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One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




They do not smile on the condemnable.

She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him. And who,
calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful!

Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he flew
to it, he breathed, dispensed it. How conceive the clear-sighted
celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate? Not they. He knew,
for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield him
subservient responses. The world, or Puritanic members of it, had pushed
him to the trial once or twice--or had put on an air of doing so;
creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his
daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet
lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good
example to shine in the sun.

He had a secret for them.

Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his
baritone--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate
notes--should be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that
secret: there was matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in
it. And during the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast
thought on a secret so palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition
and a long year's prospect of the present day! It seemed to have been
knocked clean out of it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say. Nor had any
combinations upon the theme of business displaced it. Just before the
fall, the whole drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to
his eyes as a scene on a stage.

He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than
the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as
feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic
globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything. Only, Sanity does
not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.

Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely
little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white
waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in
its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas
of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he stood
contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic countenance,
from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a novelty to him;
unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often traversed, equally
careful that his hesitation should not be seen. A trifle more
impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and magnum of
pursiness barring the City against him. He could have laughed aloud at
the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment at London's
sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as well by the singular fit of
timidity enchaining him. Cart, omnibus, cab, van, barrow, donkey-tray,
went by in strings, broken here and there, and he could not induce his
legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened to a warning that he
would be down again if he tried it, among those wheels; and his nerves
clutched him, like a troop of household women, to keep him from the
hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth;
and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of the rutted line, you
are food for lion and jackal--the forces of the world will have you in
their mandibles.

An idea was there too; but it would not accept pursuit.

'A pretty scud overheard?' said a voice at his ear.

'For fine!--to-day at least,' Mr. Radnor affably replied to a stranger;
and gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and
laughed: 'You?' He straightened his back immediately to cross the road,
dismissing nervousness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van:
'Anything doing in the City?' For Mr. Fenellan's proper station faced
Westward.

The reply was deferred until they had reached the pavement, when Mr.
Fenellan said: 'I'll tell you,' and looked a dubious preface, to his
friend's thinking.

But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots on
the coat.

'We'll lunch; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then,' said Mr. Radnor,
adding within himself: 'Emptiness! want of food!' to account for recent
ejaculations and qualms. He had not eaten for a good four hours.

Fenellan's tone signified to his feverish sensibility of the moment, that
the matter was personal; and the intimation of a touch on domestic
affairs caused sinkings in his vacuity, much as though his heart were
having a fall.

He mentioned the slip on the bridge, to explain his: need to visit a
haberdasher's shop, and pointed at the waistcoat.

Mr. Fenellan was compassionate over the 'Poor virgin of the smoky city!'

'They have their ready-made at these shops--last year's: perhaps, never
mind, do for the day,' said Mr. Radnor, impatient for eating, now that he
had spoken of it. 'A basin of turtle; I can't wait. A brush of the coat;
mud must be dry by this time. Clear turtle, I think, with a bottle of the
Old Veuve. Not bad news to tell? You like that Old Veuve?'

'Too well to tell bad news of her,' said Mr. Fenellan in a manner to
reassure his friend, as he intended. 'You wouldn't credit it for the
Spring of the year, without the spotless waistcoat?'

'Something of that, I suppose.' And so saying, Mr. Radnor entered the
shop of his quest, to be complimented by the shopkeeper, while the
attendants climbed the ladder to upper stages for white-waistcoat boxes,
on his being; the first bird of the season; which it pleased him to hear;
for the smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone to
this brightly-constituted gentleman.




CHAPTER III

OLD VEUVE

They were known at the house of the turtle and the attractive Old Veuve:
a champagne of a sobered sweetness, of a great year, a great age,
counting up to the extremer maturity attained by wines of stilly depths;
and their worthy comrade, despite the wanton sparkles, for the promoting
of the state of reverential wonderment in rapture, which an ancient wine
will lead to, well you wot. The silly girly sugary crudity his given way
to womanly suavity, matronly composure, with yet the sparkles; they
ascend; but hue and flavour tell of a soul that has come to a lodgement
there. It conducts the youthful man to temples of dusky thought:
philosophers partaking of it are drawn by the arms of garlanded nymphs
about their necks into the fathomless of inquiries. It presents us with a
sphere, for the pursuit of the thing we covet most. It bubbles over
mellowness; it has, in the marriage with Time, extracted a spice of
individuality from the saccharine: by miracle, one would say, were it not
for our knowledge of the right noble issue of Time when he and good
things unite. There should be somewhere legends of him and the
wine-flask. There must be meanings to that effect in the Mythology,
awaiting unravelment. For the subject opens to deeper than cellars, and
is a tree with vast ramifications of the roots and the spreading growth,
whereon half if not all the mythic Gods, Inferior and Superior, Infernal
and Celestial, might be shown sitting in concord, performing in concert,
harmoniously receiving sacrificial offerings of the black or the white;
and the black not extinguishing the fairer fellow. Tell us of a certainty
that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be asserted (assuming
the great year for the wine, i.e. combinations above) that a speck of the
white within us who drink will conquer, to rise in main ascension over
volumes of the black. It may, at a greater venture, but confidently, be
said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of auspicious birth induces ever
to the worship of the loftier Deities.

