Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen Read online

  ‘But do YOU think, Harry, I oughtn’t to wear a new peacock-blue camel-hair dress on my first visit up to Oxford?’

  ‘Well, Edie dear, I don’t quite know what my own opinions are exactly upon that matter. I’m not an economist, you see, I’m a man of science. When I look at you, standing there so pretty in that pretty dress, I feel inclined to say to myself, “Every woman ought to do her best to make herself look as beautiful as she can for the common delectation of all humanity.” Your beauty, a Greek would have said, is a gift from the gods to us all, and we ought all gratefully to make the most of it. I’m sure I do.’

  ‘Thank you, Harry, again. You’re in your politest humour this afternoon.’

  ‘But then, on the other hand, I know if Le Breton were here he’d soon argue me over to the other side. He has the enthusiasm of humanity so strong upon him that you can’t help agreeing with him as long as he’s talking to you.’

  ‘Then if he were here you’d probably make me put away the peacock-blue, for fear of hubris and Nemesis and so forth, and go up to Oxford a perfect fright in my shabby old Indian tussore!’

  ‘I don’t know that I should do that, even then, Edie. In the first place, nothing on earth could make you look a perfect fright, or anything like one, Popsy dear; and in the second place, I don’t know that I’m Socialist enough myself ever to have the courage of my opinions as Le Breton has. Certainly, I should never attempt to force them unwillingly upon others. You must remember, Edie, it’s one thing for Le Breton to be so communistic as all that comes to, and quite another thing for you and me. Le Breton’s father was a general and a knight, you see; and people will never forget that his mother’s Lady Le Breton still, whatever he does. He may do what he likes in the way of social eccentricities, and the world will only say he’s such a very strange advanced young fellow. But if I were to take you up to Oxford badly dressed, or out of the fashion, or looking peculiar in any way, the world wouldn’t put it down to our political beliefs, but would say we were mere country tradespeople by birth, and didn’t know any better. That makes a lot of difference, you know.’

  ‘You’re quite right, Harry; and yet, do you know, I think there must be something, too, in sticking to one’s own opinions, like Mr. Le Breton. I should stick to mine, I’m sure, and wear whatever dress I liked, in spite of anybody. It’s a sweet thing, really, isn’t it?’ And she turned herself round, craning over her shoulder to look at the effect, in a vain attempt to assume an objective attitude towards her own back.

  ‘I’m glad I’m going to Oxford at last, Harry,’ she said, after a short pause. ‘I HAVE so longed to go all these years while you were an undergraduate; and I’m dying to have got there, now the chance has really come at last, after all. I shall glory in the place, I’m certain; and it’ll be so nice to make the acquaintance of all your clever friends.’

  ‘Well, Edie,’ said her brother, smiling gently at the light, joyous, tremulous little figure, ‘I think I’ve done right in putting it off till now. It’s just as well you haven’t gone up to Oxford till after your trip on the Continent with me. That three months in Paris, and Switzerland, and Venice, and Florence, did you a lot of good, you see; improved you, and gave you tone, and supplied you with things to talk about.’

  ‘Why, you oughtn’t to think I needed any improvement at all, sir,’ Edie answered, pouting; ‘and as to talking, I’m not aware I had ever any dearth of subjects for conversation even before I went on the Continent. There are things enough to be said about heaven and earth in England, surely, without one having to hurry through France and Italy, like Cook’s excursionists, just to hunt up something fresh to chatter about. It’s my belief that a person who can’t find anything new to say about the every-day world around her won’t discover much suggestive matter for conversation in a Continental Bradshaw. It’s like that feeble watery lady I met at the table d’hote at Geneva. From something she said I gathered she’d been in India, and I asked her how she liked it. “Oh,” she said, “it’s very hot.” I told her I had heard so before. Presently she said something casually about having been in Brazil. I asked her what sort of place Brazil was. “Oh.” she said, “it’s dreadfully hot.” I told her I’d heard that too. By-and-by she began to talk again about Barbadoes. “What did you think of the West Indies?” I said. “Oh,” said she, “they’re terribly hot, really.” I told her I had gathered as much from previous travellers. And that was positively all in the end I ever got out of her, for all her travels.’

