One of Our Conquerors, v1
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George Meredith >> One of Our Conquerors, v1
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'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.'
'I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him. Captain Dartrey
Fenellan was a beautiful fencer. He gave me some instruction; unhappily,
I have to acknowledge, too late. It is a beautiful art. Captain Dartrey
says, the French excel at it. But it asks for a weapon, which nature has
not given: whereas the fists . . .'
'So,' Mr. Radnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey: 'No sign of life?'
'It is not yet seen in the City, sir.'
'The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth's
maziest penetralia, where no tides are! is it not so, Skepsey?' said Mr.
Fenellan, whose initiative and exuberance in loquency had been restrained
by a slight oppression, known to guests; especially to the guest in the
earlier process of his magnification and illumination by virtue of a
grand old wine; and also when the news he has to communicate may be a
stir to unpleasant heaps. The shining lips and eyes of his florid face
now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy jack-o'-lanterning over it.
'Business hangs to swing at every City door, like a ragshop Doll, on the
gallows of overproduction. Stocks and Shares are hollow nuts not a
squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight of the milky kernel
mouldered to beard.
Percentage, like a cabman without a fare, has gone to sleep inside his
vehicle. Dividend may just be seen by tiptoe: stockholders, twinkling
heels over the far horizon. Too true!--and our merchants, brokers,
bankers, projectors of Companies, parade our City to remind us of the
poor steamed fellows trooping out of the burst-boiler-room of the big
ship Leviathan, in old years; a shade or two paler than the crowd o' the
passengers, apparently alive and conversible, but corpses, all of them to
lie their length in fifteen minutes.'
'And you, Fenellan?' cried his host, inspired for a second bottle by the
lovely nonsense of a voluble friend wound up to the mark.
'Doctor of the ship! with this prescription!' Mr. Fenellan held up his
glass.
'Empty?'
Mr. Fenellan made it completely so. 'Confident!' he affirmed.
An order was tossed to the waiter, and both gentlemen screwed their lips
in relish of his heavy consent to score off another bottle from the
narrow list.
'At the office in forty minutes,' Skepsey's master nodded to him and shot
him forth, calling him back: 'By the way, in case a man named Jarniman
should ask to see me, you turn him to the rightabout.'
Skepsey repeated: 'Jarniman !' and flew.
'A good servant,' Mr. Radnor said. 'Few of us think of our country so
much, whatever may be said of the specific he offers. Colney has
impressed him somehow immensely: he studies to write too; pushes to
improve himself; altogether a worthy creature.'
The second bottle appeared. The waiter, in sincerity a reluctant
executioner, heightened his part for the edification of the admiring
couple.
'Take heart, Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan; 'it's only the bottle dies;
and we are the angels above to receive the spirit.'
'I'm thinking of the house,' Benjamin replied. He told them that again.
'It 's the loss of the fame of having the wine, that he mourns. But,
Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan, 'the fame enters into the partakers of it,
and we spread it, and perpetuate it for you.'
'That don't keep a house upright,' returned Benjamin.
Mr. Fenellan murmured to himself: 'True enough, it 's elegy--though we
perform it through a trumpet; and there's not a doubt of our being down
or having knocked the world down, if we're loudly praised.'
Benjamin waited to hear approval sounded on the lips uncertain as a woman
is a wine of ticklish age. The gentlemen nodded, and he retired.
A second bottle, just as good as the first, should, one thoughtlessly
supposes, procure us a similar reposeful and excursive enjoyment, as of
men lying on their backs and flying imagination like a kite. The effect
was quite other. Mr. Radnor drank hastily and spoke with heat: 'You told
me All? tell me that!'
Mr. Fenellan gathered himself together; he sipped, and relaxed his
bracing. But there really was a bit more to tell: not much, was it? Not
likely to puff a gale on the voluptuous indolence of a man drawn along by
Nereids over sunny sea-waves to behold the birth of the Foam-Goddess?
'According to Carling, her lawyer; that is, he hints she meditates a
blow.'
'Mrs. Burman means to strike a blow?'
'The lady.'
'Does he think I fear any--does he mean a blow with a weapon? Is it a
legal . . . ? At last? Fenellan!'
'So I fancied I understood.'
'But can the good woman dream of that as a blow to strike and hurt, for a
punishment?--that's her one aim.'
