Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen Page 15

  ‘I agree with you in part, Le Breton,’ the parson said, eyeing him closely; ‘in part but not altogether. What you say about Oswald’s very largely true. His culture sits upon him like a suit made to order, not like a skin in which he was born. But don’t you think that’s due more to the individual man than to the class he happens to belong to? It seems to me there are other men who come from the same class as Oswald, or even from lower classes, but whose culture is just as much ingrained as, say, my dear fellow, yours is. They were born, no doubt, of naturally cultivated parents. And that’s how your rule about the dozen generations that go to make a gentleman comes really true. I believe myself it takes a good many generations; but then none of them need have been gentlemen, in the ordinary sense of the word, before him. A gentleman, if I’m to use the expression as implying the good qualities conventionally supposed to be associated with it, a gentleman may be the final outcome and efflorescence of many past generations of quiet, unobtrusive, working-man culture — don’t you think so?’

  Herbert Le Breton smiled incredulously. ‘I don’t know that I do, quite,’ he answered languidly. ‘I confess I attach more importance than you do to the mere question of race and family. A thoroughbred differs from a cart-horse, and a greyhound from a vulgar mongrel, in mind and character as well as in body. Oswald seems to me in all essentials a bourgeois at heart even now.’

  ‘But remember,’ Berkeley said, rather warmly for him, ‘the bourgeois class in England is just the class which must necessarily find it hardest to throw off the ingrained traces of its early origin. It has intermarried for a long time — long enough to have produced a distinct racial type like those you speak of among dogs and horses — the Philistine type, in fact — and when it tries to emerge, it must necessarily fight hard against the innate Philistinism of which it is conscious in its own constitution. No class has had its inequality with others, its natural inferiority, so constantly and cruelly thrust in its face; certainly the working-man has not. The working-man who makes efforts to improve himself is encouraged; the working-man who rises is taken by the hand; the working-man, whatever he does, is never sneered at. But it’s very different with the shopkeeper. Naturally a little prone to servility — that comes from the very necessities of the situation — and laudably anxious to attain the level of those he considers his superiors, he gets laughed at on every hand. Being the next class below society, society is always engaged in trying to keep him out and keep him down. On the other hand, he naturally forms his ideal of what is fine and worth imitating from the example of the class above him; and therefore, considering what that class is, he has unworthy aims and snobbish desires. Either in his own person, or in the persons of his near relations, the wholesale merchant and the manufacturer — all bourgeois alike — he supplies the mass of nouveaux riches who are the pet laughing-stock of all our playwrights, and novelists, and comic papers. So the bourgeois who really knows he has something in him, like Harry Oswald, feels from the beginning painfully conscious of the instability of his position, and of the fact that men like you are cutting jokes behind his back about the smell of tea that still clings to him. That’s a horrible drag to hold a man back — the sense that he must always be criticised as one of his own class — and that a class with many recognised failings. It makes him self-conscious, and I believe self-consciousness is really at the root of that slight social awkwardness you think you notice in Harry Oswald. A working-man’s son need never feel that. I feel sure there are working-men’s sons who go through the world as gentlemen mixing with gentlemen, and never give the matter of their birth one moment’s serious consideration. Their position never troubles them, and it never need trouble them. Put it to yourself, now, Le Breton. Suppose I were to tell you my father was a working shoemaker, for example, or a working carpenter, you’d never think anything more about it; but if I were to tell you he was a grocer, or a baker, or a confectioner, or an ironmonger, you’d feel a certain indefinable class barrier set up between us two immediately and ever after. Isn’t it so, now?’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ Herbert answered dubitatively. ‘But as he’s probably neither the one nor the other, the hypothesis isn’t worth seriously discussing. I must go off now; I’ve got a lecture at twelve. Good-bye. Don’t forget the tickets for Thursday’s concert.’