  ‘My dear Edie, I’ve always admitted that you were simply perfect,’ Harry said, glancing at her with visible admiration, ‘and I don’t think anything on earth could possibly improve you — except perhaps a judicious course of differential and integral calculus, which might possibly serve to tone down slightly your exuberant and excessive vitality. Still, you know, from the point of view of society, which is a force we have always to reckon with — a constant, in fact, that we may call Pi — there can be no doubt in the world that to have been on the Continent is a differentiating factor in one’s social position. It doesn’t matter in the least what your own private evaluation of Pi may be; if you don’t happen to know the particular things and places that Pi knows, Pi’s evaluation of you will be approximately a minimum, of that you may be certain.’

  ‘Well, for my part, I don’t care twopence about Pi as you call it,’ said Edie, tossing her pretty little head contemptuously; ‘but I’m very glad indeed to have been on the Continent for my own sake, because of the pictures, and palaces, and mountains, and waterfalls we’ve seen, and not because of Pi’s opinion of me for having seen them. I would have been the same person really whether I’d seen them or not; but I’m so much the richer myself for that view from the top of the Col de Balme, and for that Murillo — oh, do you remember the flood of light on that Murillo? — in the far corner of that delicious gallery at Bologna. Why, mother darling, what on earth has been vexing you?’

  ‘Nothing at all, Edie dear; leastways, that is, nothing to speak of,’ said her mother, coming up from the shop hot and flurried from her desperate encounter with the redoubtable Miss Luttrell.

  ‘Oh, I know just what it is, darling,’ cried the girl, putting her arm around her mother’s waist caressingly, and drawing her down to kiss her face half a dozen times over in her outburst of sympathy. ‘That horrid old Miss Catherine has been here again, I’m sure, for I saw her going out of the shop just now, and she’s been saying something or other spiteful, as she always does, to vex my dearie. What did she say to you to-day, now do tell us, duckie mother?’

  ‘Well, there,’ said Mrs. Oswald, half laughing and half crying, ‘I can’t tell ‘ee exactly what she did say, but it was just the kind of thing that she mostly does, impudent like, just to hurt a body’s feelings. She said you’d better not go to Oxford, Edie, but stop at home and learn your catechism.’

  ‘You might have pointed out to her, mother dear,’ said the young man, smoothing her hair softly with his hand, and kissing her forehead, ‘that in the most advanced intellectual centres the Church catechism is perhaps no longer regarded as the absolute ultimatum of the highest and deepest economical wisdom.’

  ‘Bless your heart, Harry, what’d be the good of talking that way to the likes of she? She wouldn’t understand a single word of what you were driving at. It must be all plain sailing with her, without it’s in the way of spite, and then she sees her chance to tack round the hardest corner with half a wind in her sails only, as soon as look at it. Her sharpness goes all off toward ill-nature, that it do. Why, she said you’d got on at Oxford by good patronage!’

  ‘There, you see, Edie,’ cried Harry demonstratively, ‘that’s an infinitesimal fraction of Pi; that’s a minute decimal of this great, sneering, ugly aggregate “society” that we have to deal with whether we will or no, and that rends us and grinds us to powder if only it can once get in the thin end of a chance. Take shaky bitter old Miss Catherine for your unit, multiply her to the nth, and there you see the
irreducible power we have to fight against. All one’s political economy is very well in its way; but the practical master of the situation is Pi, sitting autocratically in many-headed judgment on our poor solitary little individualities, and crushing us irretrievably with the dead weight of its inexorable cumulative nothingness. And to think that that quivering old mass of perambulating jealousy — that living incarnation of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness — should be able to make you uncomfortable for a single moment, mother darling, with her petty, dribbling, doddering venom, why, it’s simply unendurable.’

  ‘There now, Harry,’ said Mrs. Oswald, relenting, ‘you mustn’t be too hard, neither, on poor old Miss Catherine. She’s a bit soured, you see, by disappointments and one thing and another. She doesn’t mean it, really, but it’s just her nature. Folks can’t be blamed for their nature, now, can they?’

