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Georg Ebers - "A Thorny Path, Volume 9."

Richard Hakluyt - "The Discovery of Muscovy etc."

Anonymous - "Beowulf"

Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg - "Graded Lessons in English"

The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Complete







CHAPTER II

AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT

That night stands up without any clear traces about it or near it, like
the brazen castle of romance round which the sea-tide flows. My father
must have borne me miles along the road; he must have procured food for
me; I have an idea of feeling a damp forehead and drinking new milk, and
by-and-by hearing a roar of voices or vehicles, and seeing a dog that
went alone through crowded streets without a master, doing as he pleased,
and stopping every other dog he met. He took his turning, and my father
and I took ours. We were in a house that, to my senses, had the smell of
dark corners, in a street where all the house-doors were painted black,
and shut with a bang. Italian organ-men and milk-men paraded the street
regularly, and made it sound hollow to their music. Milk, and no cows
anywhere; numbers of people, and no acquaintances among them; my thoughts
were occupied by the singularity of such things.

My father could soon make me forget that I was transplanted; he could act
dog, tame rabbit, fox, pony, and a whole nursery collection alive, but he
was sometimes absent for days, and I was not of a temper to be on
friendly terms with those who were unable to captivate my imagination as
he had done. When he was at home I rode him all round the room and
upstairs to bed, I lashed him with a whip till he frightened me, so real
was his barking; if I said 'Menagerie' he became a caravan of wild
beasts; I undid a button of his waistcoat, and it was a lion that made a
spring, roaring at me; I pulled his coat-tails and off I went tugging at
an old bear that swung a hind leg as he turned, in the queerest way, and
then sat up and beating his breast sent out a mew-moan. Our room was
richer to me than all the Grange while these performances were going
forward. His monkey was almost as wonderful as his bear, only he was too
big for it, and was obliged to aim at reality in his representation of
this animal by means of a number of breakages; a defect that brought our
landlady on the scene. The enchantment of my father's companionship
caused me to suffer proportionately in his absence. During that period of
solitude, my nursemaid had to order me to play, and I would stumble about
and squat in the middle of the floor, struck suddenly by the marvel of
the difference between my present and my other home. My father entered
into arrangements with a Punch and Judy man for him to pay me regular
morning visits opposite our window; yet here again his genius defeated
his kind intentions; for happening once to stand by my side during the
progress of the show, he made it so vivid to me by what he said and did,
that I saw no fun in it without him: I used to dread the heralding crow
of Punch if he was away, and cared no longer for wooden heads being
knocked ever so hard.

On Sundays we walked to the cathedral, and this was a day with a delight
of its own for me. He was never away on the Sunday. Both of us attired in
our best, we walked along the streets hand in hand; my father led me
before the cathedral monuments, talking in a low tone of British
victories, and commending the heroes to my undivided attention. I
understood very early that it was my duty to imitate them. While we
remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and dropped
his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce Nelson's name or
some other great man's and this recurred regularly. 'What are we for
now?' he would ask me as we left our house. I had to decide whether we
took a hero or an author, which I soon learnt to do with capricious
resolution. We were one Sunday for Shakespeare; another for Nelson or
Pitt. 'Nelson, papa,' was my most frequent rejoinder, and he never
dissented, but turned his steps toward Nelson's cathedral dome, and
uncovered his head there, and said: 'Nelson, then, to-day'; and we went
straight to his monument to perform the act of homage. I chose Nelson in
preference to the others because near bed-time in the evening my father
told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither Pitt nor Shakespeare
lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge white bear on the ice to
make himself interesting. I named them occasionally out of compassion,
and to please my father, who said that they ought to have a turn. They
were, he told me, in the habit of paying him a visit, whenever I had
particularly neglected them, to learn the grounds for my disregard of
their claims, and they urged him to intercede with me, and imparted many
of their unpublished adventures, so that I should be tempted to give them
a chance on the following Sunday.