  Arthur Berkeley looked after him with a contemptuous smile. ‘The outcome of a race himself,’ he thought, ‘and not the best side of that race either. I was half tempted, in the heat of argument, to blurt out to him the whole truth about the dear gentle old Progenitor; but I’m glad I didn’t now. After all, it’s no use to cast your pearls before swine. For Herbert’s essentially a pig — a selfish self-centred pig; no doubt a very refined and cultivated specimen of pigdom — the best breed; but still a most emphatic and consummate pig for all that. Not the same stuff in him that there is in Ernest — a fibre or two wanting somewhere. But I mustn’t praise Ernest — a rival! a rival! It’s war to the death between us two now, and no quarter. He’s a good fellow, and I like him dearly; but all’s fair in love and war; and I must go down to Calcombe to-morrow morning and forestall him immediately. Dear little Miss Butterfly, ’tis for your sake; you shall not be pinched and cramped to suit the Procrustean measure of Ernest Le Breton’s communistic fancies. You shall fly free in the open air, and flash your bright silken wings, decked out bravely in scales of many hues, not toned down to too sober and quaker-like a suit of drab and dove-colour. You were meant by nature for the sunshine and the summer; you shall not be worried and chilled and killed with doses of heterodox political economy and controversial ethics. Better even a country rectory (though with a bad Late Perpendicular church), and flowers, and picnics, and lawn-tennis, and village small-talk, and the squire’s dinner-parties, than bread and cheese and virtuous poverty in a London lodging with Ernest Le Breton. Romance lives again. The beautiful maiden is about to be devoured by a goggle-eyed monster, labelled on the back “Experimental Socialism”; the red cross knight flies to her aid, and drives away the monster by his magic music. Lance in rest! lyre at side! third class railway ticket in pocket! A Berkeley to the rescue! and there you have it.’ And as he spoke, he tilted with his pen at an imaginary dragon supposed to be seated in the crimson rocking-chair by the wainscotted fireplace.

  ‘Yes, I must certainly go down to Calcombe. No use putting it off any longer. I’ve arranged to go next summer to London, to keep house for the dear old Progenitor; the music is getting asked for, two requests for more this very morning; trade is looking up. I shall throw the curacy business overboard (what chance for modest merit that ISN’T first cousin to a Bishop in the Church as at present constituted?) and take to composing entirely for a livelihood. I wouldn’t ask Miss Butterfly before, because I didn’t wish to tie her pretty wings prematurely; but a rival! that’s quite a different matter. What right has he to go poaching on my preserves, I should like to know, and trying to catch the little gold fish I want to entice for my own private and particular fish-pond! An interloper, to be turned out unmercifully. So off to Calcombe, and that quickly.’

  He sat down to his desk, and taking out some sheets of blank music-paper, began writing down the score of a little song at which he had been working. So he continued till lunch-time, and then, turning to the table when the scout called him, took his solitary lunch of bread and butter, with a volume of Petrarch set open before him as he eat. He was lazily Englishing the soft lines of the original into such verse as suited his fastidious ear, when the scout came in suddenly once more, bringing in his hand the mid-day letters. One of them bore the Calcombe postmark. ‘Strange,’ Berkeley said to himself; ‘at the very moment when I was thinking of going there. An invitation perhaps; the age of miracles is not yet past — don’t they see spirits in a conjuror’s room in Regent Street? — from Oswald, too; by Jove, it must be an invitation.’ And he ran his eye down the page rapidly, to see if there was any mention of little Miss Butterfly. Yes; there was her name on the second sheet; what co
uld her brother have to say to him about her?

  ‘We have Ernest Le Breton down here now,’ Oswald wrote, ‘on a holiday from the Exmoors’, and you may be surprised to hear that I shall probably have him sooner or later for a brother-in-law. He has proposed to and been accepted by my sister Edith; and though it is likely, as things stand at present, to be a rather long engagement (for Le Breton has nothing to marry upon), we are all very much pleased about it here at Calcombe. He is just the exact man I should wish my sister to marry; so pleasant and good and clever, and so very well connected. Felicitate us, my dear Berkeley!’

