Beauchamps Career, v3

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This etext was produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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entire meal of them. D.W.]

BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER

By George Meredith

1897

BOOK 3.
XIX. LORD PALMET, AND CERTAIN ELECTORS
XX. A DAY AT ITCHINCOPE
XXI. THE QUESTION AS TO THE EXAMINATION OF THE WHIGS,
AND THE FINE BLOW STRUCK BY MR. EVERARD ROMFREY
XXII. THE DRIVE INTO BEVISHAM
XXIII. TOURDESTELLE
XXIV. HIS HOLIDAY
XXV. THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOAT

CHAPTER XIX

LORD PALMET, AND CERTAIN ELECTORS OF BEVISHAM

Meantime the candidates raised knockers, rang bells, bowed, expounded
their views, praised their virtues, begged for votes, and greatly and
strangely did the youngest of them enlarge his knowledge of his
countrymen. But he had an insatiable appetite, and except in relation to
Mr. Cougham, considerable tolerance. With Cougham, he was like a young
hound in the leash. They had to run as twins; but Beauchamp's conjunct
would not run, he would walk. He imposed his experience on Beauchamp,
with an assumption that it must necessarily be taken for the law of
Beauchamp's reason in electoral and in political affairs, and this was
hard on Beauchamp, who had faith in his reason. Beauchamp's early
canvassing brought Cougham down to Bevisham earlier than usual in the
days when he and Seymour Austin divided the borough, and he inclined to
administer correction to the Radically-disposed youngster. 'Yes, I have
gone all over that,' he said, in speech sometimes, in manner perpetually,
upon the intrusion of an idea by his junior. Cougham also, Cougham had
passed through his Radical phase, as one does on the road to wisdom.
So the frog telleth tadpoles: he too has wriggled most preposterous of
tails; and he has shoved a circular flat head into corners unadapted to
its shape; and that the undeveloped one should dutifully listen to
experience and accept guidance, is devoutly to be hoped. Alas!
Beauchamp would not be taught that though they were yoked they stood at
the opposite ends of the process of evolution.

The oddly coupled pair deplored, among their respective friends, the
disastrous Siamese twinship created by a haphazard improvident Liberal
camp. Look at us! they said:--Beauchamp is a young demagogue; Cougham
is chrysalis Tory. Such Liberals are the ruin of Liberalism; but of such
must it be composed when there is no new cry to loosen floods. It was
too late to think of an operation to divide them. They held the heart of
the cause between them, were bound fast together, and had to go on.
Beauchamp, with a furious tug of Radicalism, spoken or performed, pulled
Cougham on his beam-ends. Cougham, to right himself, defined his
Liberalism sharply from the politics of the pit, pointed to France and
her Revolutions, washed his hands of excesses, and entirely overset
Beauchamp. Seeing that he stood in the Liberal interest, the junior
could not abandon the Liberal flag; so he seized it and bore it ahead of
the time, there where Radicals trip their phantom dances like shadows on
a fog, and waved it as the very flag of our perfectible race. So great
was the impetus that Cougham had no choice but to step out with him
briskly--voluntarily as a man propelled by a hand on his coat-collar.
A word saved him: the word practical. 'Are we practical?' he inquired,
and shivered Beauchamp's galloping frame with a violent application of
the stop abrupt; for that question, 'Are we practical?' penetrates the
bosom of an English audience, and will surely elicit a response if not.
plaudits. Practical or not, the good people affectingly wish to be
thought practical. It has been asked by them

If we're not practical, what are we?--Beauchamp, talking to Cougham
apart, would argue that the daring and the far-sighted course was often
the most practical. Cougham extended a deprecating hand: 'Yes, I have
gone over all that.' Occasionally he was maddening.

The melancholy position of the senior and junior Liberals was known
abroad and matter of derision.

It happened that the gay and good-humoured young Lord Palmet, heir to the
earldom of Elsea, walking up the High Street of Bevisham, met Beauchamp
on Tuesday morning as he sallied out of his hotel to canvass. Lord
Palmet was one of the numerous half-friends of Cecil Baskelett, and it
may be a revelation of his character to you, that he owned to liking
Beauchamp because of his having always been a favourite with the women.
He began chattering, with Beauchamp's hand in his: 'I've hit on you, have
I? My dear fellow, Miss Halkett was talking of you last night.
I slept at Mount Laurels; went on purpose to have a peep. I'm bound
for Itchincope. They've some grand procession in view there; Lespel
wrote for my team; I suspect he's for starting some new October races.
He talks of half-a-dozen drags. He must have lots of women there.
I say, what a splendid creature Cissy Halkett has shot up! She topped
the season this year, and will next. You're for the darkies, Beauchamp.
So am I, when I don't see a blonde; just as a fellow admires a girl when
there's no married woman or widow in sight. And, I say, it can't be true
you've gone in for that crazy Radicalism? There's nothing to be gained
by it, you know; the women hate it! A married blonde of five-and-
twenty's the Venus of them all. Mind you, I don't forget that Mrs.
Wardour-Devereux is a thorough-paced brunette; but, upon my honour, I'd
bet on Cissy Halkett at forty. "A dark eye in woman," if you like, but
blue and auburn drive it into a corner.'