'Great Will,' my father called Shakespeare, and 'Slender Billy,' Pitt.
The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over
the park after it by the light of Bardolph's nose, upon which they put an
extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody
groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful
mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but
everybody in the park called him, 'Father William'; and when he wanted to
know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives
me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in
the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcase; Hamlet
(the fact was impressed on me) offered him a three-legged stool; and a
number of kings and knights and ladies lit their torches from Bardolph;
and away they flew, distracting the keepers and leaving Will and his
troop to the deer. That poor thing died from a different weapon at each
recital, though always with a flow of blood and a successful dash of his
antlers into Falstaff; and to hear Falstaff bellow! But it was mournful
to hear how sorry Great Will was over the animal he had slain. He spoke
like music. I found it pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole
scene was lighted up by Bardolph's nose. When I was just bursting out
crying--for the deer's tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at
his side; he had little ones at home--Great Will remembered his
engagement to sell Shylock a pound of the carcase; determined that no Jew
should eat of it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a
pound, and he said the Jew would not see the difference: Falstaff only
got off by hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life
would make him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick.

My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air, and
such liveliness--he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed King Lear
tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of
Falstaff--that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them,
which was better than understanding them. I required some help from him
to see that Hamlet's offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish moment
of the chase, was laughable. He taught me what to think of it by pitching
Great Will's voice high, and Hamlet's very low. By degrees I got some
unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakespeare.

There never was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under
eight or ten years old. He could guess on Saturday whether I should name
William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions, 'Slender Billy,' as
I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up for the dulness of his
high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me
solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his day a passion. If I named
him, my father would say, 'W. P., otherwise S. B., was born in the year
so-and-so; now,' and he went to the cupboard, 'in the name of Politics,
take this and meditate upon him.' The shops being all shut on Sunday, he
certainly bought it, anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and, as
soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his
repeating a couplet,

'Billy Pitt took a cake and a raspberry jam,
When he heard they had taken Seringapatam.'

At any rate, the rumour of his having done so, at periods of strong
excitement, led to the inexplicable display of foresight on my father's
part.

My meditations upon Pitt were, under this influence, favourable to the
post of a Prime Minister, but it was merely appetite that induced me to
choose him; I never could imagine a grandeur in his office,
notwithstanding my father's eloquent talk of ruling a realm, shepherding
a people, hurling British thunderbolts. The day's discipline was, that
its selected hero should reign the undisputed monarch of it, so when I
was for Pitt, I had my tart as he used to have it, and no story, for he
had none, and I think my idea of the ruler of a realm presented him to me
as a sort of shadow about a pastrycook's shop. But I surprised people by
speaking of him. I made remarks to our landlady which caused her to throw
up her hands and exclaim that I was astonishing. She would always add a
mysterious word or two in the hearing of my nursemaid or any friend of
hers who looked into my room to see me. After my father had got me
forward with instructions on the piano, and exercises in early English
history and the book of the Peerage, I became the wonder of the house. I
was put up on a stool to play 'In my Cottage near a Wood,' or 'Cherry
Ripe,' and then, to show the range of my accomplishments, I was asked,
'And who married the Dowager Duchess of Dewlap?' and I answered, 'John
Gregg Wetherall, Esquire, and disgraced the family.' Then they asked me
how I accounted for her behaviour.

'It was because the Duke married a dairymaid,' I replied, always tossing
up my chin at that. My father had concocted the questions and prepared me
for the responses, but the effect was striking, both upon his visitors
and the landlady's. Gradually my ear grew accustomed to her invariable
whisper on these occasions. 'Blood Rile,' she said; and her friends all
said 'No!' like the run of a finger down a fiddlestring.

