sixty-second
number of the _Spectator_.
Whoever, indeed, compares these notes with the _Essay on the Georgics_,
and with the opinions expressed in the _Account of the English Poets_,
will be convinced that the foundations of his critical method were laid at
this period (1697). In the _Essay on the Georgics_ he seems to be timid in
the presence of Virgil's superiority; his _Account of the English Poets_,
besides being impregnated with the principles of taste prevalent after the
Restoration, shows deficient powers of perception and appreciation. The
name of Shakespeare is not mentioned in it, Dryden and Congreve alone
being selected to represent the drama. Chaucer is described as "a merry
bard," whose humour has become obsolete through time and change; while the
rich pictorial fancy of the _Faery Queen_ is thus described:
"Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age--
An age that yet uncultivate and rude,
Where'er the poet's fancy led pursued,
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more;
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below."
According to Pope--always a suspicious witness where Addison is
concerned--he had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him.[7]
Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of course
appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fashion of the
_Spectator_; to Dryden, the most distinguished poet of the day, deserved
compliments are paid, but their value is lessened by the exaggerated
opinion which the writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a
"mighty genius," and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his
imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe a remarkable
confusion of various veins of thought; an unjust depreciation of the
Gothic grandeur of the older English poets; a just admiration for the
Greek and Roman authors; a sense of the necessity of good sense and
regularity in writings composed for an "understanding age;" and at the
same time a lingering taste for the forced invention and far-fetched
conceits that mark the decay of the spirit of mediæval chivalry.
With the judgments expressed in this performance it is instructive to
compare such criticisms on Shakespeare as we find in No. 42 of the
_Spectator_, the papers on "Chevy Chase" (73, 74), and particularly the
following passage:
"As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in
the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there
is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of
ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinction's
sake, I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds
in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has
likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton
has a genius much above it. _Spenser is in the same class with
Milton._ The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of it.
Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has
everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among
the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There
are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem ascribed to Musæus,
which by that, as well as many other marks, betrays itself to be a
modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers we find none of
this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in
Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in
Martial."
The stepping-stone from the immaturity of the early criticisms in the
_Account of the Greatest English Poets_ to the finished ease of the
_Spectator_ is to be found in the notes to the translation of Ovid.[8]
The time came when he was obliged to form a decision affecting the entire
course of his life. Tonson, who had a wide acquaintance, no doubt
introduced him to Congreve and the leading men of letters in London, and
through them he was presented to Somers and Montague. Those ministers
perhaps persuaded him, as a point of etiquette, to write, in 1695, his
_Address to King William_, a poem composed in a vein of orthodox
hyperbole, all of which must have been completely thrown away on that most
unpoetical of monarchs. Yet in spite of those seductions Addison lingered
at Oxford. To retain his Fellowship it was necessary for him to take
orders. Had he done so, there can be no doubt that his literary skill and
his value as a political partizan would have opened for him a road to the
highest preferment. At that time the clergy were far from thinking it
unbecoming to their cloth to fight in the political arena or to take part
in journalism. Swift would have been advanced to a bishopric, as a reward
for his political services, if it had not been for the prejudice
entertained towards him by Queen Anne; Boulter, rector of St. Saviour's,
Southwark, having made himself conspicuous by editing a paper called the
_Freethinker_, was raised to the Primacy of Ireland; Hoadley, the
notorious Bishop of Bangor, edited the _London Journal_; the honours that
were awarded to two men of such second-rate intellectual capacity would
hardly have been denied to Addison. He was inclined in this direction by
the example and advice of his father, who was now Dean of Lichfield, and
who was urgent on his son to rid himself of the pecuniary embarrassments
in which he was involved by embracing the Church as a profession. A few
years before he had himself seemed to look upon the Church as his future
sphere. In his _Account of the Greatest English Poets_ he says:
"I leave the arts of poetry and verse
To them that practise them with more success.
Of greater truths I'll now propose to tell,
And so at once, dear friend and muse, farewell."
Had he followed up his intention we might have known the name of Addison
as that of an artful controversialist, and perhaps as a famous writer of
sermons; but we should, in all probability, have never heard of the
_Spectator_.
Fortunately for English letters, other influences prevailed to give a
different direction to his fortunes. It is true that Tickell, Addison's
earliest biographer, states that his determination not to take orders was
the result of his own habitual self-distrust, and of a fear of the
responsibilities which the clerical office would involve. But Steele, who
was better acquainted with his friend's private history, on reading
Tickell's Memoir, addressed a letter to Congreve on the subject, in which
he says:
"These, you know very well, were not the reasons which made Mr.
Addison turn his thoughts to the civil world; and, as you were the
instrument of his becoming acquainted with Lord Halifax, I doubt not
but you remember the warm instances that noble lord made to the head
of the College not to insist upon Mr. Addison's going into orders. His
arguments were founded upon the general pravity and corruption of men
of business, who wanted liberal education. And I remember, as if I had
read the letter yesterday, that my lord ended with a compliment that,
however he might be represented as a friend to the Church, he never
would do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it."
No doubt the real motive of the interest in Addison shown by Lord Halifax,
at that time known as Charles Montague, was an anxiety which he shared
with all the leading statesmen of the period, and of which more will be
said presently, to secure for his party the services of the ablest
writers. Finding his _protégé_ as yet hardly qualified to transact affairs
of State, he joined with Lord Somers, who had also fixed his eyes on
Addison, in soliciting for him from the Crown, in 1699, a pension of £300
a year, which might enable him to supplement his literary accomplishments
with the practical experience of travel. Addison naturally embraced the
offer. He looked forward to studying the political institutions of foreign
countries, to seeing the spots of which he had read in his favourite
classical authors, and to meeting the most famous men of letters on the
Continent.
It is characteristic both of his own tastes and of his age that he seems
to have thought his best passport to intellectual society abroad would be
his Latin poems. His verses on the _Peace of Ryswick_, written in 1697
and dedicated to Montague, had already procured him great reputation, and
had been praised by Edmund Smith--a high authority--as "the best Latin
poem since the _Æneid_." This gave him the opportunity of collecting his
various compositions of the same kind, and in 1699 he published from the
Sheldonian Press a second volume of the _Musæ Anglicanæ_--the first having
appeared in 1691--containing poems by various Oxford scholars. Among the
contributors were Hannes, one of the many scholarly physicians of the
period; J. Philips, the author of the _Splendid Shilling_; and Alsop, a
prominent antagonist of Bentley, whose Horatian humour is celebrated by
Pope in the _Dunciad_.[9]
But the most interesting of the names in the volume is that of the once
celebrated Edmond, commonly called "Rag," Smith, author of the _Ode on the
Death of Dr. Pocock_, who seems to have been among Addison's intimate
acquaintance, and deserves to be recollected in connection with him on
account of a certain similarity in their genius and the extraordinary
difference in their fortunes. "Rag" was a man of fine accomplishments and
graceful humour, but, like other scholars of the same class, indolent and
licentious. In spite of great indulgence extended to him by the
authorities of Christ Church, he was expelled from the University in
consequence of his irregularities. His friends stood by him, and, through
the interest of Addison, a proposal was made to him to undertake a history
of the Revolution, which, however, from political scruples he felt himself
obliged to decline. Like Addison, he wrote a tragedy modelled on classical
lines; but, as it had no political significance, it only pleased the
critics, without, like "Cato," interesting
|
tie. His undertaking was to obtain material in
Europe for an American “society-paper.”
If it be objected to all this that when Francie Dosson at last came in
she addressed him as if she easily placed him, the answer is that she
had been notified by her father--and more punctually than was indicated
by the manner of her response. “Well, the way you DO turn up,” she said,
smiling and holding out her left hand to him: in the other hand, or the
hollow of her slim right arm, she had a lumpish parcel. Though she had
made him wait she was clearly very glad to see him there; and she as
evidently required and enjoyed a great deal of that sort of indulgence.
Her sister’s attitude would have told you so even if her own appearance
had not. There was that in her manner to the young man--a perceptible
but indefinable shade--which seemed to legitimate the oddity of his
having asked in particular for her, asked as if he wished to see her to
the exclusion of her father and sister: the note of a special pleasure
which might have implied a special relation. And yet a spectator looking
from Mr. George Flack to Miss Francie Dosson would have been much at a
loss to guess what special relation could exist between them. The girl
was exceedingly, extraordinarily pretty, all exempt from traceable
likeness to her sister; and there was a brightness in her--a still
and scattered radiance--which was quite distinct from what is called
animation. Rather tall than short, fine slender erect, with an airy
lightness of hand and foot, she yet gave no impression of quick
movement, of abundant chatter, of excitable nerves and irrepressible
life--no hint of arriving at her typical American grace in the most
usual way. She was pretty without emphasis and as might almost have been
said without point, and your fancy that a little stiffness would have
improved her was at once qualified by the question of what her softness
would have made of it. There was nothing in her, however, to confirm
the implication that she had rushed about the deck of a Cunarder with a
newspaper-man. She was as straight as a wand and as true as a gem; her
neck was long and her grey eyes had colour; and from the ripple of her
dark brown hair to the curve of her unaffirmative chin every line in
her face was happy and pure. She had a weak pipe of a voice and
inconceivabilities of ignorance.
Delia got up, and they came out of the little reading-room--this young
lady remarking to her sister that she hoped she had brought down all
the things. “Well, I had a fiendish hunt for them--we’ve got so many,”
Francie replied with a strange want of articulation. “There were a few
dozens of the pocket-handkerchiefs I couldn’t find; but I guess I’ve got
most of them and most of the gloves.”
“Well, what are you carting them about for?” George Flack enquired,
taking the parcel from her. “You had better let me handle them. Do you
buy pocket-handkerchiefs by the hundred?”
“Well, it only makes fifty apiece,” Francie yieldingly smiled. “They
ain’t really nice--we’re going to change them.”
“Oh I won’t be mixed up with that--you can’t work that game on these
Frenchmen!” the young man stated.
“Oh with Francie they’ll take anything back,” Delia Dosson declared.
“They just love her, all over.”
“Well, they’re like me then,” said Mr. Flack with friendly cheer. “I’LL
take her back if she’ll come.”
“Well, I don’t think I’m ready quite yet,” the girl replied. “But I hope
very much we shall cross with you again.”
“Talk about crossing--it’s on these boulevards we want a
life-preserver!” Delia loudly commented. They had passed out of the
hotel and the wide vista of the Rue de la Paix stretched up and down.
There were many vehicles.
“Won’t this thing do? I’ll tie it to either of you,” George Flack said,
holding out his bundle. “I suppose they won’t kill you if they love
you,” he went on to the object of his preference.
“Well, you’ve got to know me first,” she answered, laughing and looking
for a chance, while they waited to pass over.
“I didn’t know you when I was struck.” He applied his disengaged hand to
her elbow and propelled her across the street. She took no notice of
his observation, and Delia asked her, on the other side, whether their
father had given her that money. She replied that he had given her
loads--she felt as if he had made his will; which led George Flack to
say that he wished the old gentleman was HIS father.
“Why you don’t mean to say you want to be our brother!” Francie prattled
as they went down the Rue de la Paix.
“I should like to be Miss Delia’s, if you can make that out,” he
laughed.
“Well then suppose you prove it by calling me a cab,” Miss
Delia returned. “I presume you and Francie don’t take this for a
promenade-deck.”
“Don’t she feel rich?” George Flack demanded of Francie. “But we do
require a cart for our goods”; and he hailed a little yellow carriage,
which presently drew up beside the pavement. The three got into it and,
still emitting innocent pleasantries, proceeded on their way, while at
the Hotel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham Mr. Dosson wandered down into
the court again and took his place in his customary chair.
II
The court was roofed with glass; the April air was mild; the cry of
women selling violets came in from the street and, mingling with the
rich hum of Paris, seemed to bring with it faintly the odour of the
flowers. There were other odours in the place, warm succulent and
Parisian, which ranged from fried fish to burnt sugar; and there were
many things besides: little tables for the post-prandial coffee; piles
of luggage inscribed (after the initials or frequently the name) R.
P. Scudamore or D. Jackson Hodge, Philadelphia Pa., or St. Louis
Mo.; rattles of unregarded bells, flittings of tray-bearing waiters,
conversations with the second-floor windows of admonitory landladies,
arrivals of young women with coffinlike bandboxes covered with black
oil-cloth and depending from a strap, sallyings-forth of persons staying
and arrivals just afterwards of other persons to see them; together with
vague prostrations on benches of tired heads of American families.
It was to this last element that Mr. Dosson himself in some degree
contributed, but it must be added that he had not the extremely bereft
and exhausted appearance of certain of his fellows. There was an air of
ruminant resignation, of habitual accommodation in him; but you would
have guessed that he was enjoying a holiday rather than aching for a
truce, and he was not so enfeebled but that he was able to get up from
time to time and stroll through the porte cochere to have a look at the
street.
He gazed up and down for five minutes with his hands in his pockets, and
then came back; that appeared to content him; he asked for little and
had no restlessness that these small excursions wouldn’t assuage. He
looked at the heaped-up luggage, at the tinkling bells, at the young
women from the lingere, at the repudiated visitors, at everything but
the other American parents. Something in his breast told him that he
knew all about these. It’s not upon each other that the animals in the
same cage, in a zoological collection, most turn their eyes. There was
a silent sociability in him and a superficial fineness of grain that
helped to account for his daughter Francie’s various delicacies. He was
fair and spare and had no figure; you would have seen in a moment
that the question of how he should hold himself had never in his life
occurred to him. He never held himself at all; providence held him
rather--and very loosely--by an invisible string at the end of which he
seemed gently to dangle and waver. His face was so smooth that his thin
light whiskers, which grew only far back, scarcely seemed native to his
cheeks: they might have been attached there for some harmless purpose of
comedy or disguise. He looked for the most part as if he were thinking
over, without exactly understanding it, something rather droll that had
just occurred; if his eyes wandered his attention rested, just as
it hurried, quite as little. His feet were remarkably small, and his
clothes, in which light colours predominated, were visibly the work of
a French tailor: he was an American who still held the tradition that it
is in Paris a man dresses himself best. His hat would have looked odd in
Bond Street or the Fifth Avenue, and his necktie was loose and flowing.
Mr. Dosson, it may further be noted, was a person of the simplest
composition, a character as cipherable as a sum of two figures. He had
a native financial faculty of the finest order, a gift as direct as
a beautiful tenor voice, which had enabled him, without the aid of
particular strength of will or keenness of ambition, to build up a large
fortune while he was still of middle age. He had a genius for happy
speculation, the quick unerring instinct of a “good thing”; and as he
sat there idle amused contented, on the edge of the Parisian street,
he might very well have passed for some rare performer who had sung his
song or played his trick and had nothing to do till the next call.
And he had grown rich not because he was ravenous or hard, but simply
because he had an ear, not to term it a nose. He could make out the tune
in the discord of the market-place; he could smell success far up
the wind. The second factor in his little addition was that he was an
unassuming father. He had no tastes, no acquirements, no curiosities,
and his daughters represented all society for him. He thought much
more and much oftener of these young ladies than of his bank-shares and
railway-stock; they crowned much more his sense of accumulated property.
