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Honore de Balzac - "Farewell"

George Allan England - "Darkness and Dawn"

Sir Charles Lyell - "The Student's Elements of Geology"

Adolphus William Ward - "Chaucer"

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> One of Our Conquerors, Complete







CHAPTER XIII

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN

After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend's
contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for as
long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official
duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro.
Fenellan waited for him to lead.

'Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?'

'I have dined with Mr. Carling:--capital claret.'

Emptiness was in the reply.

Victor curbed himself and said: 'By the way, you're not likely to have
dealings with Blathenoy. The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty
eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business. I shall sit on the
Board of my Bank. One hears things. He lives in style at Wrensham. By the
way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her. You
said of little Mabsy--"Here she comes into the room all pink and white,
like a daisy." She's the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at that
age.--So, then, we come to another dead block!'

'Well, no; it's a chemist's shop, if that helps us on,' said Fenellan,
settling to a new posture in his chair. 'She's there of an afternoon for
hours.'

'You mean it's she?'

'The lady. I 'll tell you. I have it from Carling, worthy man; and
lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret. He's a
bit of a "Mackenzie Man," as old aunts of mine used to say at home--a Man
of Feeling. Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted a
lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it's an exposition of
positive human nature when they've pulled down our noses to the worst
parts--if there's a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the
dogs is to have us by the nose:--excite it and befoul it, and you're
fearfully credible! You don't read that olfactory literature. However,
friend Carling is a conciliatory carle. Three or four days of the week
the lady, he says, drives to her chemist's, and there she sits in the
shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop
looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if
Carling's picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green
shade over her forehead. Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders of
applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind of a
prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she 'll try it
herself. It's a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent's Park pretty
well every day.'

'Ha! Regent's Park!' exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the
district and the number of the house, dismal to him. London buried the
woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London. 'A
chemist's shop! She sits there?'

'Mrs. Burman. We pass by the shop.'

'She had always a turn for drugs.--Not far from here, did you say? And
every day! under a green shade?'

'Dear fellow, don't be suggesting ballads; we'll go now,' said Fenellan.
'It 's true it's like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.'

He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the
office.

'You've done nothing?' Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.

'Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.'

'Where did you hear?'

'Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady's chemists. I called
the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board Meeting.'

'The Themison?'

'The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much in
request for it.'

'There's one of your echoes of Colney!' Victor cried. 'One gets dead sick
of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors. They don't kill, you know very
well. It 's not to their interest to kill. They may take the relish out
of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the patient
living!'

Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through his
friend.

'The City's mending; it's not the weary widow woman of the day when we
capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,' he said, as they trod
the pavement. 'Funny people, the English! They give you all the primeing
possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for the
exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not, you're
marched off to penitence. I complain, that they have no philosophical
appreciation of human nature.'

'We pass the shop?' Victor interrupted him.

'You're in view of it in a minute. And what a square, for recreative
dancing! And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
agitation! And what a country, where from morning to night it's an
endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence! Old Colney seems
right now and then: they 're the offspring of pirates, and they 've got
the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of quarrelling
everlastingly over the booty. I 'd have band-music here for a couple of
hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the East; and
that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South too. But
just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this London of
ours, it 's only too sadly true that the people are in the first rumble
of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives. Now you see the
shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.'

Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
swelled it, ahemming. 'That shop?' said he. And presently: 'Fenellan, I'm
not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day of
our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked home up
this way across the square, and I was about to step into that identical
shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having forgotten
Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I'm stating a
fact--I distinctly--I 'm sure of the shop--felt myself plucked back by
the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a foot
backward to keep your equilibrium.'

So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
for the colouring of history.

He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder's
experience.

Fenellan smiled indulgently. 'Queer things happen. I recollect reading in
my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where he
was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of
the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at
his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice;
and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped
up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over
the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into the boat awaiting
them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of
gratitude for the special deliverance. There was a Warning! and it might
well be called, as he called it, from within. We're cared for, never
doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity, or
you'll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the
burnt. That sounds like the moral.'

'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable suggestion. The
idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.

'Scarcely likely. I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the
beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
mixture that strikes her fancy. It's possible to do more suicidal things
than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get
their different passports to Orcus.'

Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
chemical wash. The woman might be inside there now! She might have seen
his figure in the shop-mirror! And she there! The wonder of it all seemed
to be, that his private history was not walking the streets. The thinness
of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day's immunity:
because this woman would live in London, in order to have her choice of a
central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly imagination on the
various recipes . . . and while it would have been so much healthier for
her to be living in a recess of the country!

