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George Barr McCutcheon - "Brewster's Millions"

Georg Ebers - "A Thorny Path, Volume 6."

George Meredith - "The Tragic Comedians, Complete"

Gilbert Parker - "The Seats Of The Mighty, Volume 5."

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the shadow cast over
his negligent hedonism by Victor's boiling pressure, drove him into the
seat of judgement. As a consequence, he was rather a dull table-guest in
the presence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked to anticipate
high entertainment from him. He did nothing to bridge the crevasse and
warm the glacier air at table when the doctor, anecdotal intentionally to
draw him out, related a decorous but pungent story of one fair member of
a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed establishment of
our chain-mail marriage-tie. An anecdote of immediate diversion was
wanted, expected: and Fenellan sat stupidly speculating upon whether the
doctor knew of a cupboard locked. So that Dr. Themison was carried on by
Lady Grace Halley's humourous enthusiasm for the subject to dilate and
discuss and specify, all in the irony of a judicial leaning to the side
of the single-minded social adventurers, under an assumed accord with his
audience; concluding: 'So there's an end of Divorce.'

'By the trick of multiplication,' Fenellan, now reassured, was content to
say. And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
women being present.

Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by Mr.
Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue. As regarded her personal
feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about her to
keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one of its
culprits. But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from an infusion
of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the mother's lips:
and she was a woman having the feminine mind's pudency in that direction,
which does not consent to the revealing of much. Here was the mother's
dilemma: her girl--Victor's girl, as she had to think in this
instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth, seemed, and
might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off the table of
knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific heights of
surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought
her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice received the
electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts
in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the
circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a
newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities:
and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how
witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent creature
shocked her sensibility. She foresaw the need to such a flameful soul, as
bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very princeliest of men in
gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide. And the provident mother
knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his wife.

Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
before the public. Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was her
father's child.

At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
simplicity. If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her
somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her
high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries. Neither ignorantly
nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast of
Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful serenader,
that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their performances, and
knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious show; a sciential
rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern circles as Eve's own old
deuce from Eden's garden whereupon, opportunity inviting, both the fool
and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of insular eulogy, and the sham
one, are in a perilous pass.

Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant utterly amid
a world where the hints are hourly scattering seed of the inklings; when
vileness is not at work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming its
existence with tableau and trumpet. Nataly encountered her girl's
questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy. The questions had soon
ceased. Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there is little to be
learnt when a little is known: in populous communities, density only will
keep the little out. Only stupidity will suppose that it can be done for
the livelier young. English mothers forethoughtful for their girls, have
to take choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble Old England,
that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious things, which can be had
but in semblance under the conditions allowed by laziness to subsist, and
so curst of its shifty inconsequence as to worship in the concrete an
hypocrisy it abhors in the abstract. Nataly could smuggle or confiscate
here and there a newspaper; she could not interdict or withhold every one
of them, from a girl ardent to be in the race on all topics of popular
interest: and the newspapers are occasionally naked savages; the streets
are imperfectly garmented even by day; and we have our stumbling social
anecdotist, our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently silly woman; our
slippery one; our slimy one, the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary
the maid and the footman William. A vigilant mother has to contend with
these and the like in an increasing degree. How best?

There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated. The girl's
intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it. Since, as he argued,
we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.

Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences. Besides he was a
bachelor; therefore but a theorist. And his illustrations of his theory
were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to consume,
in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man. The satirist
too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher. Nataly had
excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.

One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with them
then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it seemed
painfully possible to be sowing in the girl's mind something like the
reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a rebelliousness
partly or wholly similar to her own. But Nataly's chief and her appeasing
reason for pursuing the conventional system with this exceptional young
creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject of the kind of young
man whom a mother elects from among those present and eligible, as
perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of good promise in the
moral department. She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under view; far from the man
of her choice and still the practice of decorum, discretion, a pardonable
fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any forecast of the behaviour
of young men or may trust the faces they see, to, promise a future
stability in the husband. Assuredly a Dudley Sowerby would be immensely
startled to find in his bride a young woman more than babily aware of the
existence of one particular form of naughtiness on earth.

Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education of the
young of the sex. Repression and mystery, he considered wholesome for
girls; and he considered the enlightening of them--to some extent--a
prudential measure for their defence; and premature instruction is a
fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding; and histrionic innocence
is no doubt the bloom on corruption; also the facts of current human
life, in the crude of the reports or the cooked of the sermon in the
newspapers, are a noxious diet for our daughters; whom nevertheless we
cannot hope to be feeding always on milk: and there is a time when their
adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly it exists out of noodledom, is
harmful:--but how beautiful the shining simplicity of our dear young
English girls! He was one of the many men to whose minds women come in
pictures and are accepted much as they paint themselves. Like his
numerous fellows, too, he required a conflict with them, and a worsting
at it, to be taught, that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to
dispose of for their good: unless Love should interpose, he would have
exclaimed. He broke from his fellows in his holy horror of a father's
running counter to love. Nesta had only to say, that she loved another,
for Dudley Sowerby to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants. But
love was unknown to the girl.

Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look of Victor's
traditional hospitality. Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging
intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: 'Lady
Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and
myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear
old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers
of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital! Just
three days in Paris, and home by any of the other routes. It's the drive
we want. Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we have our Concert--an hour at
night and we're sure of sleep.' It had a sweet simple air, befitting him;
as when in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children. For
travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave her something of the
child's inheritance of the wisdom of life--the living ever so little
ahead of ourselves; about as far as the fox in view of the hunt. That is
the soul of us out for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast;
and the body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily chase.
Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, anticipation a revival. She
enraptured Victor with glimpses of the domestic fun she had ceased to
show sign of since the revelation of Lakelands. Her only regret was on
account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the party, because of
happy memories associating him with the Seine-land, and also that his
bilious criticism of his countrymen was moderated by a trip to the
Continent. Fenellan reported Colney to be 'busy in the act of distilling
one of his Prussic acid essays.' Fenellan would have jumped to go. He
informed Victor, as a probe, that the business of the Life Insurance was
at periods 'fearfully necrological! Inexplicably, he was not invited. Did
it mean, that he was growing dull? He looked inside instead of out, and
lost the clue.

His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed plainly what would
have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the expedition, had not he as well as Colney
been excluded. Two carriages and a cab conveyed the excursionists, as
they merrily called themselves, to the terminus. They were Victor's
guests; they had no trouble, no expense, none of the nipper reckonings
which dog our pleasures; the state of pure bliss. Fenellan's enviousness
drove him at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter jumped to the seat
beside Nesta in her carriage, Mademoiselle de Seilles and Mr. Sowerby
facing them. Lady Grace Halley, in the carriage behind, heard Nesta's
laugh; which Mr. Barmby had thought vacuous, beseeming little girls, that
laugh at nothings. She questioned Fenellan.

'Oh,' said he, 'I merely mentioned that the Rev. gentleman carries his
musical instrument at the bottom of his trunk.'

She smiled: 'And who are in the cab?'

'Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin. Those two
would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the way
to the station. Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through the
body. They're a fabulous couple.'

Victor cut him short. 'I deny that those two are absurd.'

'And Catkin's toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.'

Nataly strongly denied it. Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial
picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the
withering breath they dreaded.

Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney,
fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with a
pitchfork's exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently
meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles in
the principles of each. The pair were offending the amatory corner in the
generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities, except
by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of Miss
Graves. Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge. She wondered at
having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
tribulation-bell. Fenellan's graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the one
most wretched light is Inebriation's nose; and of the vegetarian
violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of the flocks
and herds into his lady's melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and delighted
her antipathy. She was amused to transports at the station, on hearing
Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: 'No, I carry no
instrument.' The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
forgotten when it sounded.

Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
under Victor's ear: 'Where are those two?'

'Bid me select the couple,' said he.

She rejoined: 'Silly man'; and sleepily gave him her hand for good night,
and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued junction by
saying more than he intended: 'If they come to an understanding!'

'Plain enough on one side.'

'You think it suitable?'

'Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.' 'This is really
my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.'

'Go on.'

'How?'

'Number your loves. It would tax your arithmetic.'

'I can hate.'

'Not me?'

Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it; and
they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf or two
of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
phantasies of the lady; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a never
so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female shoots within us
both straight and far and round the corners. There you have Nature, if
you want her naked in her elements, for a text. He loved his Nataly
truly, even fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked about
at no other woman; it happened only that the touch of one, the chance
warm touch, put to motion the blind forces of our mother so remarkably
surcharging him. But it was without kindling. The lady, the much cooler
person, did nurse a bit of flame. She had a whimsical liking for the man
who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries; and it became a
fascination, by extreme contrast, at the reminder of his adventurous
enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy. Women who
dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and hear him talk his ball-room
trifles to amuse, have similarly a smell of gunpowder to intoxicate them.