  ‘It occurs to me,’ said Harry quietly, ‘that vipers only sting because it’s their nature; and Dr. Watts has made a similar observation with regard to the growling and fighting of bears and lions. But I’m not aware that anybody has yet proposed to get up a Society for the protection of those much-misunderstood creatures, on the ground that they are not really responsible for their own inherited dispositions. Mr. William Sikes had a nature (no doubt congenital) which impelled him to beat his wife — I’m not sure that she was even his wife at all, now I come to think of it, but that’s a mere detail — and to kick his familiar acquaintances casually about the head. We, on the other hand, have natures which impel us, when we catch Mr. William Sikes indulging in these innate idiosyncrasies by way of recreation, to clap him promptly into prison, and even, under certain aggravating conditions, to cause him to be hanged by the neck till he be dead. This may be a regrettable incident of our own peculiar dispositions, mother dear, but it has at least the same justification as Mr. Sikes’s or the bears’ and lions’, that ’tis our nature to. And I feel pretty much the same way about old Miss Luttrell.’

  ‘Well, there,’ said his mother, kissing him gently, ‘you’re a bad rebellious boy to be calling names, like a chatter-mag, and I won’t listen to you any longer. How pretty Edie do look in her new dress, to be sure, Harry. I’ll warr’nt there won’t be a prettier girl in Oxford next week than what she is; no, nor a better one and a sweeter one neither.’

  Harry put his arms round both their waists at once, with an affectionate pressure; and they went down to their old-fashioned tea together in the little parlour behind the shop, looking out over the garden, and the beach, and the great cliffs beyond on either hand, to the very farthest edge of the distant clear-cut blue horizon.

  CHAPTER III.

  MAGDALEN QUAD.

  The Reverend Arthur Collingham Berkeley, curate of St. Fredegond’s, lounged lazily in his own neatly padded wickerwork easy-chair, opposite the large lattice-paned windows of his pretty little first-floor rooms in the front quad of Magdalen.

  ‘There’s a great deal to be said, Le Breton, in favour of October term,’ he observed, in his soft, musical voice, as he gazed pensively across the central grass-plot to the crimson drapery of the Founder’s Tower. ‘Just look at that magnificent Virginia creeper over there, now; just look at the way the red on it melts imperceptibly into Tyrian purple and cloth of gold! Isn’t that in itself argument enough to fling at Hartmann’s head, if he ventured to come here sprinkling about his heresies, with his affected little spray-shooter, in the midst of a drowsy Oxford autumn? The Cardinal never saw Virginia creeper, I suppose; a man of his taste wouldn’t have been guilty of committing such a gross practical anachronism as that, any more than he would have smoked a cigarette before tobacco was invented; but if only he could have seen the October effect on that tower yonder, he’d have acknowledged that his own hat and robe were positively nowhere in the running, for colour, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Well,’ answered Herbert, putting down the Venetian glass goblet he had been examining closely with due care into its niche in the over-mantel, ‘I’ve no doubt Wolsey had too much historical sense ever to step entirely out of his own century, like my brother Ernest, for instance; but I’ve never heard his opinion on the subject of colour-harmonies, and I should suspect it of having been distinctly tinged with nascent symptoms of renaissance vulgarity. This is a lovely bit of Venetian, really, Berkeley. How the dickens do you manage to pick up all these pretty things, I wonder? Why can’t I afford them, now?’

  ‘What a question for the endowed and established to put to a poor starving devil of a curate like me!’ said Berkeley lightly. ‘You, an incarnate sinecure and vested interest, a creature revelling in an unearned income of fabulous Oriental magnificence — I dare say, putting one thing with another, fully as much as five hundred a year — to ask me, the unbeneficed and insignificant, with my wretched pittance of eighty pounds per annum and my three pass-men a term for classical mods, how I scrape together the few miserable, hoarded ha’pence which I grudgingly invest in my pots and pipkins! I save them from my dinner, Mr. Bursar — I save them. If the Church only recognised modest merit as it ought to do! — if the bishops only listened with due attention to the sound and scholarly exegesis of my Sunday evening discourses at St. Fredegond’s! — then, indeed, I might be disposed to regard things through a more satisfied medium — the medium of a nice, fat, juicy country living. But for you, Le Breton — you, sir, a pluralist and a sanguisorb of the deepest dye — to reproach me with my Franciscan poverty — oh, it’s too cruel!’

  ‘I’m an abuse, I know,’ Herbert answered, smiling and waving his hand gracefully. ‘I at once admit it. Abuses exist, unhappily; and while they continue do so, isn’t it better they should envisage themselves as me than as some other and probably less deserving fellow?’

