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Georg Ebers - "Uarda, Volume 4."

P. G. Wodehouse - "The Gold Bat"

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One of Our Conquerors, Complete

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




Mother and daughter slept together that night, and their embrace was
their world.

Nesta delighted her father the next day by walking beside him into the
City, as far as the end of the Embankment, where the carriage was in
waiting with her maid to bring her back; and at his mere ejaculation of a
wish, the hardy girl drove down in the afternoon for the walk home with
him. Lady Grace Halley was at the office. 'I'm an incorrigible Stock
Exchange gambler,' she said.

'Only,' Victor bade her beware, 'Mines are undulating in movement, and
their heights are a preparation for their going down.'

She said she 'liked a swing.'

Nesta looked at them in turn.

The day after and the day after, Lady Grace was present. She made play
with Dudley's name.

This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back
in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a
jealous foolish mother's device, or that of a weak man beating about for
protection. But the woman of the positive world soon read to the
contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt. She read rather too much
to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in
her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by
the lady's departure. Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too
great of soul for jealousy. Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint
from Lady Grace: and he went somewhat further than the exact degree when
affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of
suspecting.--Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy: she
would not stoop to a meanness. 'Plot? Nataly?' said he, and shrugged. In
fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon
Nataly. He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he
looked.

But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter
who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation. He
told her: 'Fredi does her dada so much good'; not telling her in what, or
opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was. She was trying to
be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite of her
winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he dilated in
sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of power by the
simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;--the
lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near
midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames
magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow. There is no grasping of one
who quickens us.

His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal
value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that
it was.

At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on
the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his
help. That was a dream. She could more easily have uttered the words to
Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of the vision
of doing it and casting herself on noblest man's compassionateness; and
her imagined thousand emotions;--a rolling music within her, a wreath of
cloudglory in her sky;--which had, as with virgins it may be, plighted
her body to him for sheer urgency of soul; drawn her by a single
unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl outward of the sheathing
leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to the shore of that strange
sea, where the maid stands choosing this one man for her destiny, as in a
trance. So are these young ones unfolded, shade by shade; and a shade is
all the difference with them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the
immensity of vitality in 'the shadow of a shade.'

Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs.
Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:
the 'perfect gentleman, good citizen'; prospective heir to an earldom
besides. She bowed to Dudley's merits; she read off the honorific
pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she
passed it.

She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly
unjust. For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-creatures
made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite: no mercy is in
them for the transitional. And Dudley--and it was under her influence,
and painfully, not ignobly--was in process of development: interesting to
philosophers, if not to maidens.

Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance's epigrams
upon their friends. He quite joined with his English world in its
opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of great
guns. Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest of
popgun paper pellets. The English kick at the insolence, when they are
not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is
overshadowing and braceing. Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric
Prose Epic of 'THE RIVAL TONGUES,' particularly offended him, as being a
clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid
friend's collapse. How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such a
spiteful diatribe! The suicide of Dr. Bouthoin at San Francisco was the
finishing stroke to the chances of success of the Serial;--although we
are promised splendid evolutions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who, after
brilliant achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons of Old
England's modern renown, for a determined wrestle with our English
pronunciation of words, and rescue of the spelling of them from the
printer. His headache over the present treatment of the verb 'To bid,'
was a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before Japanese, and
who acknowledged now 'in contrition of spirit,' that in formerly opposing
the scheme for an Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language
to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public. Further, he
discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to
the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point
of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders
'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the
porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.' After a week's privation
of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of satire upon his
countrymen. As for the 'pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr.
Bouthoin,' Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over dose of
the pathos; and the same might be suspected in Britannia's elegy upon
him, a strain of hot eulogy throughout. Mr. Semhians, all but
treasonably, calls it, Papboat and Brandy:--'our English literary diet of
the day': stimulating and not nourishing. Britannia's mournful
anticipation, that 'The shroud enwinding this my son is mine!'--should
the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the
giant in mainly supporting her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the
note of Conservatism. But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed
suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed
dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise,
and no longer relieved by the practice'--to translate from Dr. Gannius:
we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not
what to think: except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market's
butcher in the Satiric Art.

Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which, to
her present feeling, was inhuman. As little as our native public, had she
then any sympathy for the working in the idea: she wanted throbs, visible
aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale of
slaughter--periodically invading all English classes as a flush from the
undrained lower, Vikings all--to frigid sterile Satire. And truly it is
not a fruit-bearing rod. Colney had to stand on the defence of it against
the damsel's charges. He thought the use of the rod, while expressing
profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and those noble
heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their seniors, and
particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest rod to cut
the skin was the sole saving of them. Insensibility to Satire, he likened
to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the worser thing in
consequence. And consequently upon the lack of it, and of training to
appreciate it, he described his country's male venerables as being
distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in presenting themselves
forked.

'He is unsuccessful and embittered, Victor said to Nesta. 'Colney will
find in the end, that he has lost his game and soured himself by never
making concessions. Here's this absurd Serial--it fails, of course; and
then he has to say, it's because he won't tickle his English, won't enter
into a "frowzy complicity" with their tastes.'

'But--I think of Skepsey honest creatures respect Mr. Durance, and he is
always ready to help them,' said Nesta.

'If he can patronize.'

'Does he patronize me, dada?'

'You are one of his exceptions. Marry a title and live in state--and then
hear him! I am successful, and the result of it is, that he won't
acknowledge wisdom in anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge
the success. It is "a dirty road to success," he says. So that, if
successful, I must have rolled myself in mire. I compelled him to admit
he was wrong about your being received at Moorsedge: a bit of a triumph!'

Nesta's walks with her father were no loss of her to Nataly; the girl
came back to her bearing so fresh and so full a heart; and her father was
ever prouder of her: he presented new features of her in his quotations
of her sayings, thoughtful sayings. 'I declare she helps one to think,'
he said. 'It 's not precocity; it 's healthy inquiry. She brings me
nearer ideas of my own, not yet examined, than any one else does. I say,
what a wife for a man!'

'She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not quite strong,' said
Nataly. 'You have not seen . . . ?'

'Dudley Sowerby? He's at Cronidge, I believe. His elder brother's in a
bad way. Bad business, this looking to a death.'

Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.

Let it be cast on Society, then! A Society opposing Nature forces us to
these murderous looks upon impediments. But what of a Society in the
dance with Nature? Victor did not approve of that. He began, under the
influence of Nesta's companionship, to see the Goddess Nature there is in
a chastened nature. And this view shook the curtain covering his lost
Idea. He felt sure he should grasp it soon and enter into its daylight: a
muffled voice within him said, that he was kept waiting to do so by the
inexplicable tardiness of a certain one to rise ascending to her
spiritual roost. She was now harmless to strike: Themison, Carling,
Jarniman, even the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had been won to the cause of
humanity. Her ascent, considering her inability to do further harm below,
was most mysteriously delayed. Owing to it, in a manner almost as
mysterious, he was kept crossing a bridge having a slippery bit on it.
Thanks to his gallant Fredi, he had found his feet again. But there was a
bruise where, to his honour, he felt tenderest. And Fredi away, he might
be down again--for no love of a slippery bit, proved slippery, one might
guess, by a predecessor or two. Ta-ta-ta-to and mum! Still, in justice to
the little woman, she had been serviceable.

She would be still more so, if a member of Parliament now on his back
here we are with the murder-eye again!

Nesta's never speaking of Lakelands clouded him a little, as an
intimation of her bent of mind.

'And does my girl come to her dada to-day?' he said, on the fifth morning
since her return; prepared with a villanous resignation to hear, that
this day she abstained, though he had the wish for her coming.

