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Unknown - "The Bible, King James version, Book 12: 2 Kings"

George Meredith - "The Adventures of Harry Richmond, v6"

Mrs. O. F. Walton - "A Peep Behind the Scenes"

George Meredith - "The House on the Beach"

One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor; he
alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments. He was waxing to fervidness.
He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start, that he was to
say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to present Miss
Radnor at Court . . . .

Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out
of hot water. He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of
sneer at its functions: 'Court! my girl? But the arduous duties are over
for the season. We are a democratic people retaining the seductions of
monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count among
the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court presentations;
no harm. Only there's plenty of time . . . very young girls have their
heads turned--though I don't say, don't imagine, my girl would. By and by
perhaps.'

Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and introduced to the
figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a
respectable City merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse
of the downright contrast to his partner. He had heard casual remarks on
the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance. A short
analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man
who kept him up. Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a
line of City merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as
drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their round-bellied
beasts. Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of
restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient
cart-horse. He sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when,
like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good
things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated
interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to
make it our national Poem.

Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
somehow constantly allotted to him. His wife believed in Victor, and
deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain. Since that lamentable
loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory of
Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who
speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and
onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in
perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a
turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor. He had
never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase of
Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share
of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the
bargain had come to Victor. Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion from
that disquieting period. He assented to the praise of Victor's genius,
admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently his
head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam comfortable
feeling of security. And if you will imagine the sprite of the aggregate
English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the malignant who has despoiled
him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once had from his God Neptune
against invaders, you will comprehend the state of Mr. Inchling's mind in
regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very disturbing partner.

He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had nothing to do with North
American or South American mines and pastures or with South Africa and,
gold and diamonds: and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her inward
comparisons. Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on this example of the
island energy. Mr. Inchling was not permitted by his wife to be much the
guest of the Radnor household, because of the frequent meeting there with
Colney Durance; Colney's humour for satire being instantly in bristle at
sight of his representative of English City merchants: 'over whom,' as he
wrote of the venerable body, 'the disciplined and instructed Germans not
deviously march; whom acute and adventurous Americans, with half a cock
of the eye in passing, compassionately outstrip.' He and Dr. Schlesien
agreed upon Mr. Inchling. Meantime the latter gentleman did his part at
the tables of the wealthier City Companies, and retained his appearance
of health; he was beginning to think, upon a calculation of the increased
treasures of those Companies and the country, that we, the Taxpayer,
ought not to leave it altogether to Providence to defend them;
notwithstanding the watchful care of us hitherto shown by our briny
Providence, to save us from anxiety and expense. But there are, he said,
'difficulties'; and the very word could stop him, as commonly when our
difficulty lies in the exercise of thinking.

Victor's African room, containing large wall-maps of auriferous regions,
was inspected; and another, where clerks were busy over miscellaneous
Continents. Dudley Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.

He and Victor walked in company Westward. The shop of Boyle and Luckwort,
chemists, was not passed on this occasion. Dudley grieved that he had to
be absent from the next Concert for practise, owing to his engagement to
his mother to go down to the family seat near Tunbridge Wells. Victor
mentioned his relatives, the Duvidney maiden ladies, residing near the
Wells. They measured the distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge, the two
houses, as for half an hour on horseback.

Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had been observed
confidentially arm in arm, and conversing so profoundly.

'Who, do you think, was the topic?' Victor asked.

She would not chase the little blue butterfly of a guess.




CHAPTER XIX

TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN THEM AND OF
A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS COUNTRY

There is at times in the hearts of all men of active life a vivid wild
moment or two of dramatic dialogue between the veteran antagonists,
Nature and Circumstance, when they, whose business it should be to be
joyfully one, furiously split; and the Dame is up with her shrillest
querulousness to inquire of her offspring, for the distinct original
motive of his conduct. Why did he bring her to such a pass! And what is
the gain? If he be not an alienated issue of the great Mother, he will
strongly incline to her view, that he put himself into harness to join
with a machine going the dead contrary way of her welfare; and thereby
wrote himself donkey, for his present reading. Soldiers, heroes, even the
braided, even the wearers of the gay cock's feathers, who get the honours
and the pocket-pieces, know the moment of her electrical eloquence. They
have no answer for her, save an index at the machine pushing them on yet
farther under the enemy's line of fire, where they pluck the golden
wreath or the livid, and in either case listen no more. They glorify her
topping wisdom while on the march to confound it. She is wise in her way.
But, it is asked by the disputant, If we had followed her exclusively,
how far should we have travelled from our starting-point? We of the world
and its prizes and duties must do her an injury to make her tongue
musical to us, and her argument worthy of attention. So it seems. How to
keep the proper balance between those two testy old wranglers, that
rarely pull the right way together, is as much the task for men in the
grip of the world, as for the wanton youthful fry under dominion of their
instincts; and probably, when it is done, man will have attained the
golden age of his retirement from service.