  Arthur Berkeley laid the letter down with a quiet sigh, and folded his hands despondently before him. He hadn’t seen very much of Edie, yet the disappointment was to him a very bitter one. It had been a pleasant day-dream, truly, and he was both to part with it so unexpectedly. ‘Poor little Miss Butterfly,’ he said to himself, tenderly and compassionately; ‘poor, airy, flitting, bright-eyed little Miss Butterfly. I must give you up, must I, and Ernest Le Breton must take you for better, for worse, must he? La reyne le veult, it seems, and her word is law. I’m afraid he’s hardly the man to make you happy, little lady; kind-hearted, well-meaning, but too much in earnest, too much absorbed in his ideas of right for a world where right’s impossible, and every man for himself is the wretched sordid rule of existence. He will overshadow and darken your bright little life, I fear me; not intentionally — he couldn’t do that — but by his Quixotic fads and fancies; good fads, honest fads, but fads wholly impracticable in this jarring universe of clashing interests, where he who would swim must keep his own head steadily above water, and he who minds his neighbour must sink like lead to the unfathomable bottom. He will sink, I doubt not, poor little Miss Butterfly; he will sink inevitably, and drag you down with him, down, down, down to immeasurable depths of poverty and despair. Oh, my poor little butterfly, I’m sorry for you, and sorry for myself. It was a pretty dream, and I loved it dearly. I had made you a queen in my fancy, and throned you in my heart, and now I have to dethrone you again, me miserable, and have my poor lonely heart bare and queenless!’

  The piano was open, and he went over to it instinctively, strumming a few wild bars out of his own head, made up hastily on the spur of the moment. ‘No, not dethrone you,’ he went on, leaning back on the music-stool, and letting his hand wander aimlessly over the keys; ‘not dethrone you; I shall never, never be able to do that. Little Miss Butterfly, your image is stamped there too deep for dethronement, stamped there for ever, indelibly, ineffaceably, not to be washed out by tears or laughter. Ernest Le Breton may take you and keep you; you are his; you have chosen him, and you have chosen in most things not unwisely, for he’s a good fellow and true (let me be generous in the hour of disappointment even to the rival, the goggle-eyed impracticable dragon monstrosity), but you are mine, too, for I won’t give you up; I can’t give you up; I must live for you still, even if you know it not. Little woman, I will work for you and I will watch over you; I will be your earthly Providence; I will try to extricate you from the quagmires into which the well-meaning, short-sighted dragon will infallibly lead you. Dear little bright soul, my heart aches for you; I know the trouble you are bringing upon yourself; but la reyne le veult, and it is not your humble servitor’s business to interfere with your royal pleasure. Still, you are mine, for I am yours; yours, body and soul; what else have I to live for? The dear old Progenitor can’t be with us many years longer; and when he is gone there will be nothing left me but to watch over little Miss Butterfly and her Don Quixote of a future husband. A man can’t work and slave and compose sonatas for himself alone — the idea’s disgusting, piggish, worthy only of Herbert Le Breton; I must do what I can for the little queen, and for her balloon-navigating Utopian Ernest. Thank heaven, no law prevents you from loving in your own heart the one woman whom you have once loved, no matter who may chance to marry her. Go, day-dream, fly, vanish, evaporate; the solid core remains still — my heart, and little Miss Butterfly. I have loved her once, and I shall love her, I shall love her for ever!’

  He crumpled the letter up in his fingers, and flung it half angrily into the waste-paper basket, as though it were the embodied day-dream he was mentally apostrophising. It was sermon-day, and he had to write his discourse that very afternoon. A quaint idea seized him. ‘Aha,’ he said, almost gaily, in his volatile irresponsible fashion, ‘I have my text ready; the hour brings it to me unsought; a quip, a quip! I shall preach on the Pool of Bethesda: “While I am coming, another steppeth down before me.” The verse seems as if it were made on purpose for me; what a pity nobody else will understand it!’ And he smiled quietly at the conceit, as he got the scented sheets of sermon-paper out of his little sandalwood davenport. For Arthur Berkeley was one of those curiously compounded natures which can hardly ever be perfectly serious, and which can enjoy a quaintness or a neat literary allusion even at a moment of the bitterest personal disappointment. He could solace himself for a minute for the loss of Edie by choosing a text for his Sunday’s sermon with a prettily-turned epigram on his own position.