He muttered: 'Diseases--drugs!'

Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
woman going.

'And deadly spite.' That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.

In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.

A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed to himself, that
latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous in
thought, as never before. He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving. He accused her of dragging
him down to humanity's lowest.

But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.

Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily, appeared to him
as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a short
drive from the house in Regent's Park; but having shaken-off that house,
he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it. The woman certainly had
a power.

He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for winning
men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of his
energies: men and, individually, women. Individually, the women were to
be counted on as well; warm supporters.

It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
collectively. Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them. Glancing at
congregated women, he had a chill. The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective woman:
that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of civilized
life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the tolerable, the
legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an aspect of the stand
against him.

Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
not to be subdued? And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
Nataly!

Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight. Not many
of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that index:
nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure of value
left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides. The passing
by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to sit beneath her
green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a henbane-visage!--had
precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity: and it
opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical mind. But
he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of sensibility, to contemplate
the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that was nothing other
than yonder weak lonely woman.

In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school of
its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums done
on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the
creditor on the defaulter. Debtors are always paying like those who are
guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they have
made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in soul; and
the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is
undischarged. You know the Liar; you must have seen him diminishing,
until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to humanity's
preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on
our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of things, he must
from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive nimbleness, up to
the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it again. There is a
repentance that does reconstitute! It may help to the traceing to springs
of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.

Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every debt
with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt apologies for
a short brush of his temper. Nay, he had such a conscience for the
smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a
friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge, softened
his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once. Although this
man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature which drives to
unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen at its beating
after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for the reverse of
lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship. So social a man
could not otherwise incline. But when it came to the examination of
accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of physical revulsion,
loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out of Court. To men, it
was impossible for him to speak the torments of those days of the
monstrous alliance. The heavens were cognizant. He pleaded his case in
their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by wealth, attracted,
besought, snared, revolted, etc. And Mrs. Burman, when roused to
jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of his admiration
of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless fair woman
living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the corpse and
shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her breath about
him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!

He pleaded successfully. But the silence following the verdict was heavy;
the silence contained an unheard thunder. It was the sound, as when out
of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict. Are we expected to
commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
public?--Imagine it for a moment as done. Men are ours at a word--or at
least a word of invitation. Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman. And
that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns the poor racked
wretch who so much as remembers them! She is the enemy of Nature.--Tell
us how? She is the slave of existing conventions.--And from what cause?
She is the artificial production of a state that exalts her so long as
she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.

Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with her
arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.

He placed himself to the right of Mrs. Burman, for the world to behold
the couple: and he lent the world a sigh of disgust.

What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to rise above the
situation, in a splendid survey and rapid view of the means of reversing
it. He was too social to be a captain of the socially insurgent;
imagination expired.

But having a courageous Nataly to second him!--how then? It was the
succour needed. Then he would have been ready to teach the world that
Nature--honest Nature--is more to be prized than Convention: a new Era
might begin.

The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated him springingly. It
sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly's want of common adventurous
daring. She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture from
a flowing purse with a heavy heart--unfeminine, one might say; she
preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think--but it was
unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a strain
and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.

These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant
twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away
independent of the player's cunning hand. He would have said, that he was
more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make him
praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would it have astonished him to
contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
invoked. But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes. Men call
on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of their
rhetoric. They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not, as
women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour. It is not an effort at
epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.

An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.

'How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians! Well, now, the Germans
have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
has done. He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod's Romeo
et Juliette--and we don't gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for the
melody gone; think of the little shepherd's pipeing in Mireille; and
there's another in Sapho-delicious. I held out against Wagner as long as
I could. The Italians don't much more than Wagnerize in exchange for the
loss of melody. They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
Campagnole. The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
master. Aida and Otello, no. I confess to a weakness for the old
barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade. Aren't you seduced by
cadences? Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--a cadence
catches me still. Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps! There's a march
in Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I'm in military step when I
hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera. Fredi takes
little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night. Enough to make us old
ones envious! You remember your first Opera, Fenellan? Sonnambula, with
me. I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if you
like--showing all that's noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
describe its effect on me. I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a
year after. The Huguenots to-night. Not the best suited for little Mabsy;
but she'll catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera; we used to think it the
best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the Meistersinger.'

Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
the Huguenots. That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him. He
drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying. The return of a lively
disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the yoke
of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist's shop; save
that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the picture; she
threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him through his
nostrils. He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need for it;
singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour abreast with
Armandine's kitchen-clock. Fenellan proposed a glass of sherry and
bitters at his Club over the way. He had forgotten a shower of
black-balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on a certain
past day. Without word of refusal, Victor entered a wine-merchant's
office, where he was unknown, and stating his wish for bitters and dry
sherry, presently received the glass, drank, nodded to the administering
clerk, named the person whom he had obliged and refreshed, and passed
out, remarking to Fenellan: 'Colney on Clubs! he's right; they're the
mediaeval in modern times, our Baron's castles, minus the Baron; dead
against public life and social duties. Business excuses my City Clubs;
but I shall take my name off my Club up West.'

'More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot, and Whist for the
services,' Fenellan said. 'Or tabernacles for the Chosen, and Grangousier
playing Divinity behind the veil. Well, they're social.'

'Sectionally social, means anything but social, my friend. However--and
the monastery had a bell for the wanderer! Say, I'm penniless or
poundless, up and down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must
feel, these palaces--if we're Christian, not Jews: not that the Jews are
uncharitable; they set an: example, in fact. . . . '

He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of Fenellan, who thought
of his pursuit of wealth and grand expenditure.

Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond the subject. He
was nearing to the Idea he had seized and lost on London Bridge.

The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit Nataly, withdrew him
from his ineffectual chase. He had nought to deliver; on the contrary, a
meditation concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment which was
the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent to him.

He snatched at the name of Themison.

With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report of progress to be
made to Nataly; and not at all an empty report.

Themison, then: he leaned on Themison. The woman's doctor should have an
influence approaching to authority with her.

Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his theme of discourse to
Fenellan: let Banks beware.

Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his head. 'Feel the wind?'
he said.

Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep tones, which at
times he had: 'No: don't be alarmed; I feel the devil. If one has wealth
and a desperate wish, he will speak. All he does, is to make me more
charitable to those who give way to him. I believe in a devil.'

'Horns and tail?'

'Bait and hook.'

'I haven't wealth, and I wish only for dinner,' Fenellan said.

'You know that Armandine is never two minutes late. By the way, you
haven't wealth--you have me.'

'And I thank God for you!' said Fenellan, acutely reminiscent of his
having marked the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman
Buttermore, as a man who might be useful to his friend.




CHAPTER XIV

DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS

A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance occurred:
Armandine was ten minutes behind the hour with her dinner. But the
surprise and stupefaction expressed by Victor, after glances at his
watch, were not so profound as Fenellan's, on finding himself exchangeing
the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themison. His friend's
rapidity in pushing the combinations he conceived, was known: Fenellan's
wonder was not so much that Victor had astonished him again, as that he
should be called upon again to wonder at his astonishment. He did; and he
observed the doctor and Victor and Nataly: aided by dropping remarks.
Before the evening was over, he gathered enough of the facts, and had to
speculate only on the designs. Dr. Themison had received a visit from the
husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor concerning her state of health. At an
interview with the lady, laughter greeted him; he was confused by her
denial of the imputation of a single ailment: but she, to recompose him,
let it be understood, that she was anxious about her husband's condition,
he being certainly overworked; and the husband's visit passed for a
device on the part of the wife. She admitted a willingness to try a
change of air, if it was deemed good for her husband. Change of air was
prescribed to each for both. 'Why not drive to Paris?' the doctor said,
and Victor was taken with the phrase.

He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had heard, was by the sea,
on the South coast. Which of her maladies might be in the ascendant, he
did not know. He knew little. He fancied that Dr. Themison was
unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
Burman: and Fenellan opined, that there had been no communication upon
private affairs. What, then, was the object in going to Dr. Themison? He
treated her body merely; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore could be
expected to impose upon her conduct. Fenellan appreciated his own
discernment of the superior uses to which a spiritual adviser may be put,
and he too agreeably flattered himself for the corrective reflection to
ensue, that he had not done anything. It disposed him to think a happy
passivity more sagacious than a restless activity. We should let Fortune
perform her part at the wheel in working out her ends, should we
not?--for, ten to one, nine times out of ten we are thwarting her if we
stretch out a hand. And with the range of enjoyments possessed by Victor,
why this unceasing restlessness? Why, when we are not near drowning,
catch at apparent straws, which may be instruments having sharp edges?
Themison, as Mrs. Burman's medical man, might tell the lady tales that
would irritate her bag of venom.