'Why, don't you know,' said she, 'we all meet to have tea in Mr.
Durance's chambers; and I walk back with you, and there we are joined by
mama; and we are to have a feast of literary celebrities.'

'Colney's selection of them! And Simeon Fenellan, I hope. Perhaps
Dartrey. Perhaps . . . eh?'

She reddened. So Dudley Sowerby's unspoken name could bring the blush to
her cheeks. Dudley had his excuses in his brother's condition. His
father's health, too, was--but this was Dudley calculating. Where there
are coronets, calculations of this sort must needs occur; just as where
there are complications. Odd, one fancies it, that we walking along the
pavement of civilized life, should be perpetually summoning Orcus to our
aid, for the sake of getting a clear course.

'And supposing a fog, my dearie?' he said.

'The daughter in search of her father carries a lamp to light her to him
through densest fogs as well as over deserts,' etc. She declaimed a long
sentence, to set the ripple running in his features; and when he left the
room for a last word with Armandine, she flung arms round her mother's
neck, murmuring: 'Mother! mother!' a cry equal to 'I am sure I do right,'
and understood so by Nataly approving it; she too on the line of her
instinct, without an object in sight.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE MOTHER-THE DAUGHTER

Taking Nesta's hand, on her entry into his chambers with her father,
Colney Durance bowed over it and kissed it. The unusual performance had a
meaning; she felt she was praised. It might be because she made herself
her father's companion. 'I can't persuade him to put on a great-coat,'
she said. 'You would defeat his aim at the particular waistcoat of his
ambition,' said Colney, goaded to speak, not anxious to be heard.

He kept her beside him, leading her about for introductions to multiform
celebrities of both sexes; among them the gentleman editing the Magazine
which gave out serially THE RIVAL TONGUES: and there was talk of a
dragon-throated public's queer appetite in Letters. The pained Editor
deferentially smiled at her cheerful mention of Delphica. 'In, book form,
perhaps!' he remarked, with plaintive' resignation; adding: 'You read
it?' And a lady exclaimed: 'We all read it!'

But we are the elect, who see signification and catch flavour; and we are
reminded of an insatiable monster how sometimes capricious is his gorge.
'He may happen to be in the humour for a shaking!' Colney's poor
consolation it was to say of the prospects of his published book: for the
funny monster has been known to like a shaking.

'He takes it kinder tickled,' said Fenellan, joining the group and
grasping Nesta's hand with a warmth that thrilled her and set her
guessing. 'A taste of his favourite Cayenne lollypop, Colney; it fetches
the tear he loves to shed, or it gives him digestive heat in the bag of
his literary receptacle-fearfully relaxed and enormous! And no wonder;
his is to lie him down on notion of the attitude for reading, his back;
and he has in a jiffy the funnel of the Libraries inserted into his
mouth, and he feels the publishers pouring their gallons through it
unlimitedly; never crying out, which he can't; only swelling, which he's
obliged to do, with a non-nutritious inflation; and that's his
intellectual enjoyment; bearing a likeness to the horrible old torture of
the baillir d'eau; and he's doomed to perish in the worst book-form of
dropsy. You, my dear Colney, have offended his police or excise, who
stand by the funnel, in touch with his palate, to make sure that nothing
above proof is poured in; and there's your misfortune. He's not half a
bad fellow, you find when you haven't got to serve him.'

'Superior to his official parasites, one supposes!' Colney murmured.

The celebrities were unaffectedly interested in a literary failure having
certain merits; they discussed it, to compliment the crownless author;
and the fervider they, the more was he endowed to read the meanness
prompting the generosity. Publication of a book, is the philosopher's
lantern upon one's fellows.

Colney was caught away from his private manufactory of acids by hearing
Simeon Fenellan relate to Victor some of the recent occurrences at
Brighton. Simeon's tone was unsatisfying; Colney would have the word; he
was like steel on the grindstone for such a theme of our national
grotesque-sublime.