  CHAPTER XII.

  THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY.

  At the very top of the winding footpath cut deeply into the sandstone side of the East Cliff Hill at Hastings, a wooden seat, set a little back from the road, invites the panting climber to rest for five minutes after his steep ascent from the primitive fisher village of Old Hastings, which nestles warmly in the narrow sun-smitten gulley at his feet. On this seat, one bright July morning, Herbert Le Breton lay at half length, basking in the brilliant open sunshine and evidently waiting for somebody whom he expected to arrive by the side path from the All Saints’ Valley. Even the old coastguardsman, plodding his daily round over to Ecclesbourne, noticed the obvious expectation implied in his attentive attitude, and ventured to remark, in his cheery familiar fashion, ‘She won’t be long a-comin’ now, sir, you may depend upon it: the gals is sure to be out early of a fine mornin’ like this ’ere.’ Herbert stuck his double eye-glass gingerly upon the tip of his nose, and surveyed the bluff old sailor through it with a stony British stare of mingled surprise and indignation, which drove the poor man hastily off, with a few muttered observations about some people being so confounded stuck up that they didn’t even understand the point of a little good-natured seafarin’ banter.

  As the coastguardsman disappeared round the corner of the flagstaff, a young girl came suddenly into sight by the jutting edge of sandstone bluff near the High Wickham; and Herbert, jumping up at once from his reclining posture, raised his bat to her with stately politeness, and moved forward in his courtly graceful manner to meet her as she approached. ‘Well, Selah,’ he said, taking her hand a little warmly (judged at least by Herbert Le Breton’s usual standard), ‘so you’ve come at last! I’ve been waiting here for you for fully half an hour. You see, I’ve come down to Hastings again as I promised, the very first moment I could possibly get away from my pressing duties at Oxford.’

  The girl withdrew her hand from his, blushing deeply, but looking into his face with evident pleasure and admiration. She was tall and handsome, with a certain dashing air of queenliness about her, too; and she was dressed in a brave, outspoken sort of finery, which, though cheap enough in its way, was neither common nor wholly wanting in a touch of native good taste and even bold refinement of contrast and harmony. ‘It’s very kind of you to come, Mr. Walters,’ she answered in a firm but delicate voice. ‘I’m so sorry I’ve kept you waiting. I got your letter, and tried to come in time; but father he’s been more aggravating than usual, almost, this morning, and kept saying he’d like to know what on earth a young woman could want to go out walking for, instead of stopping at home at her work and minding her Bible like a proper Christian. In HIS time young women usen’t to be allowed to go walking except on Sundays, and then only to chapel or Bible class. So I’ve not been able to get away till this very minute, with all this bundle of tracts, too, to give to the excursionists on the way. Father feels
a most incomprehensible interest, somehow, in the future happiness of the Sunday excursionists.’

  ‘I wish he’d feel a little more interest in the present happiness of his own daughter,’ Herbert said smiling. ‘But it hasn’t mattered your keeping me waiting here, Selah. Of course I’d have enjoyed it all far better in your society — I don’t think I need tell you that now, dear — but the sunshine, and the sea breeze, and the song of the larks, and the plash of the waves below, and the shouts of the fishermen down there on the beach mending their nets and putting out their smacks, have all been so delightful after our humdrum round of daily life at Oxford, that I only wanted your presence here to make it all into a perfect paradise. — Why, Selah, how pretty you look in that sweet print! It suits your complexion admirably. I never saw you wear anything before so perfectly becoming.’

  Selah drew herself up with the conscious pride of an unaffected pretty girl. ‘I’m so glad you think so, Mr. Walters,’ she said, playing nervously with the handle of her dark-blue parasol. ‘You always say such very flattering things.’

  ‘No, not flattering,’ Herbert answered, smiling; ‘not flattering, Selah, simply truthful. You always extort the truth from me with your sweet face, Selah. Nobody can look at it and not forget the stupid conventions of ordinary society. But please, dear, don’t call me Mr. Walters. Call me Herbert. You always do, you know, when you write to me.’