'She may have her hallucinations.'
'But a blow--what a word for it! But it's life to us life! It's the
blow we've prayed for. Why, you know it! Let her strike, we bless her.
We've never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary--pity,
pity, pity! Let her do that, we're at her feet, my Nataly and I. If you
knew what my poor girl suffers! She 's a saint at the stake. Chiefly on
behalf of her family. Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my
fortune: I'll own to luck; I put in a claim to courage and calculation.'
'You've been a bulwark to your friends.'
'All, Fenellan, all-stocks, shares, mines, companies, industries at home
and--abroad--all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow!
Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again--singing! Ha!
the woman has threatened it before. It's probably feline play with us.'
His chin took support, he frowned.
'You may have touched her.'
'She won't be touched, and she won't be driven. What 's the secret of
her? I can't guess, I never could. She's a riddle.'
'Riddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the
ardently sought secret to reveal itself,' said Mr. Fenellan.
His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor's
eyes, they turned over. 'Oh!--her charms! She had a desperate belief in
her beauty. The woman 's undoubtedly charitable; she's not without a
mind--sort of mind: well, it shows no crack till it's put to use. Heart!
yes, against me she has plenty of it. They say she used to be courted;
she talked of it: "my courtiers, Mr. Victor!" There, heaven forgive me,
I wouldn't mock at her to another.'
'It looks as if she were only inexorably human,' said Mr. Fenellan,
crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to
flavour. 'We read of the tester of a bandit-bed; and it flattened unwary
recumbents to pancakes. An escape from the like of that seems pleadable,
should be: none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the
insane.'
Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case. 'For the sake of
my sanity, it was! to preserve my . . . . but any word makes nonsense of
it. Could--I must ask you--could any sane man--you were abroad in those
days, horrible days! and never met her: I say, could you consent to be
tied--I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth-tied to--I was barely twenty-
one: I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an engagement--which
is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good faith; that is, with
capacity on both sides to keep the engagement: between the man you know
I was in youth and a more than middle-aged woman crazy up to the edge of
the cliff--as Colney says half the world is, and she positively is when
her spite is roused. No, Fenellan, I have nothing on my conscience with
regard to the woman. She had wealth: I left her not one penny the worse
for--but she was not one to reckon it, I own. She could be generous,
was, with her money. If she had struck this blow--I know she thought of
it: or if she would strike it now, I could not only forgive her, I could
beg forgiveness.'
A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead.
'You've borne your part bravely, my friend.'
'I!' Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal burdens. 'Praise my
Nataly if you like! Made for one another, if ever two in this world!
You know us both, and do you doubt it? The sin would have been for us
two to meet and--but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death
and beyond it: that's my firm faith. Nataly teaches me the religion of
life, and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman.
Eighteen-nineteen-twenty years!'
Tears fell from him, two drops. He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed
his watch, and smiled: 'The finishing glass! We should have had to put
Colney to bed. Few men stand their wine. You and I are not lamed by it;
we can drink and do business: my first experience in the City was, that
the power to drink--keeping a sound head--conduces to the doing of
business.'
'It's a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror.'
'If it doubles the energies, mind.'
'Not if it fiddles inside. I confess to that effect upon me. I've a
waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and
it won't allow of a thought upon Investments.'
'Consult me to-morrow,' said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having
inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided.
'You've looked at the warehouse?'
'That's performed.'
'Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early
morning as you well can.'
Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent,
the giant spoke in good fellowship. It would have been to have strained
his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to
boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.
He stopped, and laughed: 'Now I 'm pumping my pulpit-eh? You come with
us to Lakelands. I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.: if it's
fine; train half-past. We take a basket. By the way, I had no letter
from Dartrey last mail.'
'He has buried his wife. It happens to some men.'
Mr. Radnor stood gazing. He asked for the name of the place of the
burial. He heard without seizing it. A simulacrum spectre-spark of
hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening at
the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy.
Dartrey--Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and
dishonoured him: and it was in Africa! One would have to go to Africa to
be free of the galling. But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!--The
strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off
their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the
brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring,
always in ambush. We do not speak of them: we have not words to stamp
the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had
the words; we know them as out of reason: they haunt us, pluck at us,
fret us, nevertheless.
Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the
mind of shackled men.
