One of Our Conquerors, v1
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George Meredith >> One of Our Conquerors, v1
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What, then, was the value to his country of a servant who could not
accurately recollect his master's words! Miss Graves within him asked
the rapid little man, whether indeed his ideas were his own after
draughts of champagne.
The ideas, excited to an urgent animation by his racing trot, were a
quiverful in flight over an England terrible to the foe and dancing on
the green. Right so: but would we keep up the dance, we must be red iron
to touch: and the fighter for conquering is the one who can last and has
the open brain;--and there you have a point against alcohol. Yes, and
Miss Graves, if she would press it, with her natural face, could be
pleasant and persuasive: and she ought to be told she ought to marry, for
the good of the country. Women taking liquor: Skepsey had a vision of
his wife with rheumy peepers and miauly mouth, as he had once beheld the
creature:--Oh! they need discipline not such would we have for the
mothers of our English young. Decidedly the women of principle are bound
to enter wedlock; they should be bound by law. Whereas, in the opposing
case--the binding of the unprincipled to a celibate state--such a law
would have saved Skepsey from the necessitated commission of deeds of
discipline with one of the female sex, and have rescued his progeny from
a likeness to the corn-stalk reverting to weed. He had but a son for
England's defence; and the frame of his boy might be set quaking by a
thump on the wind of a drum; the courage of William Barlow Skepsey would
not stand against a sheep; it would wind-up hares to have a run at him
out in the field. Offspring of a woman of principle! . . . but there
is no rubbing out in life: why dream of it? Only that one would not have
one's country the loser!
Dwell a moment on the reverse--and first remember the lesson of the
Captivity of the Jews and the outcry of their backsliding and
repentance:--see a nation of the honourably begotten; muscular men
disdaining the luxuries they will occasionally condescend to taste,
like some tribe in Greece; boxers, rowers, runners, climbers; braced,
indomitable; magnanimous, as only the strong can be; an army at word,
winning at a stroke the double battle of the hand and the heart: men who
can walk the paths through the garden of the pleasures. They receive
fitting mates, of a build to promise or aid in ensuring depth of chest
and long reach of arm for their progeny.
Down goes the world before them.
And we see how much would be due for this to a corps of ladies like Miss
Graves, not allowed to remain too long on the stalk of spinsterhood. Her
age might count twenty-eight: too long! She should be taught that men
can, though truly ordinary women cannot, walk these orderly paths through
the garden. An admission to women, hinting restrictions, on a ticket
marked 'in moderation' (meaning, that they may pluck a flower or fruit
along the pathway border to which they are confined), speedily, alas,
exhibits them at a mad scramble across the pleasure-beds. They know not
moderation. Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of Posterity
will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun it.
The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract, as men do.
But there are grounds for supposing that the example before them of a sex
exercising self-control in freedom, would induce women to pledge
themselves to a similar abnegation, until they gain some sense of touch
upon the impalpable duty to the generations coming after us thanks to the
voluntary example we set them.
The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey in the course of
conversational remonstrances with his wife;--that of getting the Idea of
Posterity into the understanding of its principal agent, might then be
mastered.
Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement: it manifestly
devolves upon them. Let them at once take to rigorous physical training.
Women under compulsion, as vessels: men in their magnanimity,
patriotically, voluntarily.
Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed it; and it
plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not suffer him to escape
without ruefully feeling the feebleness of his vocabulary: and
consequently he made a reluctant appeal to figures, and it hung upon
the bolder exhibition of lists and tables as to whether he was beaten;
and if beaten, he was morally her captive; and this being the case,
nothing could be more repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of
his nature passively or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld
himself wearing a detestable 'ribbon,' for sign of an oath quite
needlessly sworn (simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him with nimbler
tongue), and blocking the streets, marching in bands beneath banners,
howling hymns.
Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging opinions
in argument, always fell back, frightened him. As long as they had
no opponents of their own kind, they swept the field, they were
intelligible, as the word 'principle' had become. But the appearance
of one body of Statistics invariably brought up another; and the strokes
and counterstrokes were like a play of quarter-staff on the sconce,
to knock all comprehension out of Skepsey. Otherwise he would not
unwillingly have inquired to-morrow into the Statistics of the
controversy between the waters of the wells and of the casks, prepared
to walk over to the victorious, however objectionable that proceeding.