Lord Palmet concluded by asking Beauchamp what he was doing and whither
going.

Beauchamp proposed to him maliciously, as one of our hereditary
legislators, to come and see something of canvassing. Lord Palmet had no
objection. 'Capital opportunity for a review of their women,' he
remarked.

'I map the places for pretty women in England; some parts of Norfolk, and
a spot or two in Cumberland and Wales, and the island over there, I know
thoroughly. Those Jutes have turned out some splendid fair women.
Devonshire's worth a tour. My man Davis is in charge of my team, and he
drives to Itchincope from Washwater station. I am independent; I 'll
have an hour with you. Do you think much of the women here?'

Beauchamp had not noticed them.

Palmet observed that he should not have noticed anything else.

'But you are qualifying for the Upper House,' Beauchamp said in the tone
of an encomium.

Palmet accepted the statement. 'Though I shall never care to figure
before peeresses,' he said. 'I can't tell you why. There's a heavy
sprinkling of the old bird among them. It isn't that. There's too much
plumage; I think it must be that. A cloud of millinery shoots me off a
mile from a woman. In my opinion, witches are the only ones for wearing
jewels without chilling the feminine atmosphere about them. Fellows
think differently.' Lord Palmet waved a hand expressive of purely
amiable tolerance, for this question upon the most important topic of
human affairs was deep, and no judgement should be hasty in settling it.
'I'm peculiar,' he resumed. 'A rose and a string of pearls: a woman who
goes beyond that's in danger of petrifying herself and her fellow man.
Two women in Paris, last winter, set us on fire with pale thin gold
ornaments--neck, wrists, ears, ruche, skirts, all in a flutter, and so
were you. But you felt witchcraft. "The magical Orient," Vivian Ducie
called the blonde, and the dark beauty, "Young Endor."'

'Her name?' said Beauchamp.

'A marquise; I forget her name. The other was Countess Rastaglione; you
must have heard of her; a towering witch, an empress, Helen of Troy;
though Ducie would have it the brunette was Queen of Paris. For French
taste, if you like.'

Countess Rastaglione was a lady enamelled on the scroll of Fame. 'Did
you see them together?' said Beauchamp. 'They weren't together?'

Palmet looked at him and laughed. 'You're yourself again, are you? Go
to Paris in January, and cut out the Frenchmen.'

'Answer me, Palmet: they weren't in couples?'

'I fancy not. It was luck to meet them, so they couldn't have been.'

'Did you dance with either of them?'

Unable to state accurately that he had, Palmet cried, 'Oh! for dancing,
the Frenchwoman beat the Italian.'

'Did you see her often--more than once?'

'My dear fellow, I went everywhere to see her: balls, theatres,
promenades, rides, churches.'

'And you say she dressed up to the Italian, to challenge her, rival her?'

'Only one night; simple accident. Everybody noticed it, for they stood
for Night and Day,--both hung with gold; the brunette Etruscan, and the
blonde Asiatic; and every Frenchman present was epigramizing up and down
the rooms like mad.'

'Her husband 's Legitimist; he wouldn't be at the Tuileries?' Beauchamp
spoke half to himself.

'What, then, what?' Palmet stared and chuckled. 'Her husband must have
taken the Tuileries' bait, if we mean the same woman. My dear old
Beauchamp, have I seen her, then? She's a darling! The Rastaglione was
nothing to her. When you do light on a grand smoky pearl, the milky ones
may go and decorate plaster. That's what I say of the loveliest
brunettes. It must be the same: there can't be a couple of dark beauties
in Paris without a noise about them. Marquise--? I shall recollect her
name presently.'

'Here's one of the houses I stop at,' said Beauchamp, 'and drop that
subject.'

A scared servant-girl brought out her wizened mistress to confront the
candidate, and to this representative of the sex he addressed his arts of
persuasion, requesting her to repeat his words to her husband. The
contrast between Beauchamp palpably canvassing and the Beauchamp who was
the lover of the Marquise of the forgotten name, struck too powerfully on
Palmet for his gravity he retreated.