It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that Dartrey
should be free, suddenly free; and free while still a youngish man. He
was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country for vigour,
gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness; his heavenly good fortune decked
him as a prodigy.
'No harm to the head from that fall of yours?' Mr. Fenellan said.
'None.' Mr. Radnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and
cried cheerily: 'Now to business'; as men may, who have confidence in
their ability to concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial.
'You dine with us. The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or
Catkin: Priscilla Graves and Nataly--the Rev. Septimus; Cormyn and his
wife: Young Dudley Sowerby and I--flutes: he has precision, as naughty
Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression. In the course of the
evening, Lady Grace, perhaps: you like her.'
'Human nature in the upper circle is particularly likeable.'
'Fenellan,' said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his
fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey's, 'I put it to you:
would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend
Carling's report?'
Although it had not been phrased as a report, Mr. Fenellan's answering
look and gesture, and a run of indiscriminate words, enrolled it in that
form, greatly to the inspiriting of Mr. Radnor.
Old Veuve in one, to the soul of Old Veuve in the other, they recalled a
past day or two, touched the skies; and merriment or happiness in the
times behind them held a mirror to the present: or the hour of the
reverse of happiness worked the same effect by contrast: so that notions
of the singular election of us by Dame Fortune, sprang like vinous
bubbles. For it is written, that however powerful you be, you shall not
take the Winegod on board to entertain him as a simple passenger; and you
may captain your vessel, you may pilot it, and keep to your reckonings,
and steer for all the ports you have a mind to, even to doing profitable
exchange with Armenian and Jew, and still you shall do the something
more, which proves that the Winegod is on board: he is the pilot of your
blood if not the captain of your thoughts.
Mr. Fenellan was unused to the copious outpouring of Victor Radnor's
confidences upon his domestic affairs; and the unwonted excitement of
Victor's manner of speech would have perplexed him, had there not been
such a fiddling of the waltz inside him.
Payment for the turtle and the bottles of Old Veuve was performed
apart with Benjamin, while Simeon Fenellan strolled out of the house,
questioning a tumbled mind as to what description of suitable
entertainment, which would be dancing and flirting and fal-lallery in the
season of youth, London City could provide near meridian hours for a man
of middle age carrying his bottle of champagne, like a guest of an old-
fashioned wedding-breakfast. For although he could stand his wine as
well as his friend, his friend's potent capacity martially after the
feast to buckle to business at a sign of the clock, was beyond him.
It pointed to one of the embodied elements, hot from Nature's workshop.
It told of the endurance of powers, that partly explained the successful,
astonishing career of his friend among a people making urgent, if
unequal, demands perpetually upon stomach and head.
CHAPTER V
THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
In that nationally interesting Poem, or Dramatic Satire, once famous,
THE RAJAH IN LONDON (London, Limbo and Sons, 1889), now obliterated
under the long wash of Press-matter, the reflection--not unknown to
philosophical observers, and natural perhaps in the mind of an Oriental
Prince--produced by his observation of the march of London citizens
Eastward at morn, Westward at eve, attributes their practice to a
survival of the Zoroastrian form of worship. His Minister, favourable
to the people or for the sake of fostering an idea in his Master's head,
remarks, that they show more than the fidelity of the sunflower to her
God. The Rajah, it would appear, frowns interrogatively, in the princely
fashion, accusing him of obscureness of speech:--princes and the louder
members of the grey public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip
of that which they do not immediately comprehend. It is explained by the
Minister: not even the flower, he says, would hold constant, as they, to
the constantly unseen--a trebly cataphractic Invisible. The Rajah
professes curiosity to know how it is that the singular people nourish
their loyalty, since they cannot attest to the continued being of the
object in which they put their faith. He is informed by his prostrate
servant of a settled habit they have of diligently seeking their
Divinity, hidden above, below; and of copiously taking inside them doses
of what is denied to their external vision: thus they fortify credence
chemically on an abundance of meats and liquors; fire they eat, and they
drink fire; they become consequently instinct with fire. Necessarily
therefore they believe in fire. Believing, they worship. Worshipping,
they march Eastward at morn, Westward at eve. For that way lies the key,
this way the cupboard, of the supplies, their fuel.