He hoped to question his master some day except that his master would
very naturally have a tendency to sum-up in favour of wine--good wine,
in moderation; just as Miss Graves for the cup of tea--not so
thoughtfully stipulating that it should be good and not too copious.
Statistics are according to their conjurors; they are not independent
bodies, with native colours; they needs must be painted by the different
hands they pass through, and they may be multiplied; a nought or so
counts for nothing with the teller. Skepsey saw that. Yet they can
overcome: even as fictitious battalions, they can overcome. He shrank
from the results of a ciphering match having him for object, and was
ashamed of feeling to Statistics as women to giants; nevertheless he
acknowledged that the badge was upon him, if Miss Graves should beat her
master in her array of figures, to insist on his wearing it, as she
would, she certainly would. And against his internal conviction perhaps;
with the knowledge that the figures were an unfortified display, and his
oath of bondage an unmanly servility, the silliest of ceremonies! He was
shockingly feminine to Statistics.
Mr. Durance despised them: he called them, arguing against Mr. Radnor,
'those emotional things,' not comprehensibly to Skepsey. But Mr.
Durance, a very clever gentleman, could not be right in everything. He
made strange remarks upon his country. Dr. Yatt attributed them to the
state of 'his digestion.
And Mr. Fenellan had said of Mr. Durance that, as 'a barrister wanting
briefs, the speech in him had been bottled too long and was an overripe
wine dripping sour drops through the rotten cork.' Mr. Fenellan said it
laughing, he meant no harm. Skepsey was sure he had the words. He heard
no more than other people hear; he remembered whole sentences, and many:
on one of his runs, this active little machine, quickened by motion to
fire, revived the audible of years back; whatever suited his turn of mind
at the moment rushed to the rapid wheels within him. His master's
business and friends, his country's welfare and advancement, these, with
records, items, anticipations, of the manlier sports to decorate, were
his current themes; all being chopped and tossed and mixed in salad
accordance by his fervour of velocity. And if you would like a further
definition of Genius, think of it as a form of swiftness. It is the
lively young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which
mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the
motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof is
multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your half-
lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then
Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius. What do you say?
Without having a great brain, the measure of it possessed by Skepsey was
alive under strong illumination. In his heart, while doing penance for
his presumptuousness, he believed that he could lead regiments of men.
He was not the army's General, he was the General's Lieutenant, now and
then venturing to suggest a piece of counsel to his Chief. On his own
particular drilled regiments, his Chief may rely; and on his knowledge
of the country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills, dividing
rivers. He had mapped for himself mentally the battles of conquerors in
his favourite historic reading; and he understood the value of a plan,
and the danger of sticking to it, and the advantage of a big army for
flanking; and he manoeuvred a small one cunningly to make it a bolt at
the telling instant. Dartrey Fenellan had explained to him Frederick's
oblique attack, Napoleon's employment of the artillery arm preparatory to
the hurling of the cataract on the spot of weakness, Wellington's
parallel march with Marmont up to the hour of the decisive cut through
the latter at Salamanca; and Skepsey treated his enemy to the like,
deferentially reporting the engagement to a Chief whom his modesty kept
in eminence, for the receiving of the principal honours. As to his men,
of all classes and sorts, they are so supple with training that they
sustain a defeat like the sturdy pugilist a knock off his legs, and up
smiling a minute after--one of the truly beautiful sights on this earth!
They go at the double half a day, never sounding a single pair of bellows
among them. They have their appetites in full control, to eat when they
can, or cheerfully fast. They have healthy frames, you see; and as the
healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that, under any title
you like, they profess the principles--into the bog we go, we have got
round to it!--the principles of those horrible marching and chanting
people!
Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable
country for habitation?
Here was a knot.
Skepsey's head dropped lower, he went as a ram. The sayings of Mr.
Durance about his dear England: that 'her remainder of life is in the
activity of her diseases'--that 'she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise
as to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution': that
'she is animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly'; and so forth:--
charged on him during his wrestle with his problem. And the gentlemen
had said, had permitted himself to say, that our England's recent history
was a provincial apothecary's exhibition of the battle of bane and
antidote. Mr. Durance could hardly mean it. But how could one answer
him when he spoke of the torpor of the people, and of the succeeding
Governments as a change of lacqueys--or the purse-string's lacqueys?