Think as you will; forbear to come hauling up examples of malarious men,
in whom these pourings of the golden rays of life breed fogs; and be
moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning, in
tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of the
reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a most
magnetic polarity. Take it for not worse than accompanying choric
flourishes, in accord with Mr. Victor Radnor and Mr. Simeon Fenellan at
their sipping of the venerable wine.

Seated in a cosy corner, near the grey City window edged with a sooty
maze, they praised the wine, in the neuter and in the feminine; that for
the glass, this for the widow-branded bottle: not as poets hymning; it
was done in the City manner, briefly, part pensively, like men travelling
to the utmost bourne of flying flavour (a dell in infinite nether), and
still masters of themselves and at home.

Such a wine, in its capturing permeation of us, insists on being for a
time a theme.

'I wonder!' said Mr. Radnor, completely restored, eyeing his half-emptied
second glass and his boon-fellow.

'Low!' Mr. Fenellan shook his head.

'Half a dozen dozen left?'

'Nearer the half of that. And who's the culprit?'

'Old days! They won't let me have another dozen out of the house now.'

'They'll never hit on such another discovery in their cellar, unless they
unearth a fifth corner.'

'I don't blame them for making the price prohibitive. And sound as ever!'

Mr. Radnor watched the deliberate constant ascent of bubbles through
their rose-topaz transparency. He drank. That notion of the dish of
turtle was an inspiration of the right: he ought always to know it for
the want of replenishment when such a man as he went quaking. His latest
experiences of himself were incredible; but they passed, as the dimples
of the stream. He finished his third glass. The bottle, like the
cellar-wine, was at ebb: unlike the cellar-wine, it could be set flowing
again: He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion:

'Fenellan, remember, I had a sort of right to the wine--to the best I
could get; and this Old Veuve, more than any other, is a bridal wine! We
heard of Giulia Sanfredini's marriage to come off with the Spanish Duke,
and drank it to the toast of our little Nesta's godmother. I 've told
you. We took the girl to the Opera, when quite a little one--that
high:--and I declare to you, it was marvellous! Next morning after
breakfast, she plants herself in the middle of the room, and strikes her
attitude for song, and positively, almost with the Sanfredini's
voice--illusion of it, you know,--trills us out more than I could have
believed credible to be recollected by a child. But I've told you the
story. We called her Fredi from that day. I sent the diva, with excuses
and compliments, a nuptial present-necklace, Roman goldwork,
locket-pendant, containing sunny curl, and below a fine pearl; really
pretty; telling her our grounds for the liberty. She replied, accepting
the responsible office; touching letter--we found it so; framed in
Fredi's room, under her godmother's photograph. Fredi has another heroine
now, though she worships her old one still; she never abandons her old
ones. You've heard the story over and over!'

Mr. Fenellan nodded; he had a tenderness for the garrulity of Old Veuve,
and for the damsel. Chatter on that subject ran pleasantly with their
entertainment.

Mr. Radnor meanwhile scribbled, and despatched a strip of his Note-book,
bearing a scrawl of orders, to his office. He was now fully himself,
benevolent, combative, gay, alert for amusement or the probeing of
schemes to the quick, weighing the good and the bad in them with his fine
touch on proportion.

'City dead flat? A monotonous key; but it's about the same as fetching a
breath after a run; only, true, it lasts too long--not healthy! Skepsey
will bring me my letters. I was down in the country early this morning,
looking over the house, with Taplow, my architect; and he speaks fairly
well of the contractors. Yes, down at Lakelands; and saw my first lemon
butterfly in a dell of sunshine, out of the wind, and had half a mind to
catch it for Fredi,--and should have caught it myself, if I had! The
truth is, we three are country born and bred; we pine in London. Good for
a season; you know my old feeling. They are to learn the secret of
Lakelands to-morrow. It 's great fun; they think I don't see they've had
their suspicion for some time. You said--somebody said--"the eye of a
needle for what they let slip of their secrets, and the point of it for
penetrating yours":--women. But no; my dear souls didn't prick and
bother. And they dealt with a man in armour. I carry them down to
Lakelands to-morrow, if the City's flat.'

'Keeping a secret's the lid on a boiling pot with you,' Mr. Fenellan
said; and he mused on the profoundness of the flavour at his lips.

'I do it.'

'You do: up to bursting at the breast.'