'That Demerara Supple-jack, Victor! Don't listen to Simeon; he's a man of
lean narrative, fit to chronicle political party wrangles and such like
crop of carcase prose: this is epical. In DRINK we have Old England's
organic Epic; Greeks and Trojans; Parliamentary Olympus, ennobled
brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery to hand. Keep a straight eye
on the primary motives of man, you'll own the English produce the
material for proud verse; they're alive there! Dartrey's Demerara makes a
pretty episode of the battle. I haven't seen it--if it's possible to look
on it: but I hear it is flexible, of a vulgar appearance in repose,
Jove's lightning at one time, the thong of AEacus at another. Observe
Dartrey marching off to the Station, for the purpose of laying his
miraculous weapon across the shoulders of a son of Mars, who had
offended. But we have his name, my dear Victor! His name,
Simeon?--Worrell; a Major Worrell: his offence being probably, that he
obtained military instruction in the Service, and left it at his
convenience, for our poor patch and tatter British Army to take in his
place another young student, who'll grow up to do similarly. And Dartrey,
we assume, is off to stop that system. You behold Sir Dartrey twirling
the weapon in preparatory fashion; because he is determined we shall have
an army of trained officers instead of infant amateurs heading heroic
louts. Not a thought of Beer in Dartrey!--always unpatriotic, you 'll
say. Plato entreats his absent mistress to fix eyes on a star: eyes on
Beer for the uniting of you English! I tell you no poetic fiction. Seeing
him on his way, thus terribly armed, and knowing his intent, Venus, to
shield a former favourite servant of Mars, conjured the most diverting of
interventions, in the shape of a young woman in a poke-bonnet, and
Skepsey, her squire, marching with a dozen or so, informing bedevilled
mankind of the hideousness of our hymnification when it is not under
secluding sanction of the Edifice, and challengeing criticism; and that
was hard by, and real English, in the form of bludgeons, wielded by a
battalion of the national idol Bungay Beervat's boys; and they fell upon
the hymners. Here you fill in with pastoral similes. They struck the maid
adored by Skepsey. And that was the blow which slew them! Our little man
drove into the press with a pair of fists able to do their work. A
valiant skiff upon a sea of enemies, he was having it on the nob, and
suddenly the Demerara lightened. It flailed to thresh. Enough to say,
brains would have come. The Bungays made a show of fight. No lack of
blood in them, to stock a raw shilling's worth or gush before Achilles
rageing. You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the ballad. We
want only a few names of the fallen. It was the carving of a maitre chef,
according to Skepsey: right-left-and point, with supreme precision: they
fell, accurately sliced from the joint. Having done with them, Dartrey
tossed the Demerara to Skepsey, and washed his hands of battle; and he
let his major go unscathed. Phlebotomy sufficient for the day!'

Nesta's ears hummed with the name of Major Worrell.

'Skepsey did come back to London with a rather damaged frontispiece,'
Victor said. 'He can't have joined those people?'

'They may suit one of your militant peacemakers,' interposed Fenellan.
'The most placable creatures alive, and the surest for getting-up a
shindy.'

'Suit him! They're the scandal of our streets.' Victor was pricked with a
jealousy of them for beguiling him of his trusty servant.

'Look at your country, see where it shows its vitality,' said Colney.
'You don't see elsewhere any vein in movement-movement,' he harped on the
word Victor constantly employed to express the thing he wanted to see.
'Think of that, when the procession sets your teeth on edge. They're
honest foes of vice, and they move:--in England! Pulpit-preaching has no
effect. For gross maladies, gross remedies. You may judge of what you are
by the quality of the cure. Puritanism, I won't attempt to paint--it
would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English
frivolity, and you'll admit it to be the best show you make. It may still
be the saving of you--on the level of the orderly ox: I 've not observed
that it aims at higher. And talking of the pulpit, Barmby is off to the
East, has accepted a Shoreditch curacy, Skepsey tells me.'

'So there's the reason for our not seeing him!' Victor turned to Nesta.