He never compared them with other girls; he only compared his present
self with what he would have been without them. His view of them was
perfectly simple. Delia had a greater direct knowledge of life and
Francie a wider acquaintance with literature and art. Mr. Dosson had
not perhaps a full perception of his younger daughter’s beauty: he
would scarcely have pretended to judge of that, more than he would of a
valuable picture or vase, but he believed she was cultivated up to the
eyes. He had a recollection of tremendous school-bills and, in later
days, during their travels, of the way she was always leaving books
behind her. Moreover wasn’t her French so good that he couldn’t
understand it?
The two girls, at any rate, formed the breeze in his sail and the only
directing determinant force he knew; when anything happened--and he was
under the impression that things DID happen--they were there for it to
have happened TO. Without them in short, as he felt, he would have been
the tail without the kite. The wind rose and fell of course; there were
lulls and there were gales; there were intervals during which he simply
floated in quiet waters--cast anchor and waited. This appeared to be one
of them now; but he could be patient, knowing that he should soon again
inhale the brine and feel the dip of his prow. When his daughters were
out for any time the occasion affected him as a “weather-breeder”--the
wind would be then, as a kind of consequence, GOING to rise; but their
now being out with a remarkably bright young man only sweetened the
temporary calm. That belonged to their superior life, and Mr. Dosson
never doubted that George M. Flack was remarkably bright. He represented
the newspaper, and the newspaper for this man of genial assumptions
represented--well, all other representations whatever. To know Delia and
Francie thus attended by an editor or a correspondent was really to see
them dancing in the central glow. This is doubtless why Mr. Dosson had
slightly more than usual his air of recovering slowly from a pleasant
surprise. The vision to which I allude hung before him, at a convenient
distance, and melted into other bright confused aspects: reminiscences
of Mr. Flack in other relations--on the ship, on the deck, at the hotel
at Liverpool, and in the cars. Whitney Dosson was a loyal father, but
he would have thought himself simple had he not had two or three strong
convictions: one of which was that the children should never go out with
a gentleman they hadn’t seen before. The sense of their having, and his
having, seen Mr. Flack before was comfortable to him now: it made mere
placidity of his personally foregoing the young man’s society in favour
of Delia and Francie. He had not hitherto been perfectly satisfied that
the streets and shops, the general immensity of Paris, were just the
safest place for young ladies alone. But the company of a helpful
gentleman ensured safety--a gentleman who would be helpful by the fact
of his knowing so much and having it all right there. If a big newspaper
told you everything there was in the world every morning, that was
what a big newspaper-man would have to know, and Mr. Dosson had never
supposed there was anything left to know when such voices as Mr. Flack’s
and that of his organ had daily been heard. In the absence of such happy
chances--and in one way or another they kept occurring--his girls might
have seemed lonely, which was not the way he struck himself. They were
his company but he scarcely theirs; it was as if they belonged to him
more than he to them.
They were out a long time, but he felt no anxiety, as he reflected that
Mr. Flack’s very profession would somehow make everything turn out to
their profit. The bright French afternoon waned without bringing them
back, yet Mr. Dosson still revolved about the court till he might have
been taken for a valet de place hoping to pick up custom. The landlady
smiled at him sometimes as she passed and re-passed, and even ventured
to remark disinterestedly that it was a pity to waste such a lovely day
indoors--not to take a turn and see what was going on in Paris. But Mr.
Dosson had no sense of waste: that came to him much more when he was
confronted with historical monuments or beauties of nature or art, which
affected him as the talk of people naming others, naming friends of
theirs, whom he had never heard of: then he was aware of a degree of
waste for the others, as if somebody lost something--but never when he
lounged in that simplifying yet so comprehensive way in the court. It
wanted but a quarter of an hour to dinner--THAT historic fact was not
beyond his measure--when Delia and Francie at last met his view, still
accompanied by Mr. Flack and sauntering in, at a little distance from
each other, with a jaded air which was not in the least a tribute to his
possible solicitude. They dropped into chairs and joked with each other,
mingling sociability and languor, on the subject of what they had
seen and done--a question into which he felt as yet the delicacy of
enquiring. But they had evidently done a good deal and had a good
time: an impression sufficient to rescue Mr. Dosson personally from the
consciousness of failure. “Won’t you just step in and take dinner with
us?” he asked of the young man with a friendliness to which everything
appeared to minister.
“Well, that’s a handsome offer,” George Flack replied while Delia put it
on record that they had each eaten about thirty cakes.
“Well, I wondered what you were doing so long. But never mind your
cakes. It’s twenty minutes past six, and the table d’hote’s on time.”
“You don’t mean to say you dine at the table d’hote!” Mr. Flack cried.
“Why, don’t you like that?”--and Francie’s candour of appeal to their
comrade’s taste was celestial.
“Well, it isn’t what you must build on when you come to Paris. Too many
flowerpots and chickens’ legs.”
“Well, would you like one of these restaurants?” asked Mr. Dosson. “_I_
don’t care--if you show us a good one.”
“Oh I’ll show you a good one--don’t you worry.” Mr. Flack’s tone was
ever that of keeping the poor gentleman mildly but firmly in his place.
“Well, you’ve got to order the dinner then,” said Francie.
“Well, you’ll see how I could do it!” He towered over her in the pride
of this feat.
“He has got an interest in some place,” Delia declared. “He has taken us
to ever so many stores where he gets his commission.”
“Well, I’d pay you to take them round,” said Mr. Dosson; and with much
agreeable trifling of this kind it was agreed that they should sally
forth for the evening meal under Mr. Flack’s guidance.
If he had easily convinced them on this occasion that that was a more
original proceeding than worrying those old bones, as he called it, at
the hotel, he convinced them of other things besides in the course of
the following month and by the aid of profuse attentions. What he mainly
made clear to them was that it was really most kind of a young man who
had so many big things on his mind to find sympathy for questions, for
issues, he used to call them, that could occupy the telegraph and the
press so little as theirs. He came every day to set them in the right
path, pointing out its charms to them in a way that made them feel how
much they had been in the wrong. It made them feel indeed that they
didn’t know anything about anything, even about such a matter as
ordering shoes--an art in which they had vaguely supposed themselves
rather strong. He had in fact great knowledge, which was wonderfully
various, and he knew as many people as they knew few. He had
appointments--very often with celebrities--for every hour of the day,
and memoranda, sometimes in shorthand, on tablets with elastic straps,
with which he dazzled the simple folk at the Hotel de l’Univers et de
Cheltenham, whose social life, of narrow range, consisted mainly in
reading the lists of Americans who “registered” at the bankers’ and at
Galignani’s. Delia Dosson in particular had a trick of poring solemnly
over these records which exasperated Mr. Flack, who skimmed them and
found what he wanted in the flash of an eye: she kept the others waiting
while she satisfied herself that Mr. and Mrs. D. S. Rosenheim and Miss
Cora Rosenheim and Master Samuel Rosenheim had “left for Brussels.”
Mr. Flack was wonderful on all occasions in finding what he
wanted--which, as we know, was what he believed the public wanted--and
Delia was the only one of the party with whom he was sometimes a little
sharp. He had embraced from the first the idea that she was his enemy,
and he alluded to it with almost tiresome frequency, though always in a
humorous fearless strain. Even more than by her fashion of hanging over
the registers she provoked him by appearing to find their little party
not sufficient to itself, by wishing, as he expressed it, to work in new
stuff. He might have been easy, however, for he had sufficient chance to
observe how it was always the fate of the Dossons to miss their friends.
They were continually looking out for reunions and combinations that
never came off, hearing that people had been in Paris only after they
had gone away, or feeling convinced that they were there but not to be
found through their not having registered, or wondering whether they
should overtake them if they should go to Dresden, and then making up
their minds to start for Dresden only to learn at the eleventh hour,
through some accident, that the hunted game had “left for” Biarritz even
as the Rosenheims for Brussels. “We know plenty of people if we could
only come across them,” Delia had more than once observed: she
scanned the Continent with a wondering baffled gaze and talked of the
unsatisfactory way in which friends at home would “write out” that other
friends were “somewhere in Europe.” She expressed the wish that such
correspondents as that might be in a place that was not at all vague.
Two or three times people had called at the hotel when they were out and
had left cards for them without an address and superscribed with some
mocking dash of the pencil--“So sorry to miss you!” or “Off to-morrow!”
The girl sat looking at these cards, handling them and turning them over
for a quarter of an hour at a time; she produced them days afterwards,
brooding upon them afresh as if they were a mystic clue. George Flack
generally knew where they were, the people who were “somewhere in
Europe.” Such knowledge came to him by a kind of intuition, by the
voices of the air, by indefinable and unteachable processes. But he held
his peace on purpose; he didn’t want any outsiders; he thought their
little party just right. Mr. Dosson’s place in the scheme of Providence
was to “go” with Delia while he himself “went” with Francie, and nothing
would have induced George Flack to disfigure that equation. The young
man was professionally so occupied with other people’s affairs that it
should doubtless be mentioned to his praise that he still managed to
have affairs--or at least an affair--of his own. That affair was Francie
Dosson, and he was pleased to perceive how little SHE cared what had
become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He
counted all the things she didn’t care about--her soft inadvertent eyes
helped him to do that; and they footed up so, as he would have said,
that they gave him the rich sense of a free field. If she had so few
interests there was the greater possibility that a young man of bold
conceptions and cheerful manners might become one. She had usually the
air of waiting for something, with a pretty listlessness or an amused
resignation, while tender shy indefinite little fancies hummed in her
brain. Thus she would perhaps recognise in him the reward of patience.
George Flack was aware that he exposed his friends to considerable
fatigue: he brought them back pale and taciturn from suburban excursions
and from wanderings often rather aimless and casual among the boulevards
and avenues of the town. He regarded them at such times with complacency
however, for these were hours of diminished resistance: he had an idea
that he should be able eventually to circumvent Delia if he only could
catch her some day sufficiently, that is physically, prostrate. He liked
to make them all feel helpless and dependent, and this was not difficult
with people who were so modest and artless, so unconscious of the
boundless power of wealth. Sentiment, in our young man, was not a
scruple nor a source of weakness; but he thought it really touching, the
little these good people knew of what they could do with their money.
They had in their hands a weapon of infinite range and yet were
incapable of firing a shot for themselves. They had a sort of social
humility; it appeared never to have occurred to them that, added to
their loveliness, their money gave them a value. This used to strike
George Flack on certain occasions when he came back to find them in the
places where he had dropped them while he rushed off to give a turn
to one of his screws. They never played him false, never wearied of
waiting; always sat patient and submissive, usually at a cafe to which
he had introduced them or in a row of chairs on the boulevard, on the
level expanse of the Tuileries or in the Champs Elysees.
He introduced them to many cafes, in different parts of Paris, being
careful to choose those which in his view young ladies might frequent
with propriety, and there were two or three in the neighbourhood of
their hotel where they became frequent and familiar figures. As the
late spring days grew warmer and brighter they mainly camped out on
the “terrace,” amid the array of small tables at the door of the
establishment, where Mr. Flack, on the return, could descry them
from afar at their post and in the very same postures to which he
had appointed them. They complained of no satiety in watching the
many-coloured movement of the Parisian streets; and if some of the
features in the panorama were base they were only so in a version that
the social culture of our friends was incapable of supplying. George
Flack considered that he was rendering a positive service to Mr. Dosson:
wouldn’t the old gentleman have sat all day in the court anyway? and
wasn’t the boulevard better than the court? It was his theory too that
he nattered and caressed Miss Francie’s father, for there was no one
to whom he had furnished more copious details about the affairs, the
projects and prospects, of the Reverberator. He had left no doubt in the
old gentleman’s mind as to the race he himself intended to run, and Mr.
Dosson used to say to him every day, the first thing, “Well, where have
you got to now?”--quite as if he took a real interest. George Flack
reported his interviews, that is his reportings, to which Delia and
Francie gave attention only in case they knew something of the persons
on whom the young emissary of the Reverberator had conferred
this distinction; whereas Mr. Dosson listened, with his tolerant
interposition of “Is that so?” and “Well, that’s good,” just as
submissively when he heard of the celebrity in question for the first
time.
In conversation with his daughters Mr. Flack was frequently the theme,
though introduced much more by the young ladies than by himself, and
especially by Delia, who announced at an early period that she knew what
he wanted and that it wasn’t in the least what SHE wanted. She amplified
this statement very soon--at least as regards her interpretation of Mr.
Flack’s designs: a certain mystery still hung about her own, which, as
she intimated, had much more to recommend them. Delia’s vision of the
danger as well as the advantage of being a pretty girl was closely
connected, as was natural, with the idea of an “engagement”: this idea
was in a manner complete in itself--her imagination failed in the oddest
way to carry it into the next stage. She wanted her sister to be engaged
but wanted her not at all to be married, and had clearly never made up
her mind as to how Francie was to enjoy both the peril and the shelter.
It was a secret source of humiliation to her that there had as yet to
her knowledge been no one with whom her sister had exchanged vows; if
her conviction on this subject could have expressed itself intelligibly
it would have given you a glimpse of a droll state of mind--a dim theory
that a bright girl ought to be able to try successive aspirants. Delia’s
conception of what such a trial might consist of was strangely innocent:
it was made up of calls and walks and buggy-drives, and above all of
being, in the light of these exhibitions, the theme of tongues and
subject to the great imputation. It had never in life occurred to
her withal that a succession of lovers, or just even a repetition of
experiments, may have anything to say to a young lady’s delicacy. She
felt herself a born old maid and never dreamed of a lover of her own--he
would have been dreadfully in her way; but she dreamed of love
as something in its nature essentially refined. All the same she
discriminated; it did lead to something after all, and she desired that
for Francie it shouldn’t lead to a union with Mr. Flack. She looked at
such a union under the influence of that other view which she kept as
yet to herself but was prepared to produce so soon as the right occasion
should come up; giving her sister to understand that she would never
speak to her again should this young man be allowed to suppose--! Which
was where she always paused, plunging again into impressive reticence.
“To suppose what?” Francie would ask as if she were totally
unacquainted--which indeed she really was--with the suppositions of
young men.
“Well, you’ll see--when he begins to say things you won’t like!” This
sounded ominous on Delia’s part, yet her anxiety was really but thin:
otherwise she would have risen against the custom adopted by Mr. Flack
of perpetually coming round. She would have given her attention--though
it struggled in general unsuccessfully with all this side of their
life--to some prompt means of getting away from Paris. She expressed to
her father what in her view the correspondent of the Reverberator was
“after”; but without, it must be added, gaining from him the sense of it
as a connexion in which he could be greatly worked up. This indeed was
not of importance, thanks to her inner faith that Francie would never
really do anything--that is would never really like anything--her
nearest relatives didn’t like. Her sister’s docility was a great comfort
to Delia, the more that she herself, taking it always for granted, was
the first to profit by it. She liked and disliked certain things much
more than her junior did either; and Francie cultivated the convenience
of her reasons, having so few of her own. They served--Delia’s
reasons--for Mr. Dosson as well, so that Francie was not guilty of any
particular irreverence in regarding her sister rather than her father as
the controller of her fate. A fate was rather an unwieldy and terrible
treasure, which it relieved her that some kind person should undertake
to administer. Delia had somehow got hold of hers first--before even her
father, and ever so much before Mr. Flack; and it lay with Delia to make
any change. She couldn’t have accepted any gentleman as a party to an
engagement--which was somehow as far as her imagination went--without
reference to Delia, any more than she could have done up her hair
without a glass. The only action taken by Mr. Dosson on his elder
daughter’s admonitions was to convert the general issue, as Mr. Flack
would have called it, to a theme for daily pleasantry. He was fond,
in his intercourse with his children, of some small usual joke, some
humorous refrain; and what could have been more in the line of true
domestic sport than a little gentle but unintermitted raillery on
Francie’s conquest? Mr. Flack’s attributive intentions became a theme of
indulgent parental chaff, and the girl was neither dazzled nor annoyed
by the freedom of all this tribute. “Well, he HAS told us about half
we know,” she used to reply with an air of the judicious that the
undetected observer I am perpetually moved to invoke would have found
indescribably quaint.