'I keep it from Colney!'

'As Vesuvius keeps it from Palmieri when shaking him.'

'Has old Colney an idea of it?'

'He has been foretelling an eruption of an edifice.'

The laugh between them subsided to pensiveness.

Mr. Fenellan's delay in the delivery of his news was eloquent to reveal
the one hateful topic; and this being seen, it waxed to such increase of
size with the passing seconds, that prudence called for it.

'Come!' said Mr. Radnor.

The appeal was understood.

'Nothing very particular. I came into the City to look at a warehouse
they want to mount double guard on. Your idea of the fireman's
night-patrol and wires has done wonders for the office.'

'I guarantee the City if all my directions are followed.'

Mr. Fenellan's remark, that he had nothing very particular to tell,
reduced it to the mere touch upon a vexatious matter, which one has to
endure in the ears at times; but it may be postponed. So Mr. Radnor
encouraged him to talk of an Insurance Office Investment. Where it is all
bog and mist, as in the City to-day, the maxim is, not to take a step,
they agreed. Whether it was attributable to an unconsumed glut of the
markets, or apprehension of a panic, had to be considered. Both gentlemen
were angry with the Birds on the flags of foreign nations, which would
not imitate a sawdust Lion to couch reposefully. Incessantly they scream
and sharpen talons.

'They crack the City bubbles and bladders, at all events,' Mr. Fenellan
said. 'But if we let our journals go on making use of them, in the shape
of sham hawks overhead, we shall pay for their one good day of the game
with our loss of the covey. An unstable London's no world's
market-place.'

'No, no; it's a niggardly national purse, not the journals,' Mr. Radnor
said. 'The journals are trading engines. Panics are grist to them; so are
wars; but they do their duty in warning the taxpayer and rousing
Parliament. Dr. Schlesien's right: we go on believing that our God
Neptune will do everything for us, and won't see that Steam has paralyzed
his Trident: good! You and Colney are hard on Schlesien--or at him, I
should say. He's right: if we won't learn that we have become
Continentals, we shall be marched over. Laziness, cowardice, he says.'

'Oh, be hanged!' interrupted Fenellan. 'As much of the former as you
like. He 's right about our "individualismus" being another name for
selfishness, and showing the usual deficiency in external features; it's
an individualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky, each
fellow his own way. Well, then, conscript them, and they'll be all of a
better pattern. The only thing to do, and the cheapest. By heaven! it's
the only honourable thing to do.'

Mr. Radnor disapproved. 'No conscription here.'

'Not till you've got the drop of poison in your blood, in the form of an
army landed. That will teach you to catch at the drug.'

'No, Fenellan! Besides they've got to land. I guarantee a trusty army and
navy under a contract, at two-thirds of the present cost. We'll start a
National Defence Insurance Company after the next panic.'

'During,' said Mr. Fenellan, and there was a flutter of laughter at the
unobtrusive hint for seizing Dame England in the mood.

Both dropped a sigh.

'But you must try and run down with us to Lakelands to-morrow,' Mr.
Radnor resumed on a cheerfuller theme. 'You have not yet seen all I 've
done there. And it 's a castle with a drawbridge: no exchangeing of
visits, as we did at Craye Farm and at Creckholt; we are there for
country air; we don't court neighbours at all--perhaps the elect; it will
depend on Nataly's wishes. We can accommodate our Concert-set, and about
thirty or forty more, for as long as they like. You see, that was my
intention--to be independent of neighbouring society. Madame Callet
guarantees dinners or hot suppers for eighty--and Armandine is the last
person to be recklessly boasting.--When was it I was thinking last of
Armandine?' He asked himself that, as he rubbed at the back of his head.

Mr. Fenellan was reading his friend's character by the light of his
remarks and in opposition to them, after the critical fashion of
intimates who know as well as hear: but it was amiably and trippingly, on
the dance of the wine in his veins.

His look, however, was one that reminded; and Mr. Radnor cried: 'Now!
whatever it is!'

'I had an interview: I assure you,' Mr. Fenellan interposed to pacify:
'the smallest of trifles, and to be expected: I thought you ought to know
it:--an interview with her lawyer; office business, increase of Insurance
on one of her City warehouses.'

'Speak her name, speak the woman's name; we're talking like a pair of
conspirators,' exclaimed Mr. Radnor.

'He informed me that Mrs. Burman has heard of the new mansion.'

'My place at Lakelands?'

Mr. Radnor's clear-water eyes hardened to stony as their vision ran along
the consequences of her having heard it.

'Earlier this time!' he added, thrummed on the table, and thumped with
knuckles. 'I make my stand at Lakelands for good! Nothing mortal moves
me!'