Why be scheming? Victor asked. Unlike the gallant soldiery, his question
was raised in the blush of a success, from an examination of the quality
of the thing won; although it had not changed since it was first coveted;
it was demonstrably the same: and an astonishing dry stick he held, as a
reward for perpetual agitations and perversions of his natural tastes.
Here was a Dudley Sowerby, the direct issue of the conception of
Lakelands; if indeed they were not conceived together in one; and the
young gentleman had moral character, good citizen substance, and station,
rank, prospect of a title; and the grasp of him was firm. Yet so far was
it from hearty, that when hearing a professed satirist like Colney
Durance remark on the decorous manner of Dudley's transparent courtship
of the girl, under his look of an awakened approval of himself, that he
appeared to be asking everybody:--Do you not think I bid fair for an
excellent father of Philistines?--Victor had a nip of spite at the
thought of Dudley's dragging him bodily to be the grandfather. Poor
Fredi, too!--necessarily the mother: condemned by her hard fate to feel
proud of Philistine babies! Though women soon get reconciled to it! Or do
they? They did once. What if his Fredi turned out one of the modern young
women, who have drunk of ideas? He caught himself speculating on that, as
on a danger. The alliance with Dudley really seemed to set him facing
backward.

Colney might not have been under prompting of Nataly when he derided
Dudley; but Victor was at war with the picture of her, in her compression
of a cruel laugh, while her eyelids were hard shut, as if to exclude the
young patriarch of Philistines' ridiculous image.

He hearkened to the Nature interrogating him, why had he stepped on a
path to put division between himself and his beloved?--the smallest of
gaps; and still the very smallest between nuptial lovers is a
division--and that may become a mortal wound to their one-life. Why had
he roused a slumbering world? Glimpses of the world's nurse-like,
old-fashioned, mother-nightcap benevolence to its kicking favourites; its
long-suffering tolerance for the heroic breakers of its rough-cast laws,
while the decent curtain continues dropped, or lifted only ankle-high;
together with many scenes, lively suggestions, of the choice of ways he
liked best, told of things, which were better things, incomprehensibly
forfeited. So that the plain sense of value insisted on more than one
weighing of the gain in hand: a dubious measure.

He was as little disposed to reject it as to stop his course at a goal of
his aim. Nevertheless, a gain thus poorly estimated, could not command
him to do a deed of humiliation on account of it. The speaking to this
dry young Dudley was not imperative at present. A word would do in the
day to come.

Nataly was busy with her purchases of furniture, and the practise for the
great August Concert. He dealt her liberal encouragements, up to the
verge of Dr. Themison's latest hummed words touching Mrs. Burman, from
which he jumped in alarm lest he should paralyze her again: the dear
soul's dreaded aspect of an earthy pallor was a spectre behind her
cheeks, ready to rush forth. Fenellan brought Carling to dine with him;
and Themison was confirmed by Carting, with incidents in proof; Caning by
Jarniman, also with incidents; one very odd one--or so it seemed, in the
fury of the first savour of it:--she informed Jarniman, Skepsey said his
friend Jarniman said, that she had dreamed of making her appearance to
him on the night of the 23rd August, and of setting the date on the
calendar over his desk, when she entered his room: 'Sitting-room, not
bedroom; she was always quite the lady,' Skepsey reported his Jarniman.
Mrs. Burman, as a ghost, would respect herself; she would keep to her
character. Jarniman quite expected the dream to be verified; she was a
woman of her word: he believed she had received a revelation of the
approaching fact: he was preparing for the scene.

Victor had to keep silent and discourse of general prosperity. His happy
vivaciousness assisted him to feel it by day. Nataly heard him at night,
on a moan: 'Poor soul!' and loudly once while performing an abrupt
demi-vault from back to side: 'Perhaps now!' in a voice through doors.
She schooled herself to breathe equably.

Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of comfort he was
charged with, he swallowed it himself; and these were the consequences.
And an uneasy sleep was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the
Radnor family. The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia, would have
cited ancestral names, showing it to be the worst of intimations. At
night, lying on his back beneath a weight of darkness, one heavily craped
figure, distinguishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black pad,
accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind was dragged to
go through the whole case by morning light; and the compassionate man
appealed to common sense, to stamp and pass his delectable sophistries;
as, that it was his intense humaneness, which exposed him to an
accusation of inhumanity; his prayer for the truly best to happen, which
anticipated Mrs. Burman's expiry. They were simple sophistries,
fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing the imprimatur
of common sense. They refreshed him, as a chemical scent a crowded room.

All because he could not open his breast to Nataly, by reason of her
feebleness; or feel enthusiasm in the possession of young Dudley! A dry
stick indeed beside him on the walk Westward. Good quality wood, no
doubt, but dry, varnished for conventional uses. Poor dear Fredi would
have to crown it like the May-day posy of the urchins of Craye Farm and
Creckholt!

Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate him as a diligent
student of commercial matters: rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal
Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome
appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born
to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and
Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England prone
along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the
possession of certain of them. But when, as Colney says, a grateful
England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he gratefully
hands-over the establishment to his country; and both may disregard the
howls of a Salvation Army of shareholders.--Beaten by the Germans in
Brewery, too! Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow. We were ahead of them,
and they came and studied us, and they studied Chemistry as well; while
we went on down our happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire their
young Professors, and then to import their beer.

Have the Germans more brains than we English? Victor's blood up to the
dome of his cranium knocked the patriotic negative. But, as old Colney
says (and bother him, for constantly intruding!), the comfortably
successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain yet more
than it eases the person: hence are we outpaced; we have now to know we
are racing. Victor scored a mark for one of his projects. A
well-conducted Journal of the sharpest pens in the land might, at a
sacrifice of money grandly sunk, expose to his English how and to what
degree their sports, and their fierce feastings, and their opposition to
ideas, and their timidity in regard to change, and their execration of
criticism applied to themselves, and their unanimous adoption of it for a
weapon against others, are signs of a prolonged indulgence in the
cushioned seat. Victor saw it. But would the people he loved? He agreed
with Colney, forgetting the satirist's venom: to-wit; that the
journalists should be close under their editor's rod to put it in sound
bold English;--no metaphors, no similes, nor flowery insubstantiality:
but honest Saxon manger stuff: and put it repeatedly, in contempt of the
disgust of iteration; hammering so a soft place on the Anglican skull,
which is rubbed in consequence, and taught at last through soreness to
reflect.--A Journal?--with Colney Durance for Editor?--and called
conformably THE WHIPPING-TOP? Why not, if it exactly hits the
signification of the Journal and that which it would have the country do
to itself, to keep it going and truly topping? For there is no vulgarity
in a title strongly signifying the intent. Victor wrote it at night,
naming Colney for Editor, with a sum of his money to be devoted to the
publication, in a form of memorandum; and threw it among the papers in
his desk.

Young Dudley had a funny inquisitiveness about Dartrey Fenellan; owing to
Fredi's reproduction or imitation of her mother's romantic sentiment for
Dartrey, doubtless: a bit of jealousy, indicating that the dry fellow had
his feelings. Victor touched--off an outline of Dartrey's history and
character:--the half-brother of Simeon, considerably younger, and totally
different. 'Dartrey's mother was Lady Charlotte Kiltorne, one of the
Clanconans; better mother than wife, perhaps; and no reproach on her, not
a shadow; only she made the General's Bank-notes fly black paper. And--if
you 're for heredity--the queer point is, that Simeon, whose mother was a
sober-minded woman, has always been the spendthrift. Dartrey married one
of the Hennen women, all an odd lot, all handsome. I met her once. Colney
said, she came up here with a special commission from the Prince of
Darkness. There are women who stir the unholy in men--whether they mean
it or not, you know.'

Dudley pursed to remark, that he could not say he did know. And good for
Fredi if he did not know, and had his objections to the knowledge! But he
was like the men who escape colds by wrapping in comforters instead of
trusting to the spin of the blood.