Among the items of knowledge for which they were indebted to him floated
the fact that this was the very best time in the young lady’s life to
have her portrait painted and the best place in the world to have it
done well; also that he knew a “lovely artist,” a young American of
extraordinary talent, who would be delighted to undertake the job. He
led his trio to this gentleman’s studio, where they saw several
pictures that opened to them the strange gates of mystification. Francie
protested that she didn’t want to be done in THAT style, and Delia
declared that she would as soon have her sister shown up in a magic
lantern. They had had the fortune not to find Mr. Waterlow at home, so
that they were free to express themselves and the pictures were shown
them by his servant. They looked at them as they looked at bonnets and
confections when they went to expensive shops; as if it were a question,
among so many specimens, of the style and colour they would choose.
Mr. Waterlow’s productions took their place for the most part in the
category of those creations known to ladies as frights, and our friends
retired with the lowest opinion of the young American master. George
Flack told them however that they couldn’t get out of it, inasmuch as
he had already written home to the Reverberator that Francie was to sit.
They accepted this somehow as a kind of supernatural sign that she would
have to, for they believed everything they ever heard quoted from a
newspaper. Moreover Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic
to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap;
for it was well known that impressionism was going to be the art of the
future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising impressionist. It was a new
system altogether and the latest improvement in art. They didn’t want
to go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an
article that would fetch five times the money in about five years--which
somehow, as he put it, seemed a very short time, though it would have
seemed immense for anything else. They were not in search of a bargain,
but they allowed themselves to be inoculated with any reason they
thought would be characteristic of informed people; and he even
convinced them after a little that when once they had got used to
impressionism they would never look at anything else. Mr. Waterlow
was the man, among the young, and he had no interest in praising him,
because he was not a personal friend: his reputation was advancing
with strides, and any one with any sense would want to secure something
before the rush.
III
The young ladies consented to return to the Avenue des Villiers;
and this time they found the celebrity of the future. He was
smoking cigarettes with a friend while coffee was served to the two
gentlemen--it was just after luncheon--on a vast divan covered with
scrappy oriental rugs and cushions; it looked, Francie thought, as if
the artist had set up a carpet-shop in a corner. He struck her as very
pleasant; and it may be mentioned without circumlocution that the young
lady ushered in by the vulgar American reporter, whom he didn’t like and
who had already come too often to his studio to pick up “glimpses” (the
painter wondered how in the world he had picked HER up), this charming
candidate for portraiture rose on the spot before Charles Waterlow as
a precious model. She made, it may further be declared, quite the same
impression on the gentleman who was with him and who never took his eyes
off her while her own rested afresh on several finished and unfinished
canvases. This gentleman asked of his friend at the end of five minutes
the favour of an introduction to her; in consequence of which Francie
learned that his name--she thought it singular--was Gaston Probert. Mr.
Probert was a kind-eyed smiling youth who fingered the points of his
moustache; he was represented by Mr. Waterlow as an American, but he
pronounced the American language--so at least it seemed to Francie--as
if it had been French.
After she had quitted the studio with Delia and Mr. Flack--her father on
this occasion not being of the party--the two young men, falling back
on their divan, broke into expressions of aesthetic rapture, gave it to
each other that the girl had qualities--oh but qualities and a charm
of line! They remained there an hour, studying these rare properties
through the smoke of their cigarettes. You would have gathered from
their conversation--though as regards much of it only perhaps with the
aid of a grammar and dictionary--that the young lady had been endowed
with plastic treasures, that is with physical graces, of the highest
order, of which she was evidently quite unconscious. Before this,
however, Mr. Waterlow had come to an understanding with his visitors--it
had been settled that Miss Francina should sit for him at his first hour
of leisure. Unfortunately that hour hovered before him as still rather
distant--he was unable to make a definite appointment. He had sitters
on his hands, he had at least three portraits to finish before going
to Spain. He adverted with bitterness to the journey to Spain--a little
excursion laid out precisely with his friend Probert for the last weeks
of the spring,
|
York
implied was the usual prelude to a German searching party--rather this
soldier most courteously asked to see my wallet. I gave it to him. I
would have given him anything. Our coöperation was perfect. There was
no need for me to bring my exhaustive knowledge of the German language
into play. Talking fluently with my hands, now and then uttering
"_danke_," I tried to assist his search, meanwhile hopelessly looking
about for the courier. I was depending not only upon his fluent German
but also upon his superior knowledge of the situation to help me to
pass serenely through this ordeal. Alas, the crowd hid him.
Suddenly my soldier grunted something. Until now we had been getting
along splendidly and I could not conceal my surprise when he took from
my wallet a handful of letters and stared at them in bewilderment. The
more he stared the more his regard for me seemed to vanish. Although
he could not understand English he could recognize a proper name, for
the letters bore the addresses of decidedly influential men in Germany.
They challenged his suspicion. Thoroughly puzzled he opened the letters
and tried to read them. When he compared my passport with a letter I
saw his face light up. I realized that he had recognized my name in the
contents. Whereupon, greatly relieved, assured now that everything was
all right, I held out my hand for both letters and wallet. Not yet. A
rumble of words and the soldier called one of those busy civilians
with the notebooks.
This person spoke a little English. The letters interested him. Where
had I found them?... My spine began to feel cold. I replied that they
had been given me in New York and remembering that I had the courier
to rely on, I suggested that they have a word with him. It was then
that I heard an excited deluge of words and, glancing over my shoulder,
I observed that the courier was thoroughly flanked and surrounded by
five _Landwehr_ who apparently were much in earnest about something.
Concluding that some cog had slipped I racked my wits to make the best
of what was rapidly becoming a difficult situation.
The soldier having turned me over to the civilian I noticed several
suspicious glances in my direction, and blessed the luck that had
impelled me to go to the American Legation and the German Consulate in
Copenhagen for visés. That the civilian who was taking such an interest
in me belonged to the secret service, I was certain. I appealed to his
sense of discretion.
"Your passport seems all right," he thoughtfully observed, and opened
a little book. "Where are you going?"
I told him to Hamburg but could not tell him where I would stay, for
the excellent reason that not the name of a single Hamburg hotel was
known to me.
"Only for a few days, though," I said, adding hopefully; "after that I
go to Berlin to Hotel Adlon."
As fast as his pencil could move he wrote the address in his book.
"These letters," he said reluctantly, tapping them on his hand, "I
must take now. If everything is all right, they will be sent to you in
Berlin."
"But it is important that I have them," I protested, "they are my
introductions. You cannot tell me how long I may have to wait for them?
You can see from them that I am a responsible person known to your
people."
"I know," he replied, "but they are written in English, and to bring
letters written in English into Germany is forbidden. I am sorry."
He was thus politely relieving me of all my credentials when I happened
to think that in my inner waistcoat pocket lay a letter I had yet
to show them--a communication so important to me that I had kept it
separate from the others. Moreover I remembered it was sealed and that
properly used it might save the day. It was worth a trial.
Realizing that the thing had to be staged I impressively drew the
police spy aside and employing the familiar "stage business" of side
glances and exaggerated caution I slowly took the note--it was a mere
letter of introduction to the Foreign Office--from my waistcoat. If
the soldier's eyes had opened wide at the other addresses, the police
agent's now fairly bulged. Handing him the envelope I pointed to
what was typed in the upper left-hand corner--_Kaiserliche Deutsche
Botschaft, Washington, D. C._--and simply said "_Verstehen sie?_"
He _verstehened_. Being an underling he understood so well that
after a few moments he returned all the letters he had appropriated
and instantly changing his manner, he facilitated the rest of the
inspection. After my baggage was examined by more soldiers (and those
soldiers did their duty, even going through the pockets of clothes in
my trunks) I was told I might go.
"_Gute reise_," the police agent called--"Good journey."
Although treated with all courtesy I was afraid somebody might change
his mind, so hurrying out of the last room of the long wooden shed I
proceeded down the platform to the train at a pace that must have
shown signs of breaking into a run. There in my compartment the
thoughts that came to me were in this order:
There must be reason for such a rigid inspection; no doubt spies must
have been caught recently trying to enter Germany at Warnemunde.
If I hadn't lost the courier in the crowd there would have been plain
sailing.
III--STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS PAPERS
The minutes passed. It was nearly time for the train to start. Where
was the courier? Presently, rather pale, nervous in speech, but as
reserved and cool as ever he limply entered the compartment and threw
himself on the cushions.
"They took everything," he announced. "All they left me was a pair of
pajamas."
"What! You mean they have your papers?"
"All of them," he smiled. "Likewise a trunk full of letters and a
valise. Oh, well, they'll send them on. They took my address. Gad, they
stripped me through!"
I began laughing. The courier could see no mirth in the situation.
"You," I gasped, "you, who by all rights should have paraded through,
from you they take everything while they let me pass."
"Do you mean to say," he exclaimed, "that they didn't take your
letters?"
"Not one," I grinned.
"Well, I'll be damned!" he said.
Locked in the compartment we nervously watched the door, half expecting
that the police spy would come back for us. We could not have been
delayed more than a few minutes, but it seemed hours, before, with
German regard for comfort, the train glided out of the shed. It must
have been trying on my companion's good humor, but the absurdity of
stripping a courier of everything he carried, was irresistible. Perhaps
it was our continued laughter that brought the knock on the door.
Pushing aside the curtains we saw outside--for it was one of the new
German wagons with a passageway running the entire length of one side
of the car--a tall, broad-shouldered, lean man with features and
expression both typical and unmistakable.
"An Englishman!"
We saw him smile and shake his head. I hesitatingly let fall the
curtain and looked at the courier.
"Let him in," he said. "He's got the brand of an English university boy
all over him. We'll have a chat with him. You don't mind, do you?"
"Mind!" In my eagerness I banged back the compartment doors with a
crash that brought down the conductor. I saw my companion hastily
corrupt that official whose murmured "_Bitte schon_" implied an
un-Teutonic disregard for the fact that he had done something
_verboten_ by admitting a second-class passenger into a first-class
coupé; and the stranger entered.
We were gazing upon a strikingly handsome, fair-haired man not yet
thirty. His eyes twinkled when he said that he supposed we were
Americans. His manner and intonation made me stare at him.
"And you?" we finally asked.
"I'm going first to Berlin, then to Petrograd," he said, perhaps
avoiding our question. "Business trip."
We chatted on, the obvious thought obsessing me. Of course the man was
an English spy. But how absurd! If his face did not give him away to
any one who knew--and my word for it, those police spies do know!--he
would be betrayed by his mannerisms. His accent would instantly cry
out the English in him. Of what could Downing Street be thinking? It
was sending this man to certain death. One began to feel sorry for him.
Feeling the intimacy brought by the common experience at Warnemunde, I
presently said:
"You certainly have your nerve with you, traveling in Germany with
_your_ accent."
"Why?" he laughed. "A neutral is safe."
Expecting he would follow this up by saying that he was an American I
looked inquiring and when he sought to turn the subject I asked:
"Neutral? What country?"
"Denmark," he smiled.
"But your accent?" I persisted.
"I do talk a bit English, do I not? I had quite a go at it, though;
lived in London a few years, you know."
Nerve? I marveled at it. Stark foolhardy courage, or did a secret
commission from Downing Street make this the merest commonplace of
duty? Charming company, he hurried along the time with well-told
anecdotes of the Russian capital and Paris, in both of which places he
said he had been since the war began. As we drew near Lübeck, where a
thirty-five minute stop was allowed for dinner in the station, and the
stranger showed no signs of going back to his own compartment, I could
see that the courier was becoming annoyed. Relapsing into silence he
only broke it to reply to the "Dane" in monosyllables; finally, to my
surprise, the courier became downright rude. As the stranger, from the
start, had been extremely courteous, this rudeness surprised me, more
so, as it seemed deliberate. Bludgeoned by obvious hints the stranger
excused himself, and as soon as he was gone my companion leaned towards
me.
"You were surprised at my rudeness," he said, and then in an undertone;
"it was deliberate."
"I saw that. But why?"
"Because," he explained, "seeing we are Americans that fellow wanted to
travel with us all the way through. He must have known that American
company is the best to be seen in over here these days. He might have
made trouble for us."
"Then you think he's English?"
"Think! Why, they must have let him through at Warnemunde for a reason.
He has a Danish passport right enough. I saw it in the inspection
room. But I'll bet you anything there's a police spy in this train,
undoubtedly in the same compartment with him."
One felt uncomfortable. One thought that those police spies must
dislike one even more now.
"That means we may be suspected as being confederates," I gloomily
suggested.
Whether he was getting back for my having guyed him about losing his
papers I do not know, but the courier said we probably were suspected.
Whereupon the book I tried to read became a senseless jumble of words
and our compartment door became vastly more interesting. When would it
open to admit the police spy?... Confound the luck! Everything breaking
wrong.
IV--STORY OF A RIDE FROM LÜBECK TO HAMBURG
But at Lübeck nothing happened--nothing to us. A train load of
wounded had just come in and our hearts jumped at the sight of the
men in the gray-green coats of the firing line, slowly climbing the
long iron steps from the train platforms. Hurrying, we saw them go
clumping down a long, airy waiting room and as they approached
the street their hobbling steps suddenly quickened to the sharper
staccato of the canes upon which they leaned. Hurrying too, we saw
there a vague mass of pallid faces in a dense crowd; some one waved a
flag;--it stuck up conspicuously above that throng;--some one darted
forth;--"_Vater!_"--"_Liebes Mütterchen!_"
Past the burly _Landsturm_, who was trying his utmost to frown his
jolly face into threatening lines that would keep back the crowd, a
woman was scurrying. One of the big gray-green wounded men caught her
in his arm--the other arm hung in a black sling--and she clung to him
as though some one might take him away, and because she was a woman,
she wept in her moment of happiness. Her _Mann_ had come home....
Forgetting the dinner we were to have eaten in the Lübeck station, we
finally heeded a trainman's warning and turned back to our car. There
remained etched in my mind the line of pallid, apprehensive faces, the
tiny waving flags, the little woman and the big man. It was my first
sight of war.
From Lübeck to Hamburg the ride was uneventful. The hour was not late
and beyond remarking that the towns through which we passed were
not as brilliantly lighted as usual, the courier could from the car
window observe no difference between the Germany of peace and of war.