'Papa, you won't be angry with Skepsey if he has joined those people,'
said Nesta. 'I'm sure he thinks of serving his country, Mr. Durance.'

Colney smiled on her. 'And you too?'

'If women knew how!'

'They're hitting on more ways at present than the men--in England.'

'But, Mr. Durance, it speaks well for England when they're allowed the
chance here.'

'Good!' Fenellan exclaimed. 'And that upsets his placement of the modern
national genders: Germany masculine, France feminine, Old England what
remains.'

Victor ruffled and reddened on his shout of 'Neuter?'

Their circle widened. Nesta knew she was on promotion, by her being led
about and introduced to ladies. They were encouraging with her. One of
them, a Mrs. Marina Floyer, had recently raised a standard of feminine
insurrection. She said: 'I hear your praises from Mr. Durance. He rarely
praises. You have shown capacity to meditate on the condition of women,
he says.'

Nesta drew a shorter breath, with a hope at heart. She speculated in the
dark, as to whether her aim to serve and help was not so friendless. And
did Mr. Durance approve? But surely she stood in a glorious England if
there were men and women to welcome a girl to their councils. Oh! that is
the broad free England where gentlemen and gentlewomen accept of the
meanest aid to cleanse the land of its iniquities, and do not suffer
shame to smite a young face for touching upon horrors with a pure design.

She cried in her bosom: I feel! She had no other expression for that
which is as near as great natures may come to the conceiving of the
celestial spirit from an emissary angel; and she trembled, the fire ran
through her. It seemed to her, that she would be called to help or that
certainly they were nearing to an effacement of the woefullest of evils;
and if not helping, it would still be a blessedness for her to kneel
thanking heaven.

Society was being attacked and defended. She could but studiously listen.
Her father was listening. The assailant was a lady; and she had a
hearing, although she treated Society as a discrowned monarch on trial
for an offence against a more precious: viz., the individual cramped by
brutish laws: the individual with the ideas of our time, righteously
claiming expansion out of the clutches of a narrow old-world
disciplinarian-that giant hypocrite! She flung the gauntlet at externally
venerable Institutions; and she had a hearing, where horrification,
execration, the foul Furies of Conservatism would in a shortly antecedent
day have been hissing and snakily lashing, hounding her to expulsion.
Mrs. Marina Floyer gravely seconded her. Colney did the same. Victor
turned sharp on him. 'Yes,' Colney said; 'we unfold the standard of
extremes in this country, to get a single step taken: that's how we move:
we threaten death to get footway. Now, mark: Society's errors will be
admitted.'

A gentleman spoke. He began by admitting Society's errors. Nevertheless,
it so distinctly exists for the common good, that we may say of Society
in relation to the individual, it is the body to the soul. We may wash,
trim, purify, but we must not maim it. The assertion of our individuality
in opposition to the Government of Society--this existing Society--is a
toss of the cap for the erasure of our civilization, et caetera.

Platitudes can be of intense interest if they approach our case.--But, if
you please, we ask permission to wash, trim, purify, and we do not get
it.--But you have it! Because we take it at our peril; and you, who are
too cowardly to grant or withhold, call-up the revolutionary from the
pits by your slackness:--etc. There was a pretty hot debate. Both
assailant and defendant, to Victor's thinking, spoke well, and each the
right thing and he could have made use of both, but he could answer
neither. He beat about for the cause of this deficiency, and discovered
it in his position. Mentally, he was on the side of Society. Yet he was
annoyed to find the attack was so easily answerable when the defence
unfolded. But it was absurd to expect it would not be. And in fact, a
position secretly rebellious is equal to water on the brain for
stultifying us.

Before the controversy was over, a note in Nataly's handwriting called
him home. She wrote: 'Make my excuses. C. D. will give Nesta and some
lady dinner. A visitor here. Come alone, and without delay. Quite well,
robust. Impatient to consult with you, nothing else.'

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