Beauchamp found him sauntering on the pavement, and would have dismissed
him but for an agreeable diversion that occurred at that moment. A
suavely smiling unctuous old gentleman advanced to them, bowing, and
presuming thus far, he said, under the supposition that he was accosting
the junior Liberal candidate for the borough. He announced his name and
his principles Tomlinson, progressive Liberal.

'A true distinction from some Liberals I know,' said Beauchamp.

Mr. Tomlinson hoped so. Never, he said, did he leave it to the man of
his choice at an election to knock at his door for the vote.

Beauchamp looked as if he had swallowed a cordial. Votes falling into
his lap are heavenly gifts to the candidate sick of the knocker and the
bell. Mr. Tomlinson eulogized the manly candour of the junior Liberal
candidate's address, in which he professed to see ideas that
distinguished it from the address of the sound but otherwise conventional
Liberal, Mr. Cougham. He muttered of plumping for Beauchamp. 'Don't
plump,' Beauchamp said; and a candidate, if he would be an honourable
twin, must say it. Cougham had cautioned him against the heresy of
plumping.

They discoursed of the poor and their beverages, of pothouses, of the
anti-liquorites, and of the duties of parsons, and the value of a robust
and right-minded body of the poor to the country. Palmet found himself
following them into a tolerably spacious house that he took to be the old
gentleman's until some of the apparatus of an Institute for literary and
scientific instruction revealed itself to him, and he heard Mr. Tomlinson
exalt the memory of one Wingham for the blessing bequeathed by him to the
town of Bevisham. 'For,' said Mr. Tomlinson, 'it is open to both sexes,
to all respectable classes, from ten in the morning up to ten at night.
Such a place affords us, I would venture to say, the advantages without
the seductions of a Club. I rank it next--at a far remove, but next-the
church.'

Lord Palmet brought his eyes down from the busts of certain worthies
ranged along the top of the book-shelves to the cushioned chairs, and
murmured, 'Capital place for an appointment with a woman.'

Mr. Tomlinson gazed up at him mildly, with a fallen countenance. He
turned sadly agape in silence to the busts, the books, and the range of
scientific instruments, and directed a gaze under his eyebrows at
Beauchamp. 'Does your friend canvass with you?' he inquired.

'I want him to taste it,' Beauchamp replied, and immediately introduced
the affable young lord--a proceeding marked by some of the dexterity he
had once been famous for, as was shown by a subsequent observation of Mr.
Tomlinson's:

'Yes,' he said, on the question of classes, 'yes, I fear we have classes
in this country whose habitual levity sharp experience will have to
correct. I very much fear it.'

'But if you have classes that are not to face realities classes that look
on them from the box-seats of a theatre,' said Beauchamp, 'how can you
expect perfect seriousness, or any good service whatever?'

'Gently, sir, gently. No; we can, I feel confident, expand within the
limits of our most excellent and approved Constitution. I could wish
that socially . . . that is all.'

'Socially and politically mean one thing in the end,' said Beauchamp.
'If you have a nation politically corrupt, you won't have a good state of
morals in it, and the laws that keep society together bear upon the
politics of a country.'

'True; yes,' Mr. Tomlinson hesitated assent. He dissociated Beauchamp
from Lord Palmet, but felt keenly that the latter's presence desecrated
Wingham's Institute, and he informed the candidate that he thought he
would no longer detain him from his labours.

'Just the sort of place wanted in every provincial town,' Palmet remarked
by way of a parting compliment.

Mr. Tomlinson bowed a civil acknowledgement of his having again spoken.

No further mention was made of the miraculous vote which had risen
responsive to the candidate's address of its own inspired motion; so
Beauchamp said, 'I beg you to bear in mind that I request you not to
plump.'

'You may be right, Captain Beauchamp. Good day, sir.'

Palmet strode after Beauchamp into the street.

'Why did you set me bowing to that old boy?' he asked.

'Why did you talk about women?' was the rejoinder.

'Oh, aha!' Palmet sang to himself. 'You're a Romfrey, Beauchamp. A
blow for a blow! But I only said what would strike every fellow first
off. It is the place; the very place. Pastry-cooks' shops won't stand
comparison with it. Don't tell me you 're the man not to see how much a
woman prefers to be under the wing of science and literature, in a good-
sized, well-warmed room, with a book, instead of making believe, with a
red face, over a tart.'