Here and there we noticed bridges and trestles patroled by _Landwehr_
and outside our compartment we read the handbill requesting every
passenger to aid the government in preventing spies throwing explosives
from the car windows. From the conductor we learned that there had
been such attempts to delay the passage of troop trains. Whereupon
we congratulated ourselves upon buying the conductor, as we had the
compartment to ourselves. One thought of what would have happened had
there been an excitable German in with us and while the train was
crossing a bridge, we had innocently opened a window for air!
It was almost ten when the close, clustered lights of Hamburg closed in
against the trackside and we caught our first glimpse of the swarming
_Bahnhof_. Soldiers everywhere. The blue of the Reservists, the
gray-green of the Regulars--a shifting tide of color swept the length
of the long platforms, rising against the black slopes of countless
staircases, overrunning the vast halls above, increasing, as car after
car emptied its load. And then, as at Lübeck, we saw white bandages
coming down under cloth-covered helmets and caps, or arms slung in
black slings; the slightly wounded were coming in from the western
front.
All this time we had forgotten the Englishman, and it was with a start
that we recalled him.
"If he spots us," advised my companion, "we've got to hand him the cold
shoulder. Mark my words, he'll try to trail along to the same hotel and
stick like a leech."
Again he was right. At the baggage room the Englishman overtook us,
suggesting that we make a party of it--he knew a gay café--first going
to the hotel. He suggested the _Atlantic_. Bluntly he was informed we
were visiting friends, but nothing would do then but we must agree to
meet him in, say, an hour. Not until he found it an impossibility did
he give us up and finally, with marvelous good nature, he said good
night. The last I saw of him was his broad back disappearing through a
door into a street.
The courier nudged me.
"Quick," he whispered, "look,--the man going out the next door."
Before I could turn I knew whom he meant. I saw only the man's profile
before he, too, disappeared into the street; but it was a face
difficult to forget, for it had been close to me at Warnemunde; it was
the face of the police spy.
"I told you they purposely let him get through," continued my friend.
"That police fellow must have come down on the train from Warnemunde. I
tell you it's best not to pick up with any one these days. Suppose we
had fallen for that Englishman and gone to a café with him to-night--a
nice mess!"
It was in a restaurant a few hours later that I saw my first Iron
Cross, black against a gray-green coat and dangling from a button.
In _Bieber's_, a typical better class café of the new German type,
luxurious with its marble walls and floors, and with little soft rugs
underfoot and colored wicker tables and chairs, one felt the new spirit
of this miracle of nations. On the broad landing of a wide marble
staircase an orchestra played soldier songs and above the musicians,
looking down on his people, loomed a bust of Wilhelm II, _Von Gottes
Gnaden, Kaiser von Deutschland_. About him, between the flags of
Austria-Hungary and Turkey, blazed the black, white, and red, and
there where all might read, hung the proclamation of August to the
German people. We had read it through to the last line: "_Forward with
God who will be with us as he was with our Fathers!_"--when we heard
an excited inflection in the murmurings from the many tables--"_Das
Eiserne Kreuz!_" And we saw the officer from whose coat dangled the
black maltese cross, outlined in silver. His cheeks flushed, proud
of a limping, shot-riddled leg, proud of his Emperor's decoration,
but prouder still that he was a German; he must have forgotten all of
battle and suffering during that brief walk between the tables. Cheers
rang out, then a song, and when finally the place quieted everybody
stared at that little cross of black as though held by some hypnotic
power.
So! We were Americans, he said when we finally were presented. That
was good. We--that is--I had come to write of the war as seen from the
German side. Good, _sehr gut_! He had heard the Allies, especially the
English,--_Verfluchte Englanderschwein!_--were telling many lies in the
American newspapers. How could any intelligent man believe them?
In his zeal for the German cause his Iron Cross, his one shattered leg,
the consciousness that he was a hero, all were forgotten. Of course
I wanted to hear his story--the story of that little piece of metal
hanging from the black and white ribbon on his coat--but tenaciously he
refused. That surprised me until I knew Prussian officers.
So we left the man with the Iron Cross, marveling not at his modesty
but that it embodied the spirit of the German army; whereas I thought
I knew that spirit. But not until the next night, when I left Hamburg
behind, where every one was pretending to be busy and the nursemaids
and visitors were still tossing tiny fish to the wintering gulls in
the upper lake; not until the train was bringing me to Berlin did I
understand what it meant. At the stations I went out and walked with
the passengers and watched the crowds; I talked with a big business man
of Hamburg--bound for Berlin because he had nothing to do in Hamburg;
then it was I faintly began to grasp the tremendous emotional upheaval
rumbling in every Germanic soul.
V--STORY OF THE SOLDIERS IN BERLIN
My first impression of Berlin was the long cement platform gliding by,
a dazzling brilliance of great arc lamps and a rumbling chorus of song.
Pulling down the compartment window I caught the words "_Wir kämpfen_
_Mann für Mann, für Kaiser and Reich!_" And leaning out I could see
down at the other end of the Friederichstrasse Station a regiment
going to the front.
Flowers bloomed from the long black tubes from which lead was soon to
pour; wreaths and garlands hung from cloth-covered helmets; cartridge
belts and knapsacks were festooned with ferns. The soldiers were
all smoking; cigars and cigarettes had been showered upon them with
prodigal hand. Most of them held their guns in one hand and packages of
delicacies in the other; and they were climbing into the compartments
or hanging out of the windows singing, always singing, in the terrific
German way. Later I was to learn that they went into battle with the
"_Wacht am Rhein_" on their lips and a wonderful trust in God in their
hearts.
I felt that trust now. I saw it in the confident face of the young
private who hung far out of the compartment in order to hold his wife's
hand. It was not the way a conscript looks. This soldier's blue eyes
sparkled as with a holy cause, and as I watched this man and wife I
marveled at their sunny cheer. I saw that each was wonderfully proud
of the other and that this farewell was but an incident in the sudden
complexity of their lives. The Fatherland had been attacked: her man
must be a hero. It was all so easy, so brimming with confidence. Of
course he would come back to her.... You believed in the Infinite
ordering of things that he would.
Walking on down the platform I saw another young man. They were all
young, strapping fellows in their new uniforms of field gray. He was
standing beside the train; he seemed to want to put off entering the
car until the last minute. He was holding a bundle of something white
in his arms, something that he hugged to his face and kissed, while the
woman in the cheap furs wept, and I wondered if it was because of the
baby she cried, while that other childless young wife had smiled.
Back in the crowd I saw a little woman with white hair; she was too
feeble to push her way near the train. She was dabbing her eyes and
waving to a big, mustached man who filled a compartment door and who
shouted jokes to her. And almost before they all could realize it, the
train was slipping down the tracks; the car windows filled with singing
men, the long gray platform suddenly shuffling to the patter of men's
feet, as though they would all run after the train as far as they could
go. But the last car slipped away and the last waving hand fell weakly
against a woman's side. They seemed suddenly old, even the young wife,
as they slowly walked away. Theirs was not the easiest part to play in
the days of awful waiting while the young blood of the nation poured
out to turn a hostile country red.
I thought I had caught the German spirit at Lübeck and at the café in
Hamburg when the hero of the Iron Cross had declined to tell me his
tale; but this sensation that had come with my setting foot on the
Berlin station--this was something different. Fifteen hundred men going
off to what?--God only knows!--fifteen hundred virile types of this
nation of virility; and they had laughed and they had sung, and they
had kissed their wives and brothers and babies as though these helpless
ones should only be proud that their little household was helping their
Fatherland and their Emperor. Self? It was utterly submerged. On that
station platform I realized that there is but one self in all Germany
to-day and that is the soul of the nation. Nothing else matters; a
sacrifice is commonplace. Wonderful? Yes. But then we Americans fought
that way at Lexington; any nation can fight that way when it is a thing
of the heart; and this war is all of the heart in Germany. As we walked
through the station gates I understood why three million Socialists
who had fought their Emperor in and out of the Reichstag, suddenly
rallied to his side, agreeing "I know no parties, only Germans." I felt
as I thought of the young faces of the soldiers, cheerfully starting
down into the unknown hell of war, that undoubtedly among their number
were Socialists. In this national crisis partisan allegiance counted
for nothing, they had ceased dealing with the Fatherland in terms of
the mind and gave to it only the heart.
Even in Berlin I realized that war stalks down strange by-paths.
It forever makes one feel the incongruous. It disorders life in a
monstrous way. I have seen it in an instant make pictures that the
greatest artist would have given his life to have done. It likes to
deal in contrasts; it is jolting....
With General von Loebell I walked across the Doeberitz camp, which is
near Berlin. At Doeberitz new troops were being drilled for the front.
We walked towards a dense grove of pines above which loomed the sky,
threateningly gray. Between the trees I saw the flash of yellow flags;
a signal squad was drilling. Skirting the edge of the woods we came to
a huge, cleared indentation where twenty dejected English prisoners
were leveling the field for a parade ground. On the left I saw an
opening in the trees; a wagon trail wound away between the pines. And
then above the rattling of the prisoners' rakes I heard the distant
strains of a marching song that brought a lump to my throat. Back there
in the woods somewhere, some one had started a song; and countless
voices took up the chorus; and through the trees I saw a moving line of
gray-green and down the road tramped a company of soldiers. They were
all singing and their boyish voices blended with forceful beauty. "In
the Heimat! In the Heimat!" It was the favorite medley of the German
army.
The prisoners stopped work; unconsciously some of those dispirited
figures in British khaki stiffened. And issuing from the woods in
squads of fours, all singing, tramped the young German reserves,
swinging along not fifteen feet from the prison gang in olive drab--"In
the Heimat!" And out across the Doeberitz plains they swung, big and
snappy.
"They're ready," remarked General von Loebell. "They've just received
their field uniforms."
And then there tramped out of the woods another company, and another,
two whole regiments, the last thundering "_Die Wacht am Rhein_," and
we went near enough to see the pride in their faces, the excitement in
their eyes; near enough to see the Englishmen, young lads, too, who
gazed after the swinging column with a soldier's understanding, but
being prisoners and not allowed to talk, they gave no expression to
their emotions and began to scrape their rakes over the hard ground....
VI--STORY OF "THE HALL OF AWFUL DOUBT"
I stood on the Dorotheenstrasse looking up at the old red brick
building which before the second of August in this year of the world
war was the War Academy. I had heard that when tourists come to Berlin
they like to watch the gay uniformed officers ascending and descending
the long flights of gray steps; for there the cleverest of German
military youths are schooled for the General Staff. Like the tourists,
I stood across the street to-day and watched the old building and the
people ascending or descending the long flights of gray steps. Only
I saw civilians, men alone and in groups, women with shawls wrapped
around their heads, women with yellow topped boots, whose motors
waited beside the curb, and children, clinging to the hands of women,
all entering or leaving by the gray gate; some of the faces were happy
and others were wet with tears, and still others stumbled along with
heavy steps. For this old building on Dorotheenstrasse is no longer the
War Academy; it is a place where day after day hundreds assemble to
learn the fate of husband, kin or lover. For inside the gray gate sits
the Information Bureau of the War Ministry, ready to tell the truth
about every soldier in the German army! I, too, went to learn the truth.
I climbed a creaking staircase and went down a creaking hall. I met
the Count von Schwerin, who is in charge. I found myself in a big,
high-ceilinged room the walls of which were hung with heroic portraits
of military dignitaries. My first impression was of a wide arc of desks
that circling from wall to wall seemed to be a barrier between a number
of gentle-spoken, elderly gentlemen and a vague mass of people that
pressed forward. The anxious faces of all these people reminded me of
another crowd that I had seen--the crowd outside the White Star offices
in New York when the _Titanic_ went down. And I became conscious that
the decorations of this room which, the Count was explaining, was the
Assembly Hall of the War Academy, were singularly appropriate--the
pillars and walls of gray marble, oppressively conveying a sense of
coldness, insistent cold, like a tomb, and all around you the subtle
presence of death, the death of hopes. It was the Hall of Awful Doubt.
And as I walked behind the circle of desks I learned that these men of
tact and sympathy, too old for active service, were doing their part
in the war by helping to soften with kindly offices the blow of fate.
I stood behind them for some few moments and watched, although I felt
like one trespassing upon the privacy of grief. I saw in a segment of
the line a fat, plain-looking woman, with a greasy child clinging to
her dress, a white-haired man with a black muffler wrapped around his
neck, a veiled woman, who from time to time begged one of the elderly
clerks to hurry the news of her husband, and then a wisp of a girl in a
cheap, rose-colored coat, on whose cheeks two dabs of rouge burned like
coals.
Soldiers from the Berlin garrison were used there as runners. At the
bidding of the gentle old men they hastened off with the inquiry to one
of the many filing rooms and returned with the news. This day there was
a new soldier on duty; he was new to the Hall of Awful Doubt.
"I cannot imagine what is keeping him so long," I heard an elderly
clerk tell the woman with the veil. "He'll come any minute.... There he
is now. Excuse me, please."
And the elderly clerk hurried to meet the soldier, wanting to intercept
the news, if it were bad, and break it gently. But as he caught sight
of the clerk I saw the soldier click his heels and, as if he were
delivering a message to an officer, his voice boomed out: "_Tot!_"...
Dead!
And the woman with the veil gave a little gasp, a long, low moan,
and they carried her to another room; and as I left the gray room,
with the drawn, anxious faces pushing forward for their turns at the
black-covered desks, I realized the heart-rending sacrifice of the
women of France, Belgium, Russia, England, Servia, and Austria, who,
like these German mothers, wives, sweethearts, had been stricken down
in the moment of hope.
VII--STORY OF A NIGHT IN BERLIN
That night I went to the Jägerstrasse, to Maxim's. The place is
everything the name suggests; one of those Berlin cafés that open when
the theaters are coming out and close when the last girl has smiled
and gone off with the last man. I sat in a white and gold room with a
cynical German surgeon, listening to his comments.
"It is the best in town now," he explained. "All the Palais de Danse
girls come here. Don't be in a hurry. I know what you want for your
articles. You'll see it soon."
Maxim's, like most places of the sort, was methodically banal. But
one by one officers strolled in and soon a piano struck up the notes
of a patriotic song. When the music began the girls left the little
tables where they had been waiting for some man to smile, and swarmed
around the piano, singing one martial song upon another, while officers
applauded, drank their healths, and asked them to sing again.
Time passed and the girls sang on, flushed and savage as the music
crashed to the cadenzas of war. What were the real emotions of these
subjects of Germany; had the war genuine thrills for them? I had talked
with decent women of all classes about the war; what of the women whose
hectic lives had destroyed real values?
"Get one of those girls over here," I told the surgeon, "and ask her
what she thinks of the war."
"Do you really mean it?" he said with a cynical smile.
"Surely. This singing interests me. I wonder what's back of it?"
He called one of them. "Why not sing?" Hilda said with a shrug. "What
else? There are few men here now and there are fewer every night. What
do I think of this war? My officer's gone to the front without leaving
me enough to keep up the apartment. _Krieg? Krieg ist schrecklich!_ War
is terrible!"
My German friend was laughing.
"War?" he smiled. "And you thought it was going to change that kind."
But I was thinking of the woman with the veil whom I had seen in the
Hall of Awful Doubt; and outside the night air felt cool and clean....