'That butler of hers--'

'Jarniman, you mean: he's her butler, yes, the scoundrel--h'm-pah! Heaven
forgive me! she's an honest woman at least; I wouldn't rob her of her
little: fifty-nine or sixty next September, fifteenth of the month! with
the constitution of a broken drug-bottle, poor soul! She hears everything
from Jarniman: he catches wind of everything. All foreseen, Fenellan,
foreseen. I have made my stand at Lakelands, and there's my flag till
it's hauled down over Victor Radnor. London kills Nataly as well as
Fredi--and me: that is--I can use the words to you--I get back to primal
innocence in the country. We all three have the feeling. You're a man to
understand. My beasts, and the wild flowers, hedge-banks, and stars.
Fredi's poetess will tell you. Quiet waters reflecting. I should feel it
in Paris as well, though they have nightingales in their Bois. It's the
rustic I want to bathe me; and I had the feeling at school, biting at
Horace. Well, this is my Sabine Farm, rather on a larger scale, for the
sake of friends. Come, and pure air, water from the springs, walks and
rides in lanes, high sand-lanes; Nataly loves them; Fredi worships the
old roots of trees: she calls them the faces of those weedy sandy lanes.
And the two dear souls on their own estate, Fenellan! And their poultry,
cows, cream. And a certain influence one has in the country socially. I
make my stand on a home--not empty punctilio.'

Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, 'Punctilio,' and not emphatically.

'Don't bawl the word,' said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it rang
and sang. 'Here in the City the woman's harmless; and here,' he struck
his breast. 'But she can shoot and hit another through me. Ah, the
witch!--poor wretch! poor soul! Only, she's malignant. I could swear! But
Colney 's right for once in something he says about oaths--"dropping
empty buckets," or something.'

'"Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as
heavily as the ready devil himself,"' Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase.
'Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he's what the critics call
sententious. We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us.'

'Come, Fenellan, I don't think . . .'

'Oh, yes, but it's true of me too.'

'You reserve it for your enemies.'

'I 'd like to distract it a bit from the biggest of 'em.' He pointed
finger at the region of the heart.

'Here we have Skepsey,' said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach of
a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed javelin's
cast, shot from the doorway to the table.




CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND BOTTLE

This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from
his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism. His lean
slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest of
prominent large eyes. He placed his master's letters legibly on the
table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the
hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.

Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.

'How about the Schools for Boxing?' that gentleman said.

Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: 'I
have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously: a person of no
station:--it does not appear of national importance. Ladies are against.
They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because
of the blood; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not; and
it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex. They seem to be
unaware of their own interests--ladies. The contention all around us is
with ignorance. My plan is written; I have shown it, and signatures of
gentlemen, to many of our City notables favourable in most cases:
gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly. The clergy and the medical
profession are quite with me.'

'The surgical, perhaps you mean?'

'Also, sir. The clergy strongly.'

'On the grounds of--what, Skepsey?'

'Morality. I have fully explained to them:--after his work at the desk
all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment. He needs it, must have
it. I propose to catch him on his way to his music-halls and other
places, and take him to one of our establishments. A short term of
instruction, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves; it would delight
him more than excesses-beer and tobacco. The female in her right place,
certainly.' Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his hearer, and
pursued,

'It would improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his
sense of personal dignity.'

'Would you teach females as well--to divert them from their frivolities?'

'That would have to be thought over, sir. It would be better for them
than using their nails.'

'I don't know, Skepsey: I'm rather a Conservative there.'

'Yes; with regard to the female, sir: I confess, my scheme does not
include them. They dance; that is a healthy exercise. One has only to
say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency. I
look to that. And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent
of--I have to say--sex. Not that there is harm in sex. But we are for
training. I hope my meaning is clear?'

'Quite. You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic
recreation.'

'Recreation is the word, sir; I have often admired it,' said Skepsey,
blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic.

'I was a bit of a boxer once,' Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height and
breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him.

'Something might be done with you still, sir.'

Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful summary of his gifts in
a glimpse. Mr. Fenellan bowed to him.

Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters
perused.

'Skepsey's craze: regeneration of the English race by boxing--nucleus of
a national army?'

'To face an enemy at close quarters--it teaches that, sir. I have always
been of opinion, that courage may be taught. I do not say heroism. And
setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable
citizens. Protection to the weak in streets and by-places--shocking
examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd.'

'One strong man is an overmatch for your mob,' said Mr. Fenellan.

Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion of
the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn.

'Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant mob:--strong, you
say, sir? I venture my word that a decent lad, with science, would beat
him. It is a question of the study and practice of first principles.'

'If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman?' Skepsey conjured
the scene by bending his head and peering abstractedly, as if over
spectacles.

'I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake.'

Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting.

'My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first principles,
I think?'

'Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir: exceedingly quick and clever; a hard
boxer to beat.'

'You will not call him captain when you see him; he has dismissed the
army.'

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