He received a smart lecture from Beauchamp, and began to think he had
enough of canvassing. But he was not suffered to escape. For his
instruction, for his positive and extreme good, Beauchamp determined that
the heir to an earldom should have a day's lesson. We will hope there
was no intention to punish him for having frozen the genial current of
Mr. Tomlinson's vote and interest; and it may be that he clung to one who
had, as he imagined, seen Renee. Accompanied by a Mr. Oggler, a
tradesman of the town, on the Liberal committee, dressed in a pea-jacket
and proudly nautical, they applied for the vote, and found it oftener
than beauty. Palmet contrasted his repeated disappointments with the
scoring of two, three, four and more in the candidate's list, and
informed him that he would certainly get the Election. 'I think you're
sure of it,' he said. 'There's not a pretty woman to be seen; not one.'

One came up to them, the sight of whom counselled Lord Palmet to
reconsider his verdict. She was addressed by Beauchamp as Miss Denham,
and soon passed on.

Palmet was guilty of staring at her, and of lingering behind the others
for a last look at her.

They were on the steps of a voter's house, calmly enduring a rebuff from
him in person, when Palmet returned to them, exclaiming effusively, 'What
luck you have, Beauchamp!' He stopped till the applicants descended the
steps, with the voice of the voter ringing contempt as well as refusal in
their ears; then continued: 'You introduced me neck and heels to that
undertakerly old Tomlinson, of Wingham's Institute; you might have given
me a chance with that Miss--Miss Denham, was it? She has a bit of a
style!'

'She has a head,' said Beauchamp.

'A girl like that may have what she likes. I don't care what she has--
there's woman in her. You might take her for a younger sister of Mrs.
Wardour-Devereux. Who 's the uncle she speaks of? She ought not to be
allowed to walk out by herself.'

'She can take care of herself,' said Beauchamp.

Palmet denied it. 'No woman can. Upon my honour, it's a shame that she
should be out alone. What are her people? I'll run--from you, you know
--and see her safe home. There's such an infernal lot of fellows about;
and a girl simply bewitching and unprotected! I ought to be after her.'

Beauchamp held him firmly to the task of canvassing.

'Then will you tell me where she lives?' Palmet stipulated. He
reproached Beauchamp for a notorious Grand Turk exclusiveness and
greediness in regard to women, as well as a disposition to run hard
races for them out of a spirit of pure rivalry.

'It's no use contradicting, it's universally known of you,' reiterated
Palmet. 'I could name a dozen women, and dozens of fellows you
deliberately set yourself to cut out, for the honour of it. What's that
story they tell of you in one of the American cities or watering-places,
North or South? You would dance at a ball a dozen times with a girl
engaged to a man--who drenched you with a tumbler at the hotel bar, and
off you all marched to the sands and exchanged shots from revolvers; and
both of you, they say, saw the body of a drowned sailor in the water, in
the moonlight, heaving nearer and nearer, and you stretched your man just
as the body was flung up by a wave between you. Picturesque, if you
like!'

'Dramatic, certainly. And I ran away with the bride next morning?'

'No!' roared Palmet; 'you didn't. There's the cruelty of the whole
affair.'

Beauchamp laughed. 'An old messmate of mine, Lieutenant Jack Wilmore,
can give you a different version of the story. I never have fought a
duel, and never will. Here we are at the shop of a tough voter, Mr.
Oggler. So it says in my note-book. Shall we put Lord Palmet to speak
to him first?'

'If his lordship will put his heart into what he says,' Mr. Oggler bowed.
'Are you for giving the people recreation on a Sunday, my lord?'

'Trap-bat and ball, cricket, dancing, military bands, puppet-shows,
theatres, merry-go-rounds, bosky dells--anything to make them happy,'
said Palmet.

'Oh, dear! then I 'm afraid we cannot ask you to speak to this Mr.
Carpendike.' Oggler shook his head.

'Does the fellow want the people to be miserable?'

'I'm afraid, my lord, he would rather see them miserable.'

They introduced themselves to Mr. Carpendike in his shop. He was a flat-
chested, sallow young shoemaker, with a shelving forehead, who seeing
three gentlemen enter to him recognized at once with a practised
resignation that they had not come to order shoe-leather, though he would
fain have shod them, being needy; but it was not the design of Providence
that they should so come as he in his blindness would have had them.
Admitting this he wished for nothing.

The battle with Carpendike lasted three-quarters of an hour, during which
he was chiefly and most effectively silent. Carpendike would not vote
for a man that proposed to open museums on the Sabbath day. The striking
simile of the thin end of the wedge was recurred to by him for a damning
illustration. Captain Beauchamp might be honest in putting his mind on
most questions in his address, when there was no demand upon him to do
it; but honesty was no antidote to impiety. Thus Carpendike.