But my symbol of Berlin is not these things--not bustling streets
filled with motors, swarming with able-bodied men whom apparently the
army did not yet need. Its summation is best expressed by the varied
sights and emotions of an afternoon in mid-December.
Lodz has fallen; again Hindenburg has swept back the Russian hordes.
Black-shawled women call the extras. Berlin rises out of its calmness
and goes mad. Magically the cafés fill.... I am walking down a side
street. I see people swarming toward a faded yellow brick church. They
seem fired with a zealot's praise. I go in after them and see them
fall on their knees.... They are thanking Him for the Russian rout....
Wondering I go out. I come to another church. Its aisles are black with
bowed backs; the murmur of prayer drones like bees; a robed minister is
intoning:
"Oh, Almighty Father, we thank Thee that Thou art with us in our fight
for the right; we thank Thee that----"
It is very quiet in there. War seems a thing incredibly far away. The
sincerity of these people grips your heart. I feel as I never felt
in church before. Something mysteriously big and reverent stirs all
around.... Then outside in the street drums rattle, feet thump. A
regiment is going to the front! I hurry to see it go by, but back in
the church the bowed forms pray on.
(This American observer now leaves Berlin to go to the battle-front
with the German armies. He continues to narrate his experiences in some
of the world's greatest battles. He tells the first complete account of
the great battle of Augustowo Wald in which the Russian army of 240,000
men was annihilated, and how he was a guest of honor at the "Feast of
Victory.")
FOOTNOTE:
[1] All numerals throughout this volume relate to the stories herein
related--not to chapters in the original book.
THE "EMDEN"--AN EPIC OF THE GREAT WAR
_Experiences Aboard a Gallant Little Fighting Ship_
_By Kapitanleutnant Hellmuth Von Mücke, of His Emperor's Ship, The
"Emden"--Translated by Helene S. White_
The tale of the _Emden_ is one of the greatest sea stories in all
history. Fighting its way through the China Seas, into the Bay of
Bengal, and across the Indian Ocean, knowing that sooner or later it
must face death, the crew of this gallant ship defeated and captured
twenty-four enemy ships, destroying cargoes and property valued at
$10,000,000--in two months roving the high seas. The romantic voyage
began on September 10th and ended on November 9th, 1914. It was a
crew of "jolly good fellows" that sailed under Commander von Müller;
their adventures won the admiration not only of their enemies but of
the whole world. An authentic story of this epic of the seas is told
by Lieutenant Captain von Mücke, of the _Emden_ in a volume relating
its exploits. He has also written a book bearing on the adventures
of the landing squad in "The Ayesha." There is nothing more
sensationally adventuresome in fiction than these voyages. The most
improbable romance is outdone by the exploits of the gallant German
seamen. Commander von Müller of the _Emden_ is a prisoner of war in
England at the time that these accounts are written. Selections are
here given from the volume on the _Emden_, with permission of the
publishers, _Ritter and Company_, Copyright 1917.
[2] I--STORY OF ADVENTURES ON THE YELLOW SEA
"All hands aft," shrilled the whistles of the boatswain's mate through
all the ship's decks. Quickly all the officers and crew assembled on
the after deck. Everyone knew what
|
eping willow confessed,
aspired to be an "ornamental water," declined at last to ducks. And
there was access to the church, and the key of the church tower, and one
went across the corner of the lawn, and by a little iron gate into the
churchyard to decipher inscriptions, as if the tombs of all
Buryhamstreet were no more than a part of the accommodation relinquished
by the vicar's household.
Marjorie was hurried over the chief points of all this at a breakneck
pace by Sydney and Rom, and when Sydney was called away to the horrors
of practice--for Sydney in spite of considerable reluctance was destined
by her father to be "the musical one"--Rom developed a copious
affection, due apparently to some occult æsthetic influence in
Marjorie's silvery-grey and green, and led her into the unlocked vestry,
and there prayed in a whisper that she might be given "one good hug,
just _one_"--and so they came out with their arms about each other very
affectionately to visit the lagoon again. And then Rom remembered that
Marjorie hadn't seen either the walnut-tree in the orchard, or the hen
with nine chicks....
Somewhere among all these interests came tea and Mrs. Pope.
Mrs. Pope kissed her daughter with an air of having really wanted to
kiss her half an hour ago, but of having been distracted since. She was
a fine-featured, anxious-looking little woman, with a close resemblance
to all her children, in spite of the fact that they were markedly
dissimilar one to the other, except only that they took their ruddy
colourings from their father. She was dressed in a neat blue dress that
had perhaps been hurriedly chosen, and her method of doing her hair was
a manifest compromise between duty and pleasure. She embarked at once
upon an exposition of the bedroom arrangements, which evidently involved
difficult issues. Marjorie was to share a room with Daffy--that was the
gist of it--as the only other available apartment, originally promised
to Marjorie, had been secured by Mr. Pope for what he called his
"matutinal ablutions, _videlicet_ tub."
"Then, when your Aunt Plessington comes, you won't have to move," said
Mrs. Pope with an air of a special concession. "Your father's looking
forward to seeing you, but he mustn't be disturbed just yet. He's in the
vicar's study. He's had his tea in there. He's writing a letter to the
_Times_ answering something they said in a leader, and also a private
note calling attention to their delay in printing his previous
communication, and he wants to be delicately ironical without being in
any way offensive. He wants to hint without actually threatening that
very probably he will go over to the _Spectator_ altogether if they do
not become more attentive. The _Times_ used to print his letters
punctually, but latterly these automobile people seem to have got hold
of it.... He has the window on the lawn open, so that I think, perhaps,
we'd better not stay out here--for fear our voices might disturb him."
"Better get right round the other side of the church," said Daffy.
"He'd hear far less of us if we went indoors," said Mrs. Pope.
§ 4
The vicarage seemed tight packed with human interest for Marjorie and
her mother and sisters. Going over houses is one of the amusements
proper to her sex, and she and all three sisters and her mother, as soon
as they had finished an inaudible tea, went to see the bedroom she was
to share with Daffy, and then examined, carefully and in order, the
furniture and decoration of the other bedrooms, went through the rooms
downstairs, always excepting and avoiding very carefully and closing as
many doors as possible on, and hushing their voices whenever they
approached the study in which her father was being delicately ironical
without being offensive to the _Times_. None of them had seen any of the
vicarage people at all--Mr. Pope had come on a bicycle and managed all
the negotiations--and it was curious to speculate about the individuals
whose personalities pervaded the worn and faded furnishings of the
place.
The Popes' keen-eyed inspection came at times, I think, dangerously near
prying. The ideals of decoration and interests of the vanished family
were so absolutely dissimilar to the London standards as to arouse a
sort of astonished wonder in their minds. Some of the things they
decided were perfectly hideous, some quaint, some were simply and weakly
silly. Everything was different from Hartstone Square. Daffy was perhaps
more inclined to contempt, and Mrs. Pope to refined amusement and witty
appreciation than Marjorie. Marjorie felt there was something in these
people that she didn't begin to understand, she needed some missing
clue that would unlock the secret of their confused peculiarity. She was
one of those people who have an almost instinctive turn for decoration
in costume and furniture; she had already had a taste of how to do
things in arranging her rooms at Bennett College, Oxbridge, where also
she was in great demand among the richer girls as an adviser. She knew
what it was to try and fail as well as to try and succeed, and these
people, she felt, hadn't tried for anything she comprehended. She
couldn't quite see why it was that there was at the same time an attempt
at ornament and a disregard of beauty, she couldn't quite do as her
mother did and dismiss it as an absurdity and have done with it. She
couldn't understand, too, why everything should be as if it were faded
and weakened from something originally bright and clear.
All the rooms were thick with queer little objects that indicated a
quite beaver-like industry in the production of "work." There were
embroidered covers for nearly every article on the wash-hand-stand, and
mats of wool and crochet wherever anything stood on anything; there were
"tidies" everywhere, and odd little brackets covered with gilded and
varnished fir cones and bearing framed photographs and little jars and
all sorts of colourless, dusty little objects, and everywhere on the
walls tacks sustained crossed fans with badly painted flowers or
transfer pictures. There was a jar on the bedroom mantel covered with
varnished postage stamps and containing grey-haired dried grasses. There
seemed to be a moral element in all this, for in the room Sydney shared
with Rom there was a decorative piece of lettering which declared that--
"Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose."
There were a great number of texts that set Marjorie's mind stirring
dimly with intimations of a missed significance. Over her own bed,
within the lattice of an Oxford frame, was the photograph of a picture
of an extremely composed young woman in a trailing robe, clinging to the
Rock of Ages in the midst of histrionically aggressive waves, and she
had a feeling, rather than a thought, that perhaps for all the oddity of
the presentation it did convey something acutely desirable, that she
herself had had moods when she would have found something very
comforting in just such an impassioned grip. And on a framed,
floriferous card, these incomprehensible words:
|================================|
|THY GRACE IS SUFFICIENT FOR ME. |
|================================|
seemed to be saying something to her tantalizingly just outside her
range of apprehension.
Did all these things light up somehow to those dispossessed people--from
some angle she didn't attain? Were they living and moving realities when
those others were at home again?
The drawing-room had no texts; it was altogether more pretentious and
less haunted by the faint and faded flavour of religion that pervaded
the bedrooms. It had, however, evidences of travel in Switzerland and
the Mediterranean. There was a piano in black and gold, a little out of
tune, and surmounted by a Benares brass jar, enveloping a scarlet
geranium in a pot. There was a Japanese screen of gold wrought upon
black, that screened nothing. There was a framed chromo-lithograph of
Jerusalem hot in the sunset, and another of Jerusalem cold under a
sub-tropical moon, and there were gourds, roses of Jericho, sandalwood
rosaries and kindred trash from the Holy Land in no little profusion
upon a what-not. Such books as the room had contained had been arranged
as symmetrically as possible about a large, pink-shaded lamp upon the
claret-coloured cloth of a round table, and were to be replaced, Mrs.
Pope said, at their departure. At present they were piled on a
side-table. The girls had been through them all, and were ready with the
choicer morsels for Marjorie's amusement. There was "Black Beauty," the
sympathetic story of a soundly Anglican horse, and a large Bible
extra-illustrated with photographs of every well-known scriptural
picture from Michael Angelo to Doré, and a book of injunctions to young
ladies upon their behaviour and deportment that Rom and Sydney found
particularly entertaining. Marjorie discovered that Sydney had picked up
a new favourite phrase. "I'm afraid we're all dreadfully cynical," said
Sydney, several times.
A more advanced note was struck by a copy of "Aurora Leigh," richly
underlined in pencil, but with exclamation marks at some of the bolder
passages....
And presently, still avoiding the open study window very elaborately,
this little group of twentieth century people went again into the
church--the church whose foundations were laid in A.D. 912--foundations
of rubble and cement that included flat Roman bricks from a still
remoter basilica. Their voices dropped instinctively, as they came into
its shaded quiet from the exterior sunshine. Marjorie went a little
apart and sat in a pew that gave her a glimpse of the one good
stained-glass window. Rom followed her, and perceiving her mood to be
restful, sat a yard away. Syd began a whispered dispute with her mother
whether it wasn't possible to try the organ, and whether Theodore might
not be bribed to blow. Daffy discovered relics of a lepers' squint and a
holy-water stoup, and then went to scrutinize the lettering of the ten
commandments of the Mosaic law that shone black and red on gold on
either side of the I.H.S. monogram behind the white-clothed communion
table that had once been the altar. Upon a notice board hung about the
waist of the portly pulpit were the numbers of hymns that had been sung
three days ago. The sound Protestantism of the vicar had banished
superfluous crosses from the building; the Bible reposed upon the wings
of a great brass eagle; shining blue and crimson in the window, Saint
Christopher carried his Lord. What a harmonized synthesis of conflicts a
country church presents! What invisible mysteries of filiation spread
between these ancient ornaments and symbols and the new young minds from
the whirlpool of the town that looked upon them now with such bright,
keen eyes, wondering a little, feeling a little, missing so much?
It was all so very cool and quiet now--with something of the immobile
serenity of death.
§ 5
When Mr. Pope had finished his letter to the _Times_, he got out of the
window of the study, treading on a flower-bed as he did so--he was the
sort of man who treads on flower-beds--partly with the purpose of
reading his composition aloud to as many members of his family as he
could assemble for the purpose, and so giving them a chance of
appreciating the nuances of his irony more fully than if they saw it
just in cold print without the advantage of his intonation, and partly
with the belated idea of welcoming Marjorie. The law presented a rather
discouraging desolation. Then he became aware that the church tower
frothed with his daughters. In view of his need of an audience, he
decided after a brief doubt that their presence there was
unobjectionable, and waved his MS. amiably. Marjorie flapped a
handkerchief in reply....
The subsequent hour was just the sort of hour that gave Mr. Pope an
almost meteorological importance to his family. He began with an
amiability that had no fault, except, perhaps, that it was a little
forced after the epistolary strain in the study, and his welcome to
Marjorie was more than cordial. "Well, little Madge-cat!" he said,
giving her an affectionate but sound and heavy thump on the left
shoulder-blade, "got a kiss for the old daddy?"
Marjorie submitted a cheek.
"That's right," said Mr. Pope; "and now I just want you all to advise
me----"
He led the way to a group of wicker garden chairs. "You're coming,
mummy?" he said, and seated himself comfortably and drew out a spectacle
case, while his family grouped itself dutifully. It made a charming
little picture of a Man and his Womankind. "I don't often flatter
myself," he said, "but this time I think I've been neat--neat's the word
for it."
He cleared his throat, put on his spectacles, and emitted a long, flat
preliminary note, rather like the sound of a child's trumpet. "Er--'Dear
Sir!'"
"Rom," said Mrs. Pope, "don't creak your chair."
"It's Daffy, mother," said Rom.
"Oh, _Rom!_" said Daffy.
Mr. Pope paused, and looked with a warning eye over his left
spectacle-glass at Rom.
"Don't creak your chair, Rom," he said, "when your mother tells you."
"I was _not_ creaking my chair," said Rom.
"I heard it," said Mr. Pope, suavely.
"It was Daffy."
"Your mother does not think so," said Mr. Pope.
"Oh, all right! I'll sit on the ground," said Rom, crimson to the roots
of her hair.
"Me too," said Daffy. "I'd rather."
Mr. Pope watched the transfer gravely. Then he readjusted his glasses,
cleared his throat again, trumpeted, and began. "Er--'Dear Sir,'"
"Oughtn't it to be simply 'Sir,' father, for an editor?" said Marjorie.
"Perhaps I didn't explain, Marjorie," said her father, with the calm of
great self-restraint, and dabbing his left hand on the manuscript in his
right, "that this is a _private_ letter--a private letter."
"I didn't understand," said Marjorie.
"It would have been evident as I went on," said Mr. Pope, and prepared
to read again.
This time he was allowed to proceed, but the interruptions had ruffled
him, and the gentle stresses that should have lifted the subtleties of
his irony into prominence missed the words, and he had to go back and do
his sentences again. Then Rom suddenly, horribly, uncontrollably, was
seized with hiccups. At the second hiccup Mr. Pope paused, and looked
very hard at his daughter with magnified eyes; as he was about to
resume, the third burst its way through the unhappy child's utmost
effort.