He said, that Old England has taken to the arm-chair for good, and thinks
it her whole business to pronounce opinions and listen to herself;
and that, in the face of an armed Europe, this great nation is living
on sufferance. Oh!
Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.
'Feel quite up to it?' he was asked by his neighbour.
The mover of armed hosts for the defence of the country sat in a third-
class carriage of the train, approaching the first of the stations on the
way to town. He was instantly up to the level of an external world, and
fell into give and take with a burly broad communicative man; located in
London, but born in the North, in view of Durham cathedral, as he thanked
his Lord; who was of the order of pork-butcher; which succulent calling
had carried him down to near upon the borders of Surrey and Sussex, some
miles beyond the new big house of a Mister whose name he had forgotten,
though he had heard it mentioned by an acquaintance interested in the
gentleman's doings. But his object was to have a look at a rare breed of
swine, worth the journey; that didn't run to fat so much as to flavour,
had longer legs, sharp snouts to plump their hams; over from Spain, it
seemed; and the gentleman owning them was for selling them, finding them
wild past correction. But the acquaintance mentioned, who was down to
visit t' other gentleman's big new edifice in workmen's hands, had a
mother, who had been cook to a family, and was now widow of a cook's
shop; ham, beef, and sausages, prime pies to order; and a good specimen
herself; and if ever her son saw her spirit at his bedside, there
wouldn't be room for much else in that chamber--supposing us to keep our
shapes. But he was the right sort of son, anxious to push his mother's
shop where he saw a chance, and do it cheap; and those foreign pigs,
after a disappointment to their importer, might be had pretty cheap, and
were accounted tasty.
Skepsey's main thought was upon war: the man had discoursed of pigs.
He informed the man of his having heard from a scholar, that pigs had
been the cause of more bloody battles than any other animal.
How so? the pork-butcher asked, and said he was not much of a scholar,
and pigs might be provoking, but he had not heard they were a cause of
strife between man and man. For possession of them, Skepsey explained.
Oh! possession! Why, we've heard of bloody battles for the possession of
women! Men will fight for almost anything they care to get or call their
own, the pork-butcher said; and he praised Old England for avoiding war.
Skepsey nodded. How if war is forced on us? Then we fight. Suppose we
are not prepared?--We soon get that up. Skepsey requested him to state
the degree of resistance he might think he could bring against a pair of
skilful fists, in a place out of hearing of the police.
'Say, you!' said the pork-butcher, and sharply smiled, for he was a man
of size.
'I would give you two minutes,' rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently and
kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum vein.
'Rather short allowance, eh, master?' said the bigger man. 'Feel here';
he straightened out his arm and doubled it, raising a proud bridge of
muscle.
Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.
'Twice that, would not help without the science,' he remarked, and let
his arm be gripped in turn.
The pork-butcher's throat sounded, as it were, commas and colons,
punctuations in his reflections, while he tightened fingers along the
iron lump. 'Stringy. You're a wiry one, no mistake.' It was encomium.
With the ingrained contempt of size for a smallness that has not yet
taught it the prostrating lesson, he said: 'Weight tells.'
'In a wrestle,' Skepsey admitted. 'Allow me to say, you would not touch
me.'
'And how do you know I'm not a trifle handy with the maulers myself?'
'You will pardon me for saying, it would be worse for you if you were.'
The pork-butcher was flung backward. 'Are you a Professor, may I
inquire?'
Skepsey rejected the title. 'I can engage to teach young men, upon a
proper observance of first principles.'
'They be hanged!' cried the ruffled pork-butcher. 'Our best men never
got it out of books. Now, you tell me--you've got a spiflicating style
of talk about you--no brag, you tell me--course, the best man wins, if
you mean that: now, if I was one of 'em, and I fetches you a bit of a
flick, how then? Would you be ready to step out with a real Professor?'
'I should claim a fair field,' was the answer, made in modesty.
'And you'd expect to whop me with they there principles of yours?'
'I should expect to.'