  ‘No, it’s not, decidedly. I should much prefer that one of them envisaged itself as me.’

  ‘Ah, of course. From your own strictly subjective point of view that’s very natural. I also look at the question abstractly from the side of the empirical ego, and correctly deduce a corresponding conclusion. Only then, you see, the terms of the minor premiss are luckily reversed.’

  ‘Well, my dear fellow,’ said the curate, ‘the fact about the tea-things is this. You eat up your income, devour your substance in riotous living; I prefer to feast my eyes and ears to my grosser senses. You dine at high table, and fare sumptuously every day; I take a commons of cold beef for lunch, and have tea off an egg and roll in my own rooms at seven. You drink St. Emilion or still hock; I drink water from the well or the cup that cheers but not obfuscates. The difference goes to pay for the crockery. Do likewise, and with your untold wealth you might play Aunt Sally at Oriental blue, and take cock-shots with a boot-jack at hawthorn-pattern vases.’

  ‘At any rate, Berkeley, you always manage to get your money’s worth of amusement out of your money.’

  ‘Of course, because I lay myself out to do it. Buy a bottle of champagne, drink it off, and there you have to show for your total permanent investment on the transaction the memory of a noisy evening and a headache the next morning. Buy a flute, or a book of poems, or a little picture, or a Palissy platter, and you have something to turn to with delight and admiration for half a lifetime.’

  ‘Ah, but it isn’t everybody who can isolate himself so utterly from the workaday world and live so completely in his own little paradise of art as you can, my dear fellow. Non omnia possumus omnes. You seem to be always up in the aesthetic clouds, with your own music automatically laid on, and no need of cherubim or seraphim to chant continually for your gratification. Play me something of your own on your flute now, like a good fellow.’

  ‘No, I won’t; because the spirit doesn’t move me. It’s treachery to the divine gift to play when you don’t want to. Besides, what’s the use of playing before YOU when you’re not the dean of a musical cathedral? David was wiser; he played only before Saul, who had of course all the livings in his own gift, no doubt. I’ve got a new thing running in my head this very minute that you sh
all hear though, all the same, as soon as I’ve hammered it into shape — a sort of villanette in music, a little whiff of country freshness, suggested by the new ethereal acquisition, little Miss Butterfly. Have you seen Miss Butterfly yet?’

  ‘Not by that name, at any rate. Who is she?’

  ‘Oh, the name’s my own invention. Mademoiselle Volauvent, I mean — the little bit of whirligig thistledown from Devonshire, Oswald’s sister, you know, of Oriel.’

  ‘Ah, that one! Yes; just caught a glimpse of her in the High on Thursday. Very pretty, certainly, and as airy as a humming-bird.’

  ‘That’s her! She’s coming here to lunch this morning. If you’re a good boy, and will promise not to say anything naughty, you may stop and meet her. She’s a nice little thing, but rather timid at seeing so many fresh faces. You mustn’t frighten her by discussing the Absolute and the Unconditioned, or bore her by talking about Aristotle’s Politics, or the revolutions in Corcyra. For you know, my dear Le Breton, if you HAVE a fault, it is that you’re such a consummate and irrepressible prig; now aren’t you really?’

  ‘I’m hardly a fair judge on that subject, I suppose, Berkeley; but if YOU have a rudimentary glimmering of a virtue, it is that you’re such a deliciously frank and yet considerate critic. I’ll pocket your rudeness though, and eat your lunch, in spite of it. Is Miss Butterfly, as you call her, as stand-off as her brother?’

  ‘Not at all. She’s accueillante to the last degree.’

  ‘Very restricted, I suppose — a country girl of the first water? Horizon absolutely bounded by the high hedges of her native parish?’

  ‘Oh dear no! Anything but that. She’s like her brother, naturally quick and adaptive.’

  ‘Oswald’s an excellent fellow in his way,’ said Herbert, button-holing his own waistcoat; ‘but he’s spoilt by two bad traits. In the first place, he’s so dreadfully conscious of the fact that he has risen from a lower position; and then, again, he’s so engrossingly and pervadingly mathematical. X square seems to have seized upon him bodily, and to have wormed its fatal way into his very marrow.’