Mr. Pope rose with an awful resignation. "That's enough," he said. He
regarded the pseudo-twin vindictively. "You haven't the self-control of
a child of six," he said. Then very touchingly to Mrs. Pope: "Mummy,
shall we try a game of tennis with the New Generation?"
"Can't you read it after supper?" asked Mrs. Pope.
"It must go by the eight o'clock post," said Mr. Pope, putting the
masterpiece into his breast pocket, the little masterpiece that would
now perhaps never be read aloud to any human being. "Daffy, dear, do you
mind going in for the racquets and balls?"
The social atmosphere was now sultry, and overcast, and Mr. Pope's
decision to spend the interval before Daffy returned in seeing whether
he couldn't do something to the net, which was certainly very
unsatisfactory, did not improve matters. Then, unhappily, Marjorie, who
had got rather keen upon tennis at the Carmels', claimed her father's
first two services as faults, contrary to the etiquette of the family.
It happened that Mr. Pope had a really very good, hard, difficult,
smart-looking serve, whose only defect was that it always went either
too far or else into the net, and so a feeling had been fostered and
established by his wife that, on the whole, it was advisable to regard
the former variety as a legitimate extension of a father's authority.
Naturally, therefore, Mr. Pope was nettled at Marjorie's ruling, and his
irritation increased when his next two services to Daffy perished in the
net. ("Damn that net! Puts one's eye out.") Then Marjorie gave him an
unexpected soft return which he somehow muffed, and then Daffy just
dropped a return over the top of the net. (Love-game.) It was then
Marjorie's turn to serve, which she did with a new twist acquired from
the eldest Carmel boy that struck Mr. Pope as un-English. "Go on," he
said concisely. "Fifteen love."
She was gentle with her mother and they got their first rally, and when
it was over Mr. Pope had to explain to Marjorie that if she returned
right up into his corner of the court he would have to run backwards
very fast and might fall over down the silly slope at that end. She
would have to consider him and the court. One didn't get everything out
of a game by playing merely to win. She said "All right, Daddy," rather
off-handedly, and immediately served to him again, and he, taken a
little unawares, hit the ball with the edge of his racquet and sent it
out, and then he changed racquets with Daffy--it seemed he had known all
along she had taken his, but he had preferred to say nothing--uttered a
word of advice to his wife just on her stroke, and she, failing to grasp
his intention as quickly as she ought to have done, left the score
forty-fifteen. He felt better when he returned Marjorie's serve, and
then before she could control herself she repeated her new unpleasant
trick of playing into the corner again, whereupon, leaping back with an
agility that would have shamed many a younger man, Mr. Pope came upon
disaster. He went spinning down the treacherous slope behind, twisted
his ankle painfully and collapsed against the iron railings of the
shrubbery. It was too much, and he lost control of himself. His
daughters had one instant's glimpse of the linguistic possibilities of a
strong man's agony. "I told her," he went on as if he had said nothing.
"_Tennis!_"
For a second perhaps he seemed to hesitate upon a course of action. Then
as if by a great effort he took his coat from the net post and addressed
himself houseward, incarnate Grand Dudgeon--limping.
"Had enough of it, Mummy," he said, and added some happily inaudible
comment on Marjorie's new style of play.
The evening's exercise was at an end.
The three ladies regarded one another in silence for some moments.
"I will take in the racquets, dear," said Mrs. Pope.
"I think the other ball is at your end," said Daffy....
The apparatus put away, Marjorie and her sister strolled thoughtfully
away from the house.
"There's croquet here too," said Daffy. "We've not had the things out
yet!"....
"He'll play, I suppose."
"He wants to play."...
"Of course," said Marjorie after a long pause, "there's no _reasoning_
with Dad!"
§ 6
Character is one of England's noblest and most deliberate products, but
some Englishmen have it to excess. Mr. Pope had.
He was one of that large and representative class which imparts a
dignity to national commerce by inheriting big businesses from its
ancestors. He was a coach-builder by birth, and a gentleman by education
and training. He had been to City Merchant's and Cambridge.
Throughout the earlier half of the nineteenth century the Popes had been
the princes of the coach-building world. Mr. Pope's great-grandfather
had been a North London wheelwright of conspicuous dexterity and
integrity, who had founded the family business; his son, Mr. Pope's
grandfather, had made that business the occupation of his life and
brought it to the pinnacle of pre-eminence; his son, who was Marjorie's
grandfather, had displayed a lesser enthusiasm, left the house at the
works for a home ten miles away and sent a second son into the Church.
It was in the days of the third Pope that the business ceased to expand,
and began to suffer severely from the competition of an enterprising
person who had originally supplied the firm with varnish, gradually
picked up the trade in most other materials and accessories needed in
coach-building, and passed on by almost imperceptible stages to
delivering the article complete--dispensing at last altogether with the
intervention of Pope and Son--to the customer. Marjorie's father had
succeeded in the fulness of time to the inheritance this insurgent had
damaged.
Mr. Pope was a man of firm and resentful temper, with an admiration for
Cato, Brutus, Cincinnatus, Cromwell, Washington, and the sterner heroes
generally, and by nature a little ill-used and offended at things. He
suffered from indigestion and extreme irritability. He found himself in
control of a business where more flexible virtues were needed. The Popes
based their fame on a heavy, proud type of vehicle, which the increasing
luxury and triviality of the age tended to replace by lighter forms of
carriage, carriages with diminutive and apologetic names. As these
lighter forms were not only lighter but less expensive, Mr. Pope with a
pathetic confidence in the loyalty of the better class of West End
customer, determined to "make a stand" against them. He was the sort of
man to whom making a stand is in itself a sombre joy. If he had had to
choose his pose for a portrait, he would certainly have decided to have
one foot advanced, the other planted like a British oak behind, the arms
folded and the brows corrugated,--making a stand.
Unhappily the stars in their courses and the general improvement of
roads throughout the country fought against him. The lighter carriages,
and especially the lighter carriages of that varnish-selling firm, which
was now absorbing businesses right and left, prevailed over Mr. Pope's
resistance. For crossing a mountain pass or fording a river, for driving
over the scene of a recent earthquake or following a retreating army,
for being run away with by frantic horses or crushing a personal enemy,
there can be no doubt the Pope carriages remained to the very last the
best possible ones and fully worth the inflexible price demanded.
Unhappily all carriages in a civilization essentially decadent are not
subjected to these tests, and the manufactures of his rivals were not
only much cheaper, but had a sort of meretricious smartness, a
disingenuous elasticity, above all a levity, hateful indeed to the
spirit of Mr. Pope yet attractive to the wanton customer. Business
dwindled. Nevertheless the habitual element in the good class customer
did keep things going, albeit on a shrinking scale, until Mr. Pope came
to the unfortunate decision that he would make a stand against
automobiles. He regarded them as an intrusive nuisance which had to be
seen only to be disowned by the landed gentry of England. Rather than
build a car he said he would go out of business. He went out of
business. Within five years of this determination he sold out the name,
good will, and other vestiges of his concern to a mysterious buyer who
turned out to be no more than an agent for these persistently expanding
varnish makers, and he retired with a genuine grievance upon the family
accumulations--chiefly in Consols and Home Railways.
He refused however to regard his defeat as final, put great faith in the
approaching exhaustion of the petrol supply, and talked in a manner that
should have made the Automobile Association uneasy, of devoting the
rest of his days to the purification of England from these aggressive
mechanisms. "It was a mistake," he said, "to let them in." He became
more frequent at his excellent West End club, and directed a certain
portion of his capital to largely indecisive but on the whole
unprofitable speculations in South African and South American
enterprises. He mingled a little in affairs. He was a tough conventional
speaker, rich in established phrases and never abashed by hearing
himself say commonplace things, and in addition to his campaign against
automobiles he found time to engage also in quasi-political activities,
taking chairs, saying a few words and so on, cherishing a fluctuating
hope that his eloquence might ultimately win him an invitation to
contest a constituency in the interests of reaction and the sounder
elements in the Liberal party.
He had a public-spirited side, and he was particularly attracted by that
mass of modern legislative proposals which aims at a more systematic
control of the lives of lower class persons for their own good by their
betters. Indeed, in the first enthusiasm of his proprietorship of the
Pope works at East Purblow, he had organized one of those benevolent
industrial experiments that are now so common. He felt strongly against
the drink evil, that is to say, the unrestricted liberty of common
people to drink what they prefer, and he was acutely impressed by the
fact that working-class families do not spend their money in the way
that seems most desirable to upper middle-class critics. Accordingly he
did his best to replace the dangerous freedoms of money by that ideal of
the social reformer, Payment in Kind. To use his invariable phrase, the
East Purblow experiment did "no mean service" to the cause of social
reform. Unhappily it came to an end through a prosecution under the
Truck Act, that blot upon the Statute Book, designed, it would appear,
even deliberately to vitiate man's benevolent control of his fellow man.
The lessons to be drawn from that experience, however, grew if anything
with the years. He rarely spoke without an allusion to it, and it was
quite remarkable how readily it could be adapted to illuminate a hundred
different issues in the hospitable columns of the _Spectator_....
§ 7
At seven o'clock Marjorie found herself upstairs changing into her
apple-green frock. She had had a good refreshing wash in cold soft
water, and it was pleasant to change into thinner silk stockings and
dainty satin slippers and let down and at last brush her hair and dress
loiteringly after the fatigues of her journey and the activities of her
arrival. She looked out on the big church and the big trees behind it
against the golden quiet of a summer evening with extreme approval.
"I suppose those birds are rooks," she said.
But Daffy had gone to see that the pseudo-twins had done themselves
justice in their muslin frocks and pink sashes; they were apt to be a
little sketchy with their less accessible buttons.
Marjorie became aware of two gentlemen with her mother on the lawn
below.
One was her almost affianced lover, Will Magnet, the humorous writer.
She had been doing her best not to think about him all day, but now he
became an unavoidable central fact. She regarded him with an almost
perplexed scrutiny, and wondered vividly why she had been so excited and
pleased by his attentions during the previous summer.
Mr. Magnet was one of those quiet, deliberately unassuming people who do
not even attempt to be beautiful. Not for him was it to pretend, but to
prick the bladder of pretence. He was a fairish man of forty, pale, with
a large protuberant, observant grey eye--I speak particularly of the
left--and a face of quiet animation warily alert for the wit's
opportunity. His nose and chin were pointed, and his lips thin and
quaintly pressed together. He was dressed in grey, with a low-collared
silken shirt showing a thin neck, and a flowing black tie, and he
carried a grey felt hat in his joined hands behind his back. She could
hear the insinuating cadences of his voice as he talked in her mother's
ear. The other gentleman, silent on her mother's right, must, she knew,
be Mr. Wintersloan, whom Mr. Magnet had proposed to bring over. His
dress betrayed that modest gaiety of disposition becoming in an artist,
and indeed he was one of Mr. Magnet's favourite illustrators. He was in
a dark bluish-grey suit; a black tie that was quite unusually broad went
twice around his neck before succumbing to the bow, and his waistcoat
appeared to be of some gaily-patterned orange silk. Marjorie's eyes
returned to Mr. Magnet. Hitherto she had never had an opportunity of
remarking that his hair was more than a little attenuated towards the
crown. It was funny how his tie came out under his chin to the right.
What an odd thing men's dress had become, she thought. Why did they wear
those ridiculous collars and ties? Why didn't they always dress in
flannels and look as fine and slender and active as the elder Carmel boy
for example? Mr. Magnet couldn't be such an ill-shaped man. Why didn't
every one dress to be just as beautiful and splendid as
possible?--instead of wearing queer things!
"Coming down?" said Daffy, a vision of sulphur-yellow, appearing in the
doorway.
"Let _them_ go first," said Marjorie, with a finer sense of effect. "And
Theodore. We don't want to make part of a comic entry with Theodore,
Daffy."
Accordingly, the two sisters watched discreetly--they had to be wary on
account of Mr. Magnet's increasingly frequent glances at the
windows--and when at last all the rest of the family had appeared below,
they decided their cue had come. Mr. Pope strolled into the group, with
no trace of his recent debacle except a slight limp. He was wearing a
jacket of damson-coloured velvet, which he affected in the country, and
all traces of his Grand Dudgeon were gone. But then he rarely had Grand
Dudgeon except in the sanctities of family life, and hardly ever when
any other man was about.
"Well," his daughters heard him say, with a witty allusiveness that was
difficult to follow, "so the Magnet has come to the Mountain again--eh?"
"Come on, Madge," said Daffy, and the two sisters emerged harmoniously
together from the house.
It would have been manifest to a meaner capacity than any present that
evening that Mr. Magnet regarded Marjorie with a distinguished
significance. He had two eyes, but he had that mysterious quality so
frequently associated with a bluish-grey iris which gives the effect of
looking hard with one large orb, a sort of grey searchlight effect, and
he used this eye ray now to convey a respectful but firm admiration in
the most unequivocal manner. He saluted Daffy courteously, and then
allowed himself to retain Marjorie's hand for just a second longer than
was necessary as he said--very simply--"I am very pleased indeed to meet
you again--very."
A slight embarrassment fell between them.
"You are staying near here, Mr. Magnet?"
"At the inn," said Mr. Magnet, and then, "I chose it because it would be
near you."
His eye pressed upon her again for a moment.
"Is it comfortable?" said Marjorie.
"So charmingly simple," said Mr. Magnet. "I love it."
A tinkling bell announced the preparedness of supper, and roused the
others to the consciousness that they were silently watching Mr. Magnet
and Marjorie.
"It's quite a simple farmhouse supper," said Mrs. Pope.
§ 8
There were ducks, green peas, and adolescent new potatoes for supper,
and afterwards stewed fruit and cream and junket and cheese, bottled
beer, Gilbey's Burgundy, and home-made lemonade. Mrs. Pope carved,
because Mr. Pope splashed too much, and bones upset him and made him
want to show up chicken in the _Times_. So he sat at the other end and
rallied his guests while Mrs. Pope distributed the viands. He showed not
a trace of his recent umbrage. Theodore sat between Daffy and his mother
because of his table manners, and Marjorie was on her father's right
hand and next to Mr. Wintersloan, while Mr. Magnet was in the middle of
the table on the opposite side in a position convenient for looking at
her. Both maids waited.
The presence of Magnet invariably stirred the latent humorist in Mr.
Pope. He felt that he who talks to humorists should himself be humorous,
and it was his private persuasion that with more attention he might have
been, to use a favourite form of expression, "no mean jester." Quite a
lot of little things of his were cherished as "Good" both by himself
and, with occasional inaccuracies, by Mrs. Pope. He opened out now in a
strain of rich allusiveness.
"What will you drink, Mr. Wintersloan?" he said. "Wine of the country,
yclept beer, red wine from France, or my wife's potent brew from the
golden lemon?"
Mr. Wintersloan thought he would take Burgundy. Mr. Magnet preferred
beer.
"I've heard there's iron in the Beer,
And I believe it,"
misquoted Mr. Pope, and nodded as it were to the marker to score. "Daffy
and Marjorie are still in the lemonade stage. Will you take a little
Burgundy to-night, Mummy?"
Mrs. Pope decided she would, and was inspired to ask Mr. Wintersloan if
he had been in that part of the country before. Topography ensued. Mr.