For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies. Nataly lay in the
cabin. She used to be where Lady Grace was lying. A sort of pleadable,
transparent, harmless hallucination of the renewal of old service induced
him to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer's pillow, and fix the
tarpaulin over her silks and wraps; and bend his head to the soft mouth
murmuring thanks. The women who can dare the nuit blanche, and under
stars; and have a taste for holiday larks after their thirtieth, are
rare; they are precious. Nataly nevertheless was approved for guarding
her throat from the nightwind. And a softer southerly breath never
crossed Channel! The very breeze he had wished for! Luck was with him.

Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louise. Mr. Sowerby in
passing, exchanged a description of printed agreement with her, upon the
beauty of the night--a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes
not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a vocabulary. Once
he perceptibly washed his hands of dutiful politeness, in addressing
Mademoiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the
French lady, thinking--too conclusively from the breath on the glass at
the moment, as it is the Gallic habit--that if her dear Nesta must
espouse one of the uninteresting creatures called men in her native land,
it might as well be this as another, agreed that the night was very
beautiful.

'He speaks grammatical French,' Nesta commented on his achievement. 'He
contrives in his walking not to wet his boots,' mademoiselle rejoined.

Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an
inferior pretension to accent. He burned to be near these ladies, and he
passed them but once. His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was
notorious. Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her
demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the man
who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among
them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales. And say, that she is
uprooted;--he does but roll a log. Mr. Peridon's efforts to perfect
himself in the French tongue touched her.

A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of
the eye of light. Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an
addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first
greying. Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for
the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs. The
gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily
grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
refuge on any far fisher-sail.

Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed. The
girl's cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.
They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a
languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair
were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
securest of slumbers.

Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly. Both the ladies were in their oblivion;
the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating
to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes. He was near; and
quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him. Her look was grave,
straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis for
penetration. He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled
bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if that
young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof. Man could not be more
guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his
vexation, he execrated tobacco. And ask not why, where reason never was.

Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.
Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their
silvery French chimes.

Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after
they had been observing every variation in it. He spoke happily of the
pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of the
excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night; the
prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of
speculation--apparently a sourness that did not exist. Nesta had a
singular notion, coming of a girl's mingled observation and intuition,
that the impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike
him till late. Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she
remembered to have noticed the same in many small things. And it was a
pointed perception.

Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to hurry up and see
sunlight over the waters. Nataly came; she looked, and the outer wakened
the inner, she let the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to
her eyes like a string of bubbles in ascent. 'Victor, Victor, it seems
only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back--was it?--and in May,
and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view.
Dear French people! I share your love for France.'

'Home of our holidays!--the "drives"; and they may be the happiest. And
fifty minutes later we were off the harbour; and Natata landed, a
stranger; and at night she was the heroine of the town.'

Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his name to Nataly: 'Sir
Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour of Lakelands! She understood that Lady
Grace Halley was acquainted with Sir Rodwell:--hence this dash of brine
to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories, and Victor
evidently was pluming himself upon his usual luck in the fortuitous
encounter with an influential neighbour of Lakelands. He told Sir Rodwell
the story of how they had met in the salle a manger of the hotel the
impresario of a Concert in the town, who had in his hand the doctor's
certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice to appear, and
waved it, within a step of suicide. 'Well, to be brief, my wife--"noble
dame Anglaise," as the man announced her on the Concert platform,
undertook one of the songs, and sang another of her own-pure contralto
voice, as you will say; with the result that there was a perfect tumult
of enthusiasm. Next day, the waiters of the hotel presented her with a
bouquet of Spring flowers, white, and central violets. It was in the
Paris papers, under the heading: Une amie d'outre Manche--I think that
was it?' he asked Nataly.

'I forget,' said she.

He glanced at her: a cloud had risen. He rallied her, spoke of the old
Norman silver cross which the manager of the Concert had sent, humbly
imploring her to accept the small memento of his gratitude. She nodded an
excellent artificial brightness.

And there was the coast of France under young sunlight over the waters.
Once more her oft-petitioning wish through the years, that she had
entered the ranks of professional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny
is not so microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into
rock-caves, which have been filled before and left to emptiness, and will
be left to emptiness again. Nataly had the intimation visiting us when,
in a decline of physical power, the mind's ready vivacity to conjure
illusions forsakes us; and it was, of a wall ahead, and a force impelling
her against it, and no hope of deviation. And this is the featureless
thing, Destiny; not without eyes, if we have a conscience to throw them
into it to look at us.