'Bang me!' was roared. After a stare at the mild little figure with the
fitfully dead-levelled large grey eyes in front of him, the pork-butcher
resumed: 'Take you for the man you say you be, you're just the man for my
friend Jam and me. He dearly loves to see a set-to, self the same. What
prettier? And if you would be so obliging some day as to favour us with
a display, we'd head a cap conformably, whether you'd the best of it,
according to your expectations, or t' other way:--For there never was
shame in a jolly good licking as the song says: that is, if you take it
and make it appear jolly good. And find you an opponent meet and fit,
never doubt. Ever had the worse of an encounter, sir?'
'Often, Sir.'
'Well, that's good. And it didn't destroy your confidence?'
'Added to it, I hope.'
At this point, it became a crying necessity for Skepsey to escape from
an area of boastfulness, into which he had fallen inadvertently; and he
hastened to apologize 'for his personal reference,' that was intended for
an illustration of our country caught unawares by a highly trained picked
soldiery, inferior in numbers to the patriotic levies, but sharp at the
edge and knowing how to strike. Measure the axe, measure the tree; and
which goes down first?
'Invasion, is it?--and you mean, we're not to hit back?' the pork-butcher
bellowed, and presently secured a murmured approbation from an audience
of three, that had begun to comprehend the dialogue, and strengthened him
in a manner to teach Skepsey the foolishness of ever urging analogies of
too extended a circle to close sharply on the mark. He had no longer a
chance, he was overborne, identified with the fated invader, rolled away
into the chops of the Channel, to be swallowed up entire, and not a rag
left of him, but John Bull tucking up his shirtsleeves on the shingle
beach, ready for a second or a third; crying to them to come on.
Warmed by his Bullish victory, and friendly to the vanquished, the pork-
butcher told Skepsey he should like to see more of him, and introduced
himself on a card Benjamin Shaplow, not far from the Bank.
They parted at the Terminus, where three shrieks of an engine, sounding
like merry messages of the damned to their congeners in the anticipatory
stench of the cab-droppings above, disconnected sane hearing; perverted
it, no doubt. Or else it was the stamp of a particular name on his mind,
which impressed Skepsey, as he bored down the street and across the
bridge, to fancy in recollection, that Mr. Shaplow, when reiterating the
wish for self and friend to witness a display of his cunning with the
fists, had spoken the name of Jarniman. An unusual name yet more than
one Jarniman might well exist. And unlikely that a friend of the pork-
butcher would be the person whom Mr. Radnor first prohibited and then
desired to receive. It hardly mattered:--considering that the Dutch Navy
did really, incredible as it seems now, come sailing a good way up the
River Thames, into the very main artery of Old England. And what thought
the Tower of it? Skepsey looked at the Tower in sympathy, wondering
whether the Tower had seen those impudent Dutch a nice people at home,
he had heard. Mr. Shaplow's Jarniman might actually be Mr. Radnor's,
he inclined to think. At any rate he was now sure of the name.
CHAPTER XI
WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF THEIR
SCOURGE
Fenellan, in a musing exclamation, that was quite spontaneous, had put a
picture on the departing Skepsey, as observed from an end of the
Lakelands upper terrace-walk.
'Queer little water-wagtail it is!' And Lady Grace Halley and Miss
Graves and Mrs. Cormyn, snugly silken dry ones, were so taken with the
pretty likeness after hearing Victor call the tripping dripping creature
the happiest man in England, that they nursed it in their minds for a
Bewick tailpiece to the chapter of a pleasant rural day. It imbedded the
day in an idea that it had been rural.
We are indebted almost for construction to those who will define us
briefly: we are but scattered leaves to the general comprehension of us
until such a work of binding and labelling is done. And should the
definition be not so correct as brevity pretends to make it at one
stroke, we are at least rendered portable; thus we pass into the
conceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.
Anecdotes of England's happiest man were related, outlines of his
personal history requested. His nomination in chief among the
traditionally very merry Islanders was hardly borne out by the tale of
his enchainment with a drunken yokefellow--unless upon the Durance
version of the felicity of his countrymen; still, the water-wagtail
carried it, Skepsey trotted into memories. Heroes conducted up Fame's
temple-steps by ceremonious historians, who are studious, when the
platform is reached, of the art of setting them beneath the flambeau
of a final image, before thrusting them inside to be rivetted on their
pedestals, have an excellent chance of doing the same, let but the
provident narrators direct that image to paint the thing a moth-like
humanity desires, in the thing it shrinks from. Miss Priscilla Graves
now fastened her meditations upon Skepsey; and it was important to him.
Tobacco withdrew the haunting shadow of the Rev. Septimus Barmby from
Nesta. She strolled beside Louise de Seilles, to breathe sweet-sweet in
the dear friend's ear and tell her she loved her. The presence of the
German had, without rousing animosity, damped the young Frenchwoman, even
to a revulsion when her feelings had been touched by hearing praise of
her France, and wounded by the subjects of the praise. She bore the
national scar, which is barely skin-clothing of a gash that will not heal
since her country was overthrown and dismembered. Colney Durance could
excuse the unreasonableness in her, for it had a dignity, and she
controlled it, and quietly suffered, trusting to the steady, tireless,
concentrated aim of her France. In the Gallic mind of our time, France
appears as a prematurely buried Glory, that heaves the mound oppressing
breath and cannot cease; and calls hourly, at times keenly, to be
remembered, rescued from the pain and the mould-spots of that foul
sepulture. Mademoiselle and Colney were friends, partly divided by her
speaking once of revanche; whereupon he assumed the chair of the
Moralist, with its right to lecture, and went over to the enemy; his talk
savoured of a German. Our holding of the balance, taking two sides, is
incomprehensible to a people quivering with the double wound to body and
soul. She was of Breton blood. Cymric enough was in Nesta to catch any
thrill from her and join to her mood, if it hung out a colour sad or gay,
and was noble, as any mood of this dear Louise would surely be.
Nataly was not so sympathetic. Only the Welsh and pure Irish are quick
at the feelings of the Celtic French. Nataly came of a Yorkshire stock;
she had the bravery, humaneness and generous temper of our civilized
North, and a taste for mademoiselle's fine breeding, with a distaste for
the singular air of superiority in composure which it was granted to
mademoiselle to wear with an unassailable reserve when the roughness of
the commercial boor was obtrusive. She said of her to Colney, as they
watched the couple strolling by the lake below: 'Nesta brings her out of
her frosts. I suppose it's the presence of Dr. Schlesien. I have known
it the same after an evening of Wagner's music.'
'Richard Wagner Germanized ridicule of the French when they were down,'
said Colney. 'She comes of a blood that never forgives.'
'"Never forgives" is horrible to think of! I fancied you liked your
"Kelts," as you call them.'
Colney seized on a topic that shelved a less agreeable one that he saw
coming. 'You English won't descend to understand what does not resemble
you. The French are in a state of feverish patriotism. You refuse to
treat them for a case of fever. They are lopped of a limb: you tell them
to be at rest!'
'You know I am fond of them.'
'And the Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries;
look at Ireland, look at Wales, and the Keltic Scot. Have you heard them
talk? It happened in the year 1400: it's alive to them as if it were
yesterday. Old History is as dead to the English as their first father.
They beg for the privilege of pulling the forelock to the bearers of the
titles of the men who took their lands from them and turn them to the
uses of cattle. The Saxon English had, no doubt, a heavier thrashing
than any people allowed to subsist ever received: you see it to this day;
the crick of the neck at the name of a lord is now concealed and denied,
but they have it and betray the effects; and it's patent in their
Journals, all over their literature. Where it's not seen, another
blood's at work. The Kelt won't accept the form of slavery. Let him
be servile, supple, cunning, treacherous, and to appearance time-serving,
he will always remember his day of manly independence and who robbed him:
he is the poetic animal of the races of modern men.'
'You give him Pagan colours.'
'Natural colours. He does not offer the other cheek or turn his back to
be kicked after a knock to the ground. Instead of asking him to forgive,
which he cannot do, you must teach him to admire. A mercantile community
guided by Political Economy from the ledger to the banquet presided over
by its Dagon Capital, finds that difficult. However, there 's the secret
of him; that I respect in him. His admiration of an enemy or oppressor
doing great deeds, wins him entirely. He is an active spirit, not your
negative passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible. And his faults, short
of ferocity, are amusing.'
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