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Gilbert Parker - "The Battle Of The Strong [A Romance of Two Kingdoms], Volume 4."

Carl Schurz - "Report on the Condition of the South"

Francis Hueffer (translator) - "Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1"

Unknown - "The Bible, King James version, Book 16: Nehemiah"

The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Complete

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




His wife and Mrs. Waddy said reflectively, in a breath, 'True!'

'Drink or no, that's the trick o' brewery,' he added.

They assented. They began praising him, too, like meek creatures.

'What John says is worth listening to, Mary. You may be over-careful. A
stew's a stew, and not a boiling to shreds, and you want a steady fire,
and not a furnace.'

'Oh, I quite agree with John, Martha: we must take the good and the evil
in a world like this.'

'Then I'm no scholar, and you're at ease,' said John.

Mrs. Waddy put her mouth to his ear.

Up went his eyebrows, wrinkling arches over a petrified stare.

In some way she had regained her advantage. 'Art sure of it?' he
inquired.

'Pray, don't offend me by expressing a doubt of it,' she replied, bowing.

John Thresher poised me in the very centre of his gaze. He declared he
would never have guessed that, and was reproved, inasmuch as he might
have guessed it. He then said that I could not associate with any of the
children thereabout, and my dwelling in the kitchen was not to be thought
of. The idea of my dwelling in the kitchen seemed to be a serious
consideration with Mrs. Martha likewise. I was led into the rooms of
state. The sight of them was enough. I stamped my feet for the kitchen,
and rarely in my life have been happier than there, dining and supping
with John and Martha and the farm-labourers, expecting my father across
the hills, and yet satisfied with the sun. To hope, and not be impatient,
is really to believe, and this was my feeling in my father's absence. I
knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him. He had the world beyond
the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from the sounding
mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter the wild
ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of the
copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as the
History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their
venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He could not tell me whether he
meant as old as the book of English History; he fancied he did, for the
furrow-track follows the plough close upon; but no one exactly could
swear when that (the book) was put together. At my suggestion, he fixed
the trees to the date of the Heptarchy, a period of heavy ploughing. Thus
begirt by Saxon times, I regarded Riversley as a place of extreme
baldness, a Greenland, untrodden by my Alfred and my Harold. These heroes
lived in the circle of Dipwell, confidently awaiting the arrival of my
father. He sent me once a glorious letter. Mrs. Waddy took one of John
Thresher's pigeons to London, and in the evening we beheld the bird cut
the sky like an arrow, bringing round his neck a letter warm from him I
loved. Planet communicating with planet would be not more wonderful to
men than words of his to me, travelling in such a manner. I went to
sleep, and awoke imagining the bird bursting out of heaven.

Meanwhile there was an attempt to set me moving again. A strange young
man was noticed in the neighbourhood of the farm, and he accosted me at
Leckham fair. 'I say, don't we know one another? How about your
grandfather the squire, and your aunt, and Mr. Bannerbridge? I've got
news for you.'

Not unwilling to hear him, I took his hand, leaving my companion, the
miller's little girl, Mabel Sweetwinter, at a toy-stand, while Bob, her
brother and our guardian, was shying sticks in a fine attitude. 'Yes, and
your father, too,' said the young man; 'come along and see him; you can
run?' I showed him how fast. We were pursued by Bob, who fought for me,
and won me, and my allegiance instantly returned to him. He carried me
almost the whole of the way back to Dipwell. Women must feel for the
lucky heroes who win them, something of what I felt for mine; I kissed
his bloody face, refusing to let him wipe it. John Thresher said to me at
night, 'Ay, now you've got a notion of boxing; and will you believe it,
Master Harry, there's people fools enough to want to tread that ther'
first-rate pastime under foot? I speak truth, and my word for 't, they'd
better go in petticoats. Let clergymen preach as in duty bound; you and
I'll uphold a manful sport, we will, and a cheer for Bob!'