'She played poor Dartrey pranks before he buried--he, behaved well to
her; and that says much for him; he has: a devil of a temper. I 've seen
the blood in his veins, mount to cracking. But there's the man: because
she was a woman, he never let it break out with her. And, by heaven, he
had cause. She couldn't be left. She tricked him, and she loved
him-passionately, I believe. You don't understand women loving the
husband they drag through the mire?'

Dudley did not. He sharpened his mouth.

'Buried, you said, sir?--a widower?'

'I've no positive information; we shall hear when he: comes back,' Victor
replied hurriedly. 'He got a drenching of all the damns in the British
service from his. Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a trooper's
negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes Dartrey to
his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation. Good soldier
lost. And I can't complain; he has been a right-hand man to me over in
Africa. But a man ought to have some control of his temper, especially a
soldier.'

Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.

'Worse than that temper of Dartrey's, he can't forgive an injury. He
bears a grudge against his country. You've heard Colney Durance abuse old
England. It's three parts factitious-literary exercise. It 's milk beside
the contempt of Dartrey's shrug. He thinks we're a dead people, if a
people; "subsisting on our fat," as Colney says.'

'I am not of opinion that we show it,' observed Dudley.

'We don't,' Victor agreed. He disrelished his companion's mincing tone of
a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to be
at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens, who
little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the
gentleman cordially signifying full agreement. But Dudley was not gifted
to read behind words and looks.

They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was
this young Dudley saying, quite commendably: 'It's a pity we seem to have
no means of keeping our parks select.'

Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought. He remembered a fable of
Fenellan's, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to
discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure
in their hymning.

'Have you seen anything offensive to you?' he asked.

'One sees notorious persons.'

Dudley spoke aloof from them--'out of his cold attics,' Fenellan would
have said.

Victor approved: with the deadened feeling common to us when first in sad
earnest we consent to take life as it is.

He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the
fatherly embrace of goodness.

Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of
Lakelands. If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his
morality! But no; he wore it cap a pie, like a mediaeval knight his
armour. One had to approve. And there was no getting away from him. He
was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture
of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for him
at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him at a
corner of the Strand.

Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed with
Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on
self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to
Dudley's. Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in the
presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of
conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses. Dudley drove him
to Colney for relief. Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be
bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley to
critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and
foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul. That quieted her. And another thing,
she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a
tuning-fork for the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also, she
seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having to
share, high flights. And she was, in her queer woman's way, always
reassured by his endurance of Colney's company:--she read it to mean,
that he could bear Colney's perusal of him, and satiric stings. Victor
had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve
his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young
Dudley within him, he felt them. Preferring Fenellan's easy humour to
Colney's acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter's antidote to
Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.

For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of
their society. They might have headed those tribes in the country. At a
period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants to
be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not performance,
of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their temperaments.
Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of the Nineteenth
Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and negatives divorced
from harmony and awakened by the slight increase of incubating motion to
vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the rosy and
the saturnine since the former cheerfully slaved for a small stipend in
the City of his affection, and the latter entered on an inheritance
counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew a briefless barrister disposed
for scholarship from the forlornest of seats in the Courts. They had
foretold of one another each the unfulfilled; each claimed the actual as
the child of his prediction. Victor was to have been ruined long back;
Colney the prey of independent bachelors. Colney had escaped his harpy,
and Victor could be called a millionaire and more. Prophesy was crowned
by Colney's dyspepsia, by Victor's ticklish domestic position. Their pity
for one another, their warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of
different temperaments; and we have to distinguish, that in many
estimable and some gifted human creatures, it is the quality of the blood
which directs the current of opinion.

Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal satisfaction, and
to lull Nataly and make her laugh; but he could not, as she hoped he was
doing, take Colney into his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist,
impelled by his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and
does things; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic, with the
delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things. Our Optimy has his
instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy's countenance at the
confession of a dilemma-foreseen! He hands himself to Pessimy, as it were
a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack with the
wood. But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no compensation:
Pessimy is invulnerable. You waste your time in hurling a common
'tu-quoque' at one who hugs the worst.

The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view,
and neutral view of life, were a comical trio. They had come upon the
days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London's early August
when it is not pipeing March. Victor complacently bore heat as well as
cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it;
and why was he stewing in London? It was for this young Dudley, who
resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and
blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale
water: or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London's
professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told: Why was not
Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture! They
ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol. Nesta had of late been
turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after a
run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she and
Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath had
filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it as victim
on St. Helena's rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua's fortress-walls
blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes for his pathetic
sublime.