According to Stage directions, THE RAJAH AND HIS MINISTER Enter a Gin-
Palace.--It is to witness a service that they have learnt to appreciate
as Anglicanly religious.
On the step of the return to their Indian clime, they speak of the hatted
sect, which is most, or most commercially, succoured and fattened by our
rule there: they wave adieu to the conquering Islanders, as to 'Parsees
beneath a cloud.'
The two are seen last on the deck of the vessel, in perusal of a medical
pamphlet composed of statistics and sketches, traceries, horrid blots,
diagrams with numbers referring to notes, of the various maladies caused
by the prolonged prosecution of that form of worship.
'But can they suffer so and live?' exclaims the Rajah, vexed by the
physical sympathetic twinges which set him wincing.
'Science,' his Minister answers, 'took them up where Nature, in pity of
their martyrdom, dropped them. They do not live; they are engines,
insensible things of repairs and patches; insteamed to pursue their
infuriate course, to the one end of exhausting supplies for the renewing
of them, on peril of an instant suspension if they deviate a step or
stop: nor do they.'
The Rajah is of opinion, that he sails home with the key of the riddle of
their power to vanquish. In some apparent allusion to an Indian story of
a married couple who successfully made their way, he accounts for their
solid and resistless advance, resembling that of--
The doubly-wedded man and wife,
Pledged to each other and against the world
With mutual union.
One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian
citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to
our nourishing luminary: at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king,
after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish
smack-o'-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy
javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the
circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of
Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed
chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and
pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella. One would fair believe that
they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams.
No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from coal-
dust to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an enormous
engine's centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to
meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in
his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not roughened,
as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler's hand seen
from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have all the appearance of
sour scientific productions. And unhappily for the national portrait, in
the Poem quoted, the Rajah's Minister chose an hour between morning and
meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure
inside their persons, for drawing his Master's attention to the quaint
similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they
had travelled so far to visit and to study:
These Britons wear
The driven and perplexed look of men
Begotten hastily 'twixt business hours
It could not have been late afternoon.
These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them,
fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset. In April, the month of
piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all
quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking
royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for
possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion,
collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind
idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not
inquireing scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the ripe
kitchen hour), here is a noble harmony of heaven and the earth of the
works of man, speaking a grander tongue than barren sea or wood or
wilderness. Just a moment; it goes; as, when a well-attuned barrel-organ
in a street has drawn us to recollections of the Opera or Italy, another
harshly crashes, and the postman knocks at doors, and perchance a
costermonger cries his mash of fruit, a beggar woman wails her hymn.
For the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths,
the forces repressing them. That grand tongue of the giant City inspires
none human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be. An
embittered Muse of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of the
adulatory Essay and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an angry
irony 'upon those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff. Song of
praise she does not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a striking
picture is accorded, and no more. For this London, this England, Europe,
world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital
operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet
and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic
work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely
discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour,
will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of
diseases. Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material
accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous
bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might--as may, we will
suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of
Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the Spirit of Song.
But first there must be the cleansing. When Night has fallen upon
London, the Rajah remarks:
Monogamic Societies present
A decent visage and a hideous rear.
His Minister (satirically, or in sympathetic Conservatism) would have
them not to move on, that they may preserve among beholders the
impression of their handsome frontage. Night, however, will come; and
they, adoreing the decent face, are moved on, made to expose what the
Rajah sees. Behind his courteousness, he is an antagonistic observer of
his conquerors; he pushes his questions farther than the need for them;
his Minister the same; apparently to retain the discountenanced people in
their state of exposure. Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle
on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's
reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the Magistrate-
whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case, when he
becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly
peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious
contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound
in the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with the
cat of the tiles at night.
Granting all that, it being a transient novelist's business to please the
light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only chance
of half of it, let him identify himself with them, in keeping to the
quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable.
Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess
to lift the angry heroic head over human. They gloriously transfigure.
A Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the
streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun's hand so
speaks to us. And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of street-
organs has quickened little children's legs to rhythmic footing, they
strike on thoughts braver than pastoral. Victor Radnor, lover of the
country though he was, would have been the first to say it. He would
indeed have said it too emphatically. Open London as a theme, to a
citizen of London ardent for the clear air out of it, you have roused an
orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his
reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages.
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