Wintersloan had a style of his own, and spoke of the Buryhamstreet
district as a "pooty little country--pooty little hills, with a swirl in
them."
This pleased Daffy and Marjorie, and their eyes met for a moment.
Then Mr. Magnet, with a ray full on Marjorie, said he had always been
fond of Surrey. "I think if ever I made a home in the country I should
like it to be here."
Mr. Wintersloan said Surrey would tire him, it was too bossy and curly,
too flocculent; he would prefer to look on broader, simpler lines, with
just a sudden catch in the breath in them--if you understand me?
Marjorie did, and said so.
"A sob--such as you get at the break of a pinewood on a hill."
This baffled Mr. Pope, but Marjorie took it. "Or the short dry cough of
a cliff," she said.
"Exactly," said Mr. Wintersloan, and having turned a little deliberate
close-lipped smile on her for a moment, resumed his wing.
"So long as a landscape doesn't _sneeze_" said Mr. Magnet, in that
irresistible dry way of his, and Rom and Sydney, at any rate, choked.
"Now is the hour when Landscapes yawn," mused Mr. Pope, coming in all
right at the end.
Then Mrs. Pope asked Mr. Wintersloan, about his route to Buryhamstreet,
and then Mr. Pope asked Mr. Magnet whether he was playing at a new work
or working at a new play.
Mr. Magnet said he was dreaming over a play. He wanted to bring out the
more serious side of his humour, go a little deeper into things than he
had hitherto done.
"Mingling smiles and tears," said Mr. Pope approvingly.
Mr. Magnet said very quietly that all true humour did that.
Then Mrs. Pope asked what the play was to be about, and Mr. Magnet, who
seemed disinclined to give an answer, turned the subject by saying he
had to prepare an address on humour for the next dinner of the
_Literati_. "It's to be a humourist's dinner, and they've made me the
guest of the evening--by way of a joke to begin with," he said with that
dry smile again.
Mrs. Pope said he shouldn't say things like that. She
|
-Johnes regarded his companion fixedly for a moment, then
linked his arm in mine, drew me aside, and whispered hastily:
"Don't take any notice of him; he'll be all right again in a minute.
It's only a little revulsion of feeling which has overcome him. He's
frightfully tender-hearted--far too much so for a sailor; he can't bear
the sight of blood; and he knew that if I called you out I should choose
him for my second; and--you twig, eh!"
I thought I did, but was not quite sure, so I bowed again, which seemed
quite as satisfactory as words to Fitz-Johnes, for he said, with his arm
still linked in mine:
"That's all right. Now let's go and cement our friend ship over a
bottle of wine at the `Blue Posts,' what do you say?"
I intimated that the proposal was quite agreeable to me; and we
accordingly wheeled about and directed our steps to the inn in question,
which, in my time, was _the_ place of resort, _par excellence_, of all
midshipmen.
Lord Tomnoddy now removed his handkerchief from his eyes; and, sure
enough, he _had_ been weeping, for I detected him in the very act of
drying his tears. He must have possessed a truly wonderful command over
his features, though, for I could not detect the faintest trace of that
deep feeling which had overpowered him so shortly before; on the
contrary, he laughed uproariously at a very feeble joke which I just
then ventured to let off; and thereafter, until I parted with them both
an hour later, was the merriest of the party.
We arrived in due course at the "Blue Posts," and, walking into a
private parlour, rang for the waiter. On the appearance of that
individual, Fitz-Johnes, with a truly lordly air, ordered in three
bottles of port; sagely remarking that he made a point of never drinking
less than a bottle himself; and as his friend Hawkesley was _known_ to
have laid down the same rule, the third bottle was a necessity unless
Lord Tomnoddy was to go without. Lord Tomnoddy faintly protested
against the ordering of so much wine; but Fitz-Johnes was firm in his
determination, insisting that he should regard it as nothing short of a
deliberate insult on Tomnoddy's part if that individual declined his
hospitality.
After a considerable delay the wine and glasses made their appearance,
the waiter setting them down, and then pausing respectfully by the
table.
"Thank you; that will do. You need not wait," said Fitz-Johnes.
"The money, if you please, sir," explained the waiter.
"Oh, ah! yes, to be sure. The money." And Fitz-Johnes plunged his hand
into his breeches pocket and withdrew therefrom the sum of twopence
halfpenny, together with half a dozen buttons (assorted); a penknife
minus its blades; the bowl of a clay tobacco pipe broken short off;
three pieces of pipe-stem evidently originally belonging to the latter;
and a small ball of sewing twine.
Carefully arranging the copper coins on the edge of the table he
returned the remaining articles to their original place of deposit, and
then plunged his hand into his other pocket, from which he produced--
nothing.
"How much is it?" he inquired, glancing at the waiter.
"Fifteen shillings, if you please, sir," was the reply.
"Lend me a sovereign, there's a good fellow; I've left my purse in my
other pocket," he exclaimed to Lord Tomnoddy.
"I would with pleasure, old fellow, if I had it. But, unfortunately, I
haven't a farthing about me."
Thereupon the waiter proceeded deliberately to gather up the glasses
again, and was about to take them and the wine away, when I interposed
with a proposal to pay.
"No," said Fitz-Johnes fiercely; "I won't hear of it; I'll perish at the
stake first. But if you really don't mind _lending_ me a sovereign
until to-morrow--"
I said I should be most happy; and forthwith produced the coin, which
Fitz-Johnes, having received it, flung disdainfully down upon the table
with the exclamation:
"There, caitiff, is the lucre. Now, avaunt! begone! Thy bones are
marrowless; and you have not a particle of speculation about you."
The waiter, quite unmoved, took up the sovereign, laid down the change--
which Fitz-Johnes promptly pocketed--and retired from the room, leaving
us to discuss our wine in peace; which we did, I taking three glasses,
and my companions disposing of the remainder.
Fitz-Johnes now became very communicative on the subject of his cousin
Lady Mary; and finally the recollection came to him suddenly that she
had sent him her miniature only a day or two before. This he proposed
to show me, in order that I might pronounce an opinion as to the
correctness of the likeness; but on instituting a search for it, he
discovered--much to my relief, I must confess--that he had left it, with
his purse, in the pocket of his other jacket.
The wine at length finished, we parted company at the door of the "Blue
Posts;" I shaping a course homeward, and my new friends heading in the
direction of the Hard, their uproarious laughter reaching my ear for
some time after they had passed out of sight.
CHAPTER TWO.
I QUIT THE PATERNAL ROOF.
On reaching home I found that my father had preceded me by a few minutes
only, and was to be found in the surgery. Thither, accordingly, I
hastened to give him an opportunity of seeing me in my new rig.
"Good Heavens, boy!" he exclaimed when he had taken in all the details
of my appearance, "do you mean to say that you have presented yourself
in public in that extraordinary guise?"
I respectfully intimated that I had, and that, moreover, I failed to
observe anything at all extraordinary in my appearance.
"Well," observed he, bursting into a fit of hearty laughter,
notwithstanding his evident annoyance, "_you_ may not have noticed it;
but I'll warrant that everybody else has. Why, I should not have been
surprised to hear that you had found yourself the laughing-stock of the
town. Run away, Dick, and change your clothes at once; Shears must see
those things and endeavour to alter them somehow; you can never wear
them as they are."
I slunk away to my room in a dreadfully depressed state of mind. Was it
possible that what my father had said was true! A sickening suspicion
seized me that it _was_; and that I had at last found an explanation of
the universal laughter which had seemed to accompany me everywhere in my
wanderings that wretched afternoon.
I wrapped up the now hated uniform in the brown paper which had encased
it when it came from Shears; and my father and I were about to sally
forth with it upon a wrathful visit to the erring Shears, when a
breathless messenger from him arrived with another parcel, and a note of
explanation and apology, to the effect that by some unfortunate blunder
the wrong suit had been sent home, and Mr Shears would feel greatly
obliged if we would return it per bearer.
The man, upon this, was invited inside and requested to wait whilst I
tried on the rightful suit, which was found to fit excellently; and I
could not avoid laughing rather ruefully as I looked in the glass and
contrasted my then appearance with that which I remembered it to have
been in the earlier part of the day. Later on, that same evening, my
sea-chest and the remainder of my outfit arrived; and I was ready to
join, as had been already arranged, on the following day.
The eventful morning at length arrived; and with my enthusiasm
considerably cooled by a night of sleepless excitement and the
unpleasant consciousness that I was about, in an hour or two more, to
bid a long farewell to home and all who loved me, I descended to the
breakfast-room. My father was already there; but Eva did not come down
until the last moment; and when she made her appearance it was evident
that she had very recently been weeping. The dear girl kissed me
silently with quivering lips, and we sat down to breakfast. My father
made two or three efforts to start something in the shape of a
conversation, but it was no good; the dear old gentleman was himself
manifestly ill at ease; Eva could not speak a word for sobbing; and as
for me, I was as unable to utter a word as I was to swallow my food--a
great lump had gathered in my throat, which not only made it sore but
also threatened to choke me, and it was with the utmost difficulty that
I avoided bursting into a passion of tears. None of us ate anything,
and at length the wretched apology for a meal was brought to a
conclusion, my father read a chapter from the Bible, and we knelt down
to prayers. I will not attempt to repeat here the words of his
supplication. Suffice it to say that they went straight to my heart and
lodged there, their remembrance encompassing me about as with a seven-
fold defence in many a future hour of trial and temptation.
On rising from his knees my father invited me to accompany him to his
consulting-room, and on arriving there he handed me a chair, seated
himself directly in front of me, and said:
"Now, my dear boy, before you leave the roof which has sheltered you
from your infancy, and go forth to literally fight your own way through
the world, there is just a word or two of caution and advice which I
wish to say. You are about to embark in a profession of your own
deliberate choice, and whilst that profession is of so honourable a
character that all who wear its uniform are unquestioningly accepted as
gentlemen, it is also one which, from its very nature, exposes its
followers to many and great temptations. I will not enlarge upon these;
you are now old enough to understand the nature of many of them, and
those which you may not at present know anything about will be readily
recognisable as such when they present themselves; and a few simple
rules will, I trust, enable you to overcome them. The first rule which
I wish you to take for your guidance through life, my son, is this.
Never be ashamed to honour your Maker. Let neither false pride, nor the
gibes of your companions, nor indeed _any_ influence whatever, constrain
you to deny Him or your dependence upon Him; never take His name in
vain, nor countenance by your continued presence any such thing in
others. Bear in mind the fact that He who holds the ocean in the hollow
of His hand is also the Guide, the Helper, and the defender of `those
who go down into the sea in ships;' and make it an unfailing practice to
seek His help and protection every day of your life.
"Never allow yourself to contract the habit of swearing. Many men--and,
because of their pernicious example, many boys too--habitually garnish
their conversation with oaths, profanity, and obscenity of the vilest
description. It _may_ be--though I earnestly hope and pray it will
not--that a bad example in this respect will be set you by even your
superior officers. If such should unhappily be the case, think of this,
our parting moments, and of my parting advice to you, and never suffer
yourself to be led away by such example. In the first place it is
wrong--it is distinctly _sinful_ to indulge in such language; and in the
next place, to take much lower ground, it is vulgar, ungentlemanly, and
altogether in the very worst possible taste. It is not even _manly_ to
do so, though many lads appear to think it so; there is nothing manly,
or noble, or dignified in the utterance of words which inspire in the
hearers--unless they be the lowest of the low--nothing save the most
extreme disgust. If you are ambitious to be classed among the vilest
and most ruffianly of your species, use such language; but if your
ambition soars higher than this, avoid it as you would the pestilence.
"Be always _strictly_ truthful. There are two principal incentives to
falsehood--vanity and fear. Never seek self-glorification by a
falsehood. If fame is not to be won legitimately, do without it; and
never seek to screen yourself by a falsehood--this is mean and cowardly
in the last degree. `To err is human;' we are all liable to make
mistakes sometimes; such a person as an infallible man, woman, or child
has never yet existed, and never will exist. Therefore, if you make a
mistake, have the courage to manfully acknowledge it and take the
consequences; I will answer for it that they will not be very dreadful.
A fault confessed is half atoned. And, apart from the _morality_ of the
thing, let me tell you that a reputation for truthfulness is a priceless
possession to a man; it makes his services _doubly_ valuable.
"Be careful that you are always strictly honest, honourable, and upright
in your dealings with others. Never let your reputation in this respect
be sullied by so much as a breath. And bear this in mind, my boy, it is
not sufficient that you should _be_ all this, you must also _seem_ it,
that is to say you must keep yourself far beyond the reach of even the
barest suspicion. Many a man who, by carelessness or inexperience, has
placed himself in a questionable position, has been obliged to pay the
penalty of his want of caution by carrying about with him, to the end of
his life, the burden of a false and undeserved suspicion.
"And now there is only one thing more I wish to caution you against, and
that is _vanity_. It is a failing which is only too plainly perceptible
in most boys of your age, and--do not be angry, Dick, if I touch the
sore spot with a heavy hand; it is for your own good that I do it--you
have it in a very marked degree. Like most of your compeers you think
that, having passed your fourteenth birth-day, you are now a _man_, and
in many points I notice that you have already begun to ape the ways of
men. Don't do it, Dick. Manhood comes not so early; and of all
disagreeable and objectionable characters, save me, I pray you, from a
boy who mistakes himself for a man. Manhood, with its countless cares
and responsibilities, will come soon enough; whilst you are a boy _be_ a
boy; or, if you insist on being a man before your time, cultivate those
attributes which are characteristic of _true_ manhood, such as fearless
truth, scrupulous honour, dauntless courage, and so on; but _don't_, for
Heaven's sake, adopt the follies and vices of men. As I have said,
Dick, vanity is certainly your _great_ weakness, and I want you to be
especially on your guard against it. It will tempt you to tamper with
the truth, even if it does no worse," (I thought involuntarily of Lady
Mary and my tacit admission of the justice of Lord Fitz-Johnes'
impeachment of me with regard to her), "and it is quite possible that it
may lead you into a serious scrape.
"Now, Dick, my boy--my dear son--I have said to you all that I think,
even in the slightest degree, necessary by way of caution and advice. I
can only affectionately entreat you to remember and ponder upon my
words, and pray God to lead you to a right understanding of them.
"And now," he added, rising from his seat, "I think it is time you were
on the move. Go and wish Eva good-bye, and then I will drive you down
to the Hard--I see Edwards has brought round the carriage."
I hurried away to the drawing-room, where I knew I should find my
sister, and, opening the door gently, announced that I had come to say
good-bye. The dear girl, upon hearing my voice, rose up from the sofa,
in the cushion of which she had been hiding her tear-stained face, and
came with unsteady steps toward me. Then, as I looked into her eyes--
heavy with the mental agony from which she was suffering, and which she
bravely strove to hide for my sake--I realised, for the first time in my
life, all the horror which lurks in that dreadful word "Farewell."
Meaning originally a benediction, it has become by usage the word with
which we cut ourselves asunder from all that is nearest and dearest to
us; it is the signal for parting; the last word we address to our loved
ones; the fatal spell at which they lingeringly and unwillingly withdraw
from our clinging embrace; the utterance at which the hand-clasp of
friendship or of love is loosed, and we are torn apart never perhaps
again to meet until time shall be no more.