As to Sunday museuming being an antidote to the pothouse--no. For the
people knew the frequenting of the pothouse to be a vice; it was a
temptation of Satan that often in overcoming them was the cause of their
flying back to grace: whereas museums and picture galleries were
insidious attractions cloaked by the name of virtue, whereby they were
allured to abandon worship.

Beauchamp flew at this young monster of unreason: 'But the people are not
worshipping; they are idling and sotting, and if you carry your despotism
farther still, and shut them out of every shop on Sundays, do you suppose
you promote the spirit of worship? If you don't revolt them you unman
them, and I warn you we can't afford to destroy what manhood remains to
us in England. Look at the facts.'

He flung the facts at Carpendike with the natural exaggeration of them
which eloquence produces, rather, as a rule, to assure itself in passing
of the overwhelming justice of the cause it pleads than to deceive the
adversary. Brewers' beer and publicans' beer, wife-beatings, the homes
and the blood of the people, were matters reviewed to the confusion of
Sabbatarians.

Carpendike listened with a bent head, upraised eyes, and brows wrinkling
far on to his poll: a picture of a mind entrenched beyond the
potentialities of mortal assault. He signified that he had spoken.
Indeed Beauchamp's reply was vain to one whose argument was that he
considered the people nearer to holiness in the: indulging of an evil
propensity than in satisfying a harmless curiosity and getting a
recreation. The Sabbath claimed them; if they were disobedient, Sin
ultimately might scourge them back to the fold, but never if they were
permitted to regard themselves as innocent in their backsliding and
rebelliousness.

Such language was quite new to Beauchamp. The parsons he had spoken
to were of one voice in objecting to the pothouse. He appealed to
Carpendike's humanity. Carpendike smote him with a text from Scripture.

'Devilish cold in this shop,' muttered Palmet.

Two not flourishing little children of the emaciated Puritan burst into
the shop, followed by their mother, carrying a child in her arms. She
had a sad look, upon traces of a past fairness, vaguely like a snow
landscape in the thaw. Palmet stooped to toss shillings with her young
ones, that he might avoid the woman's face. It cramped his heart.

'Don't you see, Mr. Carpendike,' said fat Mr. Oggler, 'it's the happiness
of the people we want; that's what Captain Beauchamp works for--their
happiness; that's the aim of life for all of us. Look at me! I'm as
happy as the day. I pray every night, and I go to church every Sunday,
and I never know what it is to be unhappy. The Lord has blessed me with
a good digestion, healthy pious children, and a prosperous shop that's a
competency--a modest one, but I make it satisfy me, because I know it's
the Lord's gift. Well, now, and I hate Sabbath-breakers; I would punish
them; and I'm against the public-houses on a Sunday; but aboard my little
yacht, say on a Sunday morning in the Channel, I don't forget I owe it to
the Lord that he has been good enough to put me in the way of keeping a
yacht; no; I read prayers to my crew, and a chapter in the Bible-Genesis,
Deuteronomy, Kings, Acts, Paul, just as it comes. All's good that's
there. Then we're free for the day! man, boy, and me; we cook our
victuals, and we must look to the yacht, do you see. But we've made our
peace with the Almighty. We know that. He don't mind the working of the
vessel so long as we've remembered him. He put us in that situation,
exactly there, latitude and longitude, do you see, and work the vessel we
must. And a glass of grog and a pipe after dinner, can't be any offence.
And I tell you, honestly and sincerely, I'm sure my conscience is good,
and I really and truly don't know what it is not to know happiness.'

'Then you don't know God,' said Carpendike, like a voice from a cave.

'Or nature: or the state of the world,' said Beauchamp, singularly
impressed to find himself between two men, of whom--each perforce of his
tenuity and the evident leaning of his appetites--one was for the barren
black view of existence, the other for the fantastically bright. As to
the men personally, he chose Carpendike, for all his obstinacy and
sourness. Oggler's genial piety made him shrink with nausea.

But Lord Palmet paid Mr. Oggler a memorable compliment, by assuring him
that he was altogether of his way of thinking about happiness.

The frank young nobleman did not withhold a reference to the two or three
things essential to his happiness; otherwise Mr. Oggler might have been
pleased and flattered.

Before quitting the shop, Beauchamp warned Carpendike that he should come
again. 'Vote or no vote, you're worth the trial. Texts as many as you
like. I'll make your faith active, if it's alive at all. You speak of
the Lord loving his own; you make out the Lord to be your own, and use
your religion like a drug. So it appears to me. That Sunday tyranny of
yours has to be defended.

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