He assured me, and he had my entire faith, that boxing was England's
natural protection from the foe. The comfort of having one like Bob to
defend our country from invasion struck me as inexpressible. Lighted by
John Thresher's burning patriotism, I entered the book of the History of
England at about the pace of a carthorse, with a huge waggon at my heels
in the shape of John. There was no moving on until he was filled. His
process of receiving historical knowledge was to fight over again the
personages who did injury to our honour as a nation, then shake hands and
be proud of them. 'For where we ain't quite successful we're cunning,' he
said; 'and we not being able to get rid of William the Conqueror, because
he's got a will of his own and he won't budge, why, we takes and makes
him one of ourselves; and no disgrace in that, I should hope! He paid us
a compliment, don't you see, Master Harry? he wanted to be an Englishman.
"Can you this?" says we, sparrin' up to him. "Pretty middlin'," says he,
"and does it well." "Well then," says we, "then you're one of us, and
we'll beat the world"; and did so.'

John Thresher had a laborious mind; it cost him beads on his forehead to
mount to these heights of meditation. He told me once that he thought
one's country was like one's wife: you were born in the first, and
married to the second, and had to learn all about them afterwards, ay,
and make the best of them. He recommended me to mix, strain, and throw
away the sediment, for that was the trick o' brewery. Every puzzle that
beset him in life resolved to this cheerful precept, the value of which,
he said, was shown by clear brown ale, the drink of the land. Even as a
child I felt that he was peculiarly an Englishman. Tales of injustice
done on the Niger river would flush him in a heat of wrath till he cried
out for fresh taxes to chastise the villains. Yet at the sight of the
beggars at his gates he groaned at the taxes existing, and enjoined me to
have pity on the poor taxpayer when I lent a hand to patch the laws. I
promised him I would unreservedly, with a laugh, but with a sincere
intention to legislate in a direct manner on his behalf. He, too, though
he laughed, thanked me kindly.

I was clad in black for my distant mother. Mrs. Waddy brought down a
young man from London to measure me, so that my mourning attire might be
in the perfect cut of fashion. 'The child's papa would strip him if he
saw him in a country tailor's funeral suit,' she said, and seemed to blow
a wind of changes on me that made me sure my father had begun to stir up
his part of the world. He sent me a prayer in his own handwriting to say
for my mother in heaven. I saw it flying up between black edges whenever
I shut my eyes. Martha Thresher dosed me for liver. Mrs. Waddy found me
pale by the fireside, and prescribed iron. Both agreed upon high-feeding,
and the apothecary agreed with both in everything, which reconciled them,
for both good women loved me so heartily they were near upon disputing
over the medicines I was to consume.

Under such affectionate treatment I betrayed the alarming symptom that my
imagination was set more on my mother than on my father: I could not help
thinking that for any one to go to heaven was stranger than to drive to
Dipwell, and I had this idea when my father was clasping me in his arms;
but he melted it like snow off the fields. He came with postillions in
advance of him wearing crape rosettes, as did the horses. We were in the
cricket-field, where Dipwell was playing its first match of the season,
and a Dipwell lad, furious to see the elevens commit such a breach of the
rules and decency as to troop away while the game was hot, and surround
my father, flung the cricket-ball into the midst and hit two or three of
the men hard. My father had to shield him from the consequences. He said
he liked that boy; and he pleaded for him so winningly and funnily that
the man who was hurt most laughed loudest.

Standing up in the carriage, and holding me by the hand, he addressed
them by their names: 'Sweetwinter, I thank you for your attention to my
son; and you, Thribble; and you, my man; and you, Baker; Rippengale, and
you; and you, Jupp'; as if he knew them personally. It was true he nodded
at random. Then he delivered a short speech, and named himself a regular
subscriber to their innocent pleasures. He gave them money, and scattered
silver coin among the boys and girls, and praised John Thresher, and
Martha, his wife, for their care of me, and pointing to the chimneys of
the farm, said that the house there was holy to him from henceforth, and
he should visit it annually if possible, but always in the month of May,
and in the shape of his subscription, as certain as the