My poor sister! It was pitiful to witness her intense distress. This
was our first parting. Never before had we been separated for more than
an hour or two at a time, and, there being only the two of us, our
mutual affection had steadily, though imperceptibly, grown and
strengthened from year to year until now, when to say "good-bye" seemed
like the rending of our heart-strings asunder.
It had to be said, however, and it _was_ said at last--God knows how,
for my recollection of our parting moments is nothing more than that of
a brief period of acute mental suffering--and then, placing my half-
swooning sister upon the couch and pressing a last lingering kiss on her
icy-cold lips, I rushed from the room and the house.
My father had already taken his seat in the carriage; my luggage was
piled up on the front seat alongside the driver, and nothing therefore
remained but for me to jump in, slam-to the door, and we were off.
It seemed equally impossible to my father and to myself to utter a
single word during that short--though, in our then condition of acute
mental tension, all too long--drive to the Hard; we sat therefore dumbly
side by side, with our hands clasped, until the carriage drew up, when I
sprang out, hastily hailed a boatman, and then at once began with
feverish haste to drag my belongings off the carriage down into the
road. I had still to say good-bye to my father, and I felt that I
_must_ shorten the time as much as possible, that ten minutes more of
such mental torture would drive me mad.
The boatman quickly shouldered my chest, and, gathering up the remainder
of my belongings in his disengaged hand, discreetly trotted off to the
wherry, which he unmoored and drew alongside the slipway.
Then I turned to my father, and, with the obtrusive lump in my throat by
this time grown so inconveniently large that I could scarcely
articulate, held out my hand to him.
"Good-bye, father!" I stammered out huskily.
"Good-bye, Dick, my son, my own dear boy!" he returned, not less
affected than myself. "Good-bye! May God bless and keep you, and in
His own good time bring you in health and safety back to us! Amen."
A quick convulsive hand-clasp, a last hungry glance into the loving face
and the sorrow-dimmed eyes which looked so longingly down into mine, and
with a hardly-suppressed cry of anguish I tore myself away, staggered
blindly down the slipway, tumbled into the boat, and, as gruffly as I
could under the circumstances, ordered the boatman to put me on board
the _Daphne_.
CHAPTER THREE.
THE TRUTH ABOUT FITZ-JOHNES.
"Where are we going, Tom?" I asked, as the boatman, an old chum of
mine, proceeded to step the boat's mast. "You surely don't need the
sail for a run half-way across the harbour?"
"No," he answered; "no, I don't. But we're bound out to Spithead. The
_Daphne_ went out this mornin' at daylight to take in her powder, and I
'spects she's got half of it stowed away by this time. Look out for
your head, Mr Dick, sir, we shall jibe in a minute."
I ducked my head just in time to save my glazed hat from being knocked
overboard by the jibing mainsail of the boat, and then drew out my
handkerchief and waved another farewell to my father, whose fast-
diminishing figure I could still make out standing motionless on the
shore, with his hand shading his eyes as he watched the rapidly moving
boat. He waved back in answer, and then the intervening hull of a ship
hid him from my view, and I saw him no more for many a long day.
"Ah, it's a sorry business that, partin' with friends and kinsfolk when
you're outward-bound on a long cruise that you can't see the end of!"
commented my old friend Tom; "but keep up a good heart, Mr Dick; it'll
all be made up to yer when you comes home again by and by loaded down to
the scuppers with glory and prize-money."
I replied somewhat drearily that I supposed it would; and then Tom--
anxious in his rough kindliness of heart to dispel my depression of
spirits and prepare me to present myself among my new shipmates in a
suitably cheerful frame of mind--adroitly changed the subject and
proceeded to put me "up to a few moves," as he expressed it, likely to
prove useful to me in the new life upon which I was about to enter.
"And be sure, Mr Dick," he concluded, as we shot alongside the sloop,
"be sure you remember _always_ to touch your hat when you steps in upon
the quarter-deck of a man-o'-war, no matter whether 'tis your own ship
or a stranger."
Paying the old fellow his fare, and parting with him with a hearty shake
of the hand, I sprang up the ship's side, and--remembering Tom's parting
caution just in the nick of time--presenting myself in due form upon the
quarter-deck, where the first lieutenant had posted himself and from
which he was directing the multitudinous operations then in progress,
reported myself to that much-dreaded official as "come on board to
join."
He was a rather tall and decidedly handsome man, with a gentlemanly
bearing and a well-knit shapely-looking figure, dark hair and eyes,
thick bushy whiskers meeting under the chin, and a clear strong
melodious voice, which, without the aid of a speaking-trumpet, he made
distinctly heard from one end of the ship to the other. As he stood
there, in an easy attitude with his hands lightly clasped behind his
back and his eye taking in, as it seemed at a glance, everything that
was going forward, he struck me as the _beau-ideal_ of a naval officer.
I took a strong liking to him on the spot, an instinctive prepossession
which was afterwards abundantly justified, for Mr Austin--that was his
name--proved to be one of the best officers it has ever been my good
fortune to serve under.
"Oh, you're come on board to join, eh?" he remarked in response to my
announcement. "I suppose you are the young gentleman about whom Captain
Vernon was speaking to me yesterday. What is your name?"
I told him.
"Ah! Hawkesley! yes, that is the name. I remember now. Captain Vernon
told me that although you have never been to sea as yet you are not
altogether a greenhorn. What can you do?"
"I can hand, reef, and steer, box the compass, pull an oar, or sail a
boat; and I know the name and place of every spar, sail, and rope
throughout the ship."
"Aha! say you so? Then you will prove indeed a valuable acquisition.
What is the name of this rope?"
"The main-topgallant clewline," I answered, casting my eye aloft to note
the "lead" of the rope.
"Right!" he replied with a smile. "And you have the true nautical
pronunciation also, I perceive. Mr Johnson,"--to a master's mate who
happened to be passing at the moment--"this is Mr Hawkesley. Kindly
take him under your wing and induct him into his quarters in the
midshipmen's berth, if you please. Don't stop to stow away your things
just now, Mr Hawkesley," he continued. "I shall have an errand for you
in a few minutes."
"Very well, sir," I replied. And following my new acquaintance, I first
saw to the hoisting in of my traps, and then with them descended to the
place which was to be my home for so many months to come.
This was a tolerably roomy but very indifferently lighted cabin on the
lower or orlop deck, access to which was gained by the descent of a very
steep ladder. The furniture was of the most meagre description,
consisting only of a very solid deal table, two equally solid forms or
stools, and a couple of arm-chairs, one at each end of the table, all
securely lashed down to the deck. There was a shelf with a ledge along
its front edge, and divisions to form lockers, extending across the
after-end of the berth; and under this hung three small book-cases,
(which I was given to understand were private property) and a mirror six
inches long by four inches wide, before which the "young gentlemen"--
four in number, including myself--and the two master's mates had to
perform their toilets as best they could. The fore and after bulkheads
of the apartment were furnished with stout hooks to which to suspend our
hammocks, which, by the by, when slung, left, I noticed, but a very
small space on either side of the table; and depending from a beam
overhead there hung a common horn lantern containing the most attenuated
candle I ever saw--a veritable "purser's dip." This lantern, which was
suspended over the centre of the table, afforded, except at meal-times
or other special occasions, the sole illumination of the place.
Although the ship was new, and the berth had only been occupied a few
days, it was already pervaded by a very powerful odour of paint and
stale tobacco-smoke, which made me anxious to quit the place with the
least possible delay.
Merely selecting a position, therefore, for my chest, and leaving to the
wretched lad, whom adverse fortune had made the attendant of the place,
the task of lashing it down, I hastened on deck again, and presenting
myself once more before the first lieutenant, announced that I was now
ready to execute any commission with which he might be pleased to
intrust me.
"Very well," said he. "I want you to take the gig and proceed on board
the _Saint George_ with this letter for the first lieutenant of that
ship. Wait for an answer, and if he gives you a parcel be very careful
how you handle it, as it will contain articles of a very fragile
character which must on no account be damaged or broken."
The gig was thereupon piped away, and when she was in the water and her
crew in her I proceeded in my most stately manner down the side and
flung myself in an easily negligent attitude into the stern-sheets.
I felt at that moment exceedingly well satisfied with myself. I had
joined the ship but a bare half-hour before; yet here I was, singled out
from the rest of the midshipmen as the fittest person to be intrusted
with an evidently important mission. I forgot not only my father's
caution against vanity but also my sorrow at parting with him; my _amour
propre_ rose triumphant above every other feeling; the disagreeable lump
in my throat subsided, and with an unconscious, but no doubt very
ludicrous, assumption of condescending authority, I gave the order to--
"Shove off, and get the muslin upon her, and see that you crack on,
coxswain, for I am in a hurry."
"Ay, ay, sir," returned that functionary in a very respectful tone of
voice. "Step the mast, for'ard there, you sea-dogs, `and get the muslin
on her.'"
With a broad grin, whether at the verbatim repetition of my order, or in
consequence of some pantomimic gesture on the part of the coxswain, who
was behind me--I had a sudden painful suspicion that it might possibly
be _both_--the men sprang to obey the order; and in another instant the
mast was stepped, the halliard and tack hooked on, the sheet led aft,
and the sail was all ready for hoisting.
"What d'ye say, Tom; shall us take down a reef!" asked one of the men.
"Reef? No, certingly not. Didn't you hear the gentleman say as how we
was to `crack on' because he's in a hurry? Give her whole canvas,"
replied the coxswain.
With a shivering flutter and a sudden violent jerk the sail was run up;
and, careening gunwale-to, away dashed the lively boat toward the
harbour.
It was blowing fresh and squally from the eastward, and for the first
mile of our course there was a nasty choppy sea for a boat. The men
flung their oil-skins over their shoulders, and ranging themselves along
the weather side of the boat, seated themselves on the bottom-boards,
and away we went, jerk-jerking through it, the sea hissing and foaming
past us to leeward, and the spray flying in a continuous heavy shower in
over the weather-bow and right aft, drenching me through and through in
less than five minutes.
"I'm afeard you're gettin' rayther wet, sir," remarked the coxswain
feelingly when I had just about arrived at a condition of complete
saturation; "perhaps you'd better have my oil-skin, sir."
"No, thanks," I replied, "I am very comfortable as I am."
This was, to put it mildly, a perversion of the truth. I was _not_ very
comfortable; I was wet to the skin, and my bran-new uniform, upon which
I so greatly prided myself, was just about ruined. But it was then too
late for the oil-skin to be of the slightest benefit to me; and,
moreover, I did not choose that those men should think I cared for so
trifling a matter as a wetting.
But a certain scarcely-perceptible ironical inflection in the coxswain's
voice, when he so kindly offered me the use of his jumper, suggested the
suspicion that perhaps he was quietly amusing himself and his shipmates
at my expense, and that the drenching I had received was due more to his
management of the boat than anything else, so I set myself quietly to
watch.
I soon saw that my suspicion was well-founded. The rascal, instead of
easing the boat and meeting the heavier seas as he ought to have done,
was sailing the craft at top speed right through them, varying the
performance occasionally by keeping the boat broad away when a squall
struck her, causing her to careen until her gunwale went under, and as a
natural consequence shipping a great deal of water.
At length he rather overdid it, a squall striking the boat so heavily
that before he could luff and shake the wind out of the sail she had
filled to the thwarts. I thought for a moment that we were over, and so
did the crew of the boat, who jumped to their feet in consternation.
Being an excellent swimmer myself, however, I managed to perfectly
retain my _sang-froid_, whilst I also recognised in the mishap an
opportunity to take the coxswain down a peg or two.
Lifting my legs, therefore, coolly up on the side seat out of reach of
the water, I said:
"How long have you been a sailor, coxswain?"
"Nigh on to seven year, sir. Now then, lads, dowse the sail smartly and
get to work with the bucket."
"Seven years, have you?" I returned placidly. "Then you _ought_ to
know how to sail a boat by this time. I have never yet been to sea; but
I should be ashamed to make such a mess of it as this."
To this my friend in the rear vouchsafed not a word in reply, but from
that moment I noticed a difference in the behaviour of the men all
round. They found they had not got quite the greenhorn to deal with
that they had first imagined.
When at last the boat was freed of the water and sail once more made
upon her, I remarked to the coxswain:
"Now, Tom--if that is your name--you have amused yourself and your
shipmates at my expense--to your heart's content, I hope--you have
played off your little practical joke upon me, and I bear no malice.
But--let there be no more of it--do you understand?"
"Ay ay, sir; I underconstumbles," was the reply; "and I'm right sorry
now as I did it, sir, and I axes your parding, sir; that I do. Dash my
buttons, though, but you're a rare plucky young gentleman, you are, sir,
though I says it to your face. And I hopes, sir, as how you won't bear
no malice again' me for just tryin' a bit to see what sort o' stuff you
was made of, as it were?"
I eased the poor fellow's mind upon this point, and soon afterwards we
arrived alongside the _Saint George_.
I found the first lieutenant, and duly handed over my despatch, which he
read with a curious twitching about the corners of the mouth.
Having mastered the contents, he retired below, asking me to wait a
minute or two.
At that moment my attention was attracted to a midshipman in the main
rigging, who, with exaggerated deliberation, was making his unwilling
way aloft to the mast-head as it turned out. A certain familiar
something about the young gentleman caused me to look up at him more
attentively; and I then at once recognised my recent acquaintance, Lord
Fitz-Johnes. At the same moment the second lieutenant, who was eyeing
his lordship somewhat wrathfully, hailed him with:
"Now then, Mr Tomkins, are you going to be all day on your journey?
Quicken your movements, sir, or I will send a boatswain's mate after you
with a rope's-end to freshen your way. Do you hear, sir?"
"Ay ay, sir," responded the _ci-devant_ Lord Fitz-Johnes--now plain Mr
Tomkins--in a squeaky treble, as he made a feeble momentary show of
alacrity. Just then I caught his eye, and, taking off my hat, made him
an ironical bow of recognition, to which he responded by pressing his
body against the rigging--pausing in his upward journey to give due
effect to the ceremony--spreading his legs as widely apart as possible,
and extending both hands toward me, the fingers outspread, the thumb of
the right hand pressing gently against the point of his nose, and the
thumb of the left interlinked with the right-hand little finger. This
salute was made still more impressive by a lengthened slow and solemn
twiddling of the fingers, which was only brought to an end by the second
lieutenant hailing:
"Mr Tomkins, you will oblige me by prolonging your stay at the mast-
|
"\nday?\n\n_B_. Yasodhara, a higher duty calls.\nThe time will come, and it is close at hand,\nWhen (...TRUNCATED) |
".\n\n 14. Larva of _Sirex_.\n\n 15. Egg of _Rhynchites_, showing the parasitic larva.\n\n 16. Th(...TRUNCATED) |
"ers!” chattered Chip Jolliby.\n\n“Let ’im see ’ow ’ard ’e can ’it hit,” advised Bil(...TRUNCATED) |
"\ndo, give him a little tweak. Repeat this as often as he tries to bite,\nand he will soon learn th(...TRUNCATED) |
" His pristine shape, and manit-man become;\n There still he dwells, the all-pervading soul\n O(...TRUNCATED) |
End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
README.md exists but content is empty.
- Downloads last month
- 114