A gentleman of his acquaintance called on him one evening to take him out
for a walk. My father happened to be playing with me when this gentleman
entered our room: and he jumped up from his hands and knees, and abused
him for intruding on his privacy, but afterwards he introduced him to me
as Shylock's great-great-great-grandson, and said that Shylock was
satisfied with a pound, and his descendant wanted two hundred pounds, or
else all his body: and this, he said, came of the emigration of the
family from Venice to England. My father only seemed angry, for he went
off with Shylock's very great grandson arm-in-arm, exclaiming, 'To the
Rialto!' When I told Mrs. Waddy about the visitor, she said, 'Oh, dear!
oh, dear! then I'm afraid your sweet papa won't return very soon, my
pretty pet.' We waited a number of days, until Mrs. Waddy received a
letter from him. She came full-dressed into my room, requesting me to
give her twenty kisses for papa, and I looked on while she arranged her
blue bonnet at the glass. The bonnet would not fix in its place. At last
she sank down crying in a chair, and was all brown silk, and said that
how to appear before a parcel of dreadful men, and perhaps a live duke
into the bargain, was more than she knew, and more than could be expected
of a lone widow woman. 'Not for worlds!' she answered my petition to
accompany her. She would not, she said, have me go to my papa there for
anything on earth; my papa would perish at the sight of me; I was not
even to wish to go. And then she exclaimed, 'Oh, the blessed child's poor
papa!' and that people were cruel to him, and would never take into
account his lovely temper, and that everybody was his enemy, when he
ought to be sitting with the highest in the land. I had realized the
extremity of my forlorn state on a Sunday that passed empty of my father,
which felt like his having gone for ever. My nursemaid came in to assist
in settling Mrs. Waddy's bonnet above the six crisp curls, and while they
were about it I sat quiet, plucking now and then at the brown silk,
partly to beg to go with it, partly in jealousy and love at the thought
of its seeing him from whom I was so awfully separated. Mrs. Waddy took
fresh kisses off my lips, assuring me that my father would have them in
twenty minutes, and I was to sit and count the time. My nursemaid let her
out. I pretended to be absorbed in counting, till I saw Mrs. Waddy pass
by the window. My heart gave a leap of pain. I found the street-door open
and no one in the passage, and I ran out, thinking that Mrs. Waddy would
be obliged to take me if she discovered me by her side in the street.

I was by no means disconcerted at not seeing her immediately. Running on
from one street to another, I took the turnings with unhesitating
boldness, as if I had a destination in view. I must have been out near an
hour before I understood that Mrs. Waddy had eluded me; so I resolved to
enjoy the shop-windows with the luxurious freedom of one whose
speculations on those glorious things all up for show are no longer
distracted by the run of time and a nursemaid. Little more than a glance
was enough, now that I knew I could stay as long as I liked. If I stopped
at all, it was rather to exhibit the bravado of liberty than to
distinguish any particular shop with my preference: all were equally
beautiful; so were the carriages; so were the people. Ladies frequently
turned to look at me, perhaps because I had no covering on my head; but
they did not interest me in the least. I should have been willing to ask
them or any one where the Peerage lived, only my mind was quite full, and
I did not care. I felt sure that a great deal of walking would ultimately
bring me to St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey; to anything else I was
indifferent.

Toward sunset my frame was struck as with an arrow by the sensations of
hunger on passing a cook's-shop. I faltered along, hoping to reach a
second one, without knowing why I had dragged my limbs from the first.
There was a boy in ragged breeches, no taller than myself, standing
tiptoe by the window of a very large and brilliant pastry-cook's. He
persuaded me to go into the shop and ask for a cake. I thought it
perfectly natural to do so, being hungry; but when I reached the counter
and felt the size of the shop, I was abashed, and had to repeat the
nature of my petition twice to the young woman presiding there.

'Give you a cake, little boy?' she said. 'We don't give cakes, we sell
them.'

'Because I am hungry,' said I, pursuing my request.

Another young woman came, laughing and shaking lots of ringlets.

'Don't you see he's not a common boy? he doesn't whine,' she remarked,
and handed me a stale bun, saying, 'Here, Master Charles, and you needn't
say thank you.'

'My name is Harry Richmond, and I thank you very much,' I replied.

I heard her say, as I went out, 'You can see he's a gentleman's son.' The
ragged boy was awaiting me eagerly. 'Gemini! you're a lucky one,' he
cried; 'here, come along, curly-poll.' I believe that I meant to share
the bun with him, but of course he could not be aware of my beneficent
intentions: so he treated me as he thought I was for treating him, and
making one snatch at the bun, ran off cramming it into his mouth. I stood
looking at any hand. I learnt in that instant what thieving was, and
begging, and hunger, for I would have perished rather than have asked for
another cake, and as I yearned for it in absolute want of food, the boy's
ungenerous treatment of me came down in a cloud on my reason. I found
myself being led through the crush of people, by an old gentleman, to
whom I must have related an extraordinary rigmarole. He shook his head,
saying that I was unintelligible; but the questions he put to me, 'Why
had I no hat on in the open street?--Where did my mother live?--What was
I doing out alone in London?' were so many incitements to
autobiographical composition to an infant mind, and I tumbled out my
history afresh each time that he spoke. He led me into a square, stooping
his head to listen all the while; but when I perceived that we had
quitted the region of shops I made myself quite intelligible by stopping
short and crying: 'I am so hungry.' He nodded and said, 'It 's no use
cross-examining an empty stomach. You'll do me the favour to dine with
me, my little man. We'll talk over your affairs by-and-by.'

My alarm at having left the savoury street of shops was not soothed until
I found myself sitting at table with him, and a nice young lady, and an
old one who wore a cap, and made loud remarks on my garments and
everything I did. I was introduced to them as the little boy dropped from
the sky. The old gentleman would not allow me to be questioned before I
had eaten. It was a memorable feast. I had soup, fish, meat, and pastry,
and, for the first time in my life, a glass of wine. How they laughed to
see me blink and cough after I had swallowed half the glass like water.
At once my tongue was unloosed. I seemed to rise right above the roofs of
London, beneath which I had been but a wandering atom a few minutes ago.
I talked of my wonderful father, and Great Will, and Pitt, and the
Peerage. I amazed them with my knowledge. When I finished a long recital
of Great Will's chase of the deer, by saying that I did not care about
politics (I meant, in my own mind, that Pitt was dull in comparison),
they laughed enormously, as if I had fired them off. 'Do you know what
you are, sir?' said the old gentleman; he had frowning eyebrows and a
merry mouth 'you're a comical character.'

I felt interested in him, and asked him what he was. He informed me that
he was a lawyer, and ready to be pantaloon to my clown, if I would engage
him.

'Are you in the Peerage?' said I.

'Not yet,' he replied.

'Well, then,' said I, 'I know nothing about you.'

The young lady screamed with laughter. 'Oh, you funny little boy; you
killing little creature!' she said, and coming round to me, lifted me out
of my chair, and wanted to know if I knew how to kiss.

'Oh, yes; I've been taught that,' said I, giving the salute without
waiting for the invitation; 'but,' I added, 'I don't care about it much.'

She was indignant, and told me she was going to be offended, so I let her
understand that I liked being kissed and played with in the morning
before I was up, and if she would come to my house ever so early, she
would find me lying next the wall and ready for her.

'And who lies outside?' she asked.

'That's my papa,' I was beginning to say, but broke the words with a sob,
for I seemed to be separated from him now by the sea itself.

They petted me tenderly. My story was extracted by alternate leading
questions from the old gentleman and timely caresses from the ladies. I
could tell them everything except the name of the street where I lived.
My midnight excursion from the house of my grandfather excited them
chiefly; also my having a mother alive who perpetually fanned her face
and wore a ball-dress and a wreath; things that I remembered of my
mother. The ladies observed that it was clear I was a romantic child. I
noticed that the old gentleman said 'Humph,' very often, and his eyebrows
were like a rook's nest in a tree when I spoke of my father walking away
with Shylock's descendant and not since returning to me. A big book was
fetched out of his library, in which he read my grandfather's name. I
heard him mention it aloud. I had been placed on a stool beside a
tea-tray near the fire, and there I saw the old red house of Riversley,
and my mother dressed in white, and my aunt Dorothy; and they all
complained that I had ceased to love them, and must go to bed, to which I
had no objection. Somebody carried me up and undressed me, and promised
me a great game of kissing in the morning.

The next day in the strange house I heard that the old gentleman had sent
one of his clerks down to my grandfather at Riversley, and communicated
with the constables in London; and, by-and-by, Mrs. Waddy arrived, having
likewise visited those authorities, one of whom supported her claims upon
me. But the old gentleman wished to keep me until his messenger returned
from Riversley. He made all sorts of pretexts. In the end, he insisted on
seeing my father, and Mrs. Waddy, after much hesitation, and even
weeping, furnished the address: upon hearing which, spoken aside to him,
he said, 'I thought so.' Mrs. Waddy entreated him to be respectful to my
father, who was, she declared, his superior, and, begging everybody's
pardon present, the superior of us all, through no sin of his own, that
caused him to be so unfortunate; and a real Christian and pattern, in
spite of outsides, though as true a gentleman as ever walked, and by
rights should be amongst the highest. She repeated 'amongst the highest'
reprovingly, with the ears of barley in her blue bonnet shaking, and her
hands clasped tight in her lap. Old Mr. Bannerbridge (that was the old
gentleman's name) came back very late from his visit to my father, so
late that he said it would be cruel to let me go out in the street after
my bed-time. Mrs. Waddy consented to my remaining, on the condition of my
being surrendered to her at nine o'clock, and no later, the following
morning.

I was assured by Mr. Bannerbridge that my father's health and appetite
were excellent; he gave me a number of unsatisfying messages, all the
rest concerning his interview he whispered to his daughter and his
sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from
Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the
friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved
of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two
battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a
great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed
hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a whole day in
different conveyances, the last of which landed us miles away from
London, at the gates of an old drooping, mossed and streaked farmhouse,
that was like a wall-flower in colour.




CHAPTER III

DIPWELL FARM

In rain or in sunshine this old farmhouse had a constant resemblance to a
wall-flower; and it had the same moist earthy smell, except in the
kitchen, where John and Martha Thresher lived, apart from their
furniture. All the fresh eggs, and the butter stamped, with three bees,
and the pots of honey, the fowls, and the hare lifted out of the hamper
by his hind legs, and the country loaves smelling heavenly, which used to
come to Mrs. Waddy's address in London, and appear on my father's table,
were products of Dipwell farm, and presents from her sister, Martha
Thresher. On receiving this information I felt at home in a moment, and
asked right off, 'How long am I to stay here?--Am I going away
tomorrow?--What's going to be done with me?' The women found these
questions of a youthful wanderer touching. Between kissings and promises
of hens to feed, and eggs that were to come of it, I settled into
contentment. A strong impression was made on me by Mrs. Waddy's saying,
'Here, Master Harry, your own papa will come for you; and you may be sure
he will, for I have his word he will, and he's not one to break it,
unless his country's against him; and for his darling boy he'd march
against cannons. So here you'll sit and wait for him, won't you?' I sat
down immediately, looking up. Mrs. Waddy and Mrs. Thresher raised their
hands. I had given them some extraordinary proof of my love for my
father. The impression I received was, that sitting was the thing to
conjure him to me.

'Where his heart's not concerned,' Mrs. Waddy remarked of me
flatteringly, 'he's shrewd as a little schoolmaster.'

'He've a bird's-nesting eye,' said Mrs. Thresher, whose face I was
studying.

John Thresher wagered I would be a man before either of them reached that
goal. But whenever he spoke he suffered correction on account of his
English.

'More than his eating and his drinking, that child's father worrits about
his learning to speak the language of a British gentleman,' Mrs. Waddy
exclaimed. 'Before that child your h's must be like the panting of an
engine--to please his father. He 'd stop me carrying the dinner-tray on
meat-dish hot, and I'm to repeat what I said, to make sure the child
haven't heard anything ungrammatical. The child's nursemaid he'd lecture
so, the poor girl would come down to me ready to bend double, like a
bundle of nothing, his observations so took the pride out of her. That's
because he 's a father who knows his duty to the child:--"Child!" says
he, "man, ma'am." It's just as you, John, when you sow your seed you
think of your harvest. So don't take it ill of me, John; I beg of you be
careful of your English. Turn it over as you're about to speak.'

'Change loads on the road, you mean,' said John Thresher. 'Na, na, he's
come to settle nigh a weedy field, if you like, but his crop ain't nigh
reaping yet. Hark you, Mary Waddy, who're a widde, which 's as much as
say, an unocc'pied mind, there's cockney, and there's country, and there
's school. Mix the three, strain, and throw away the sediment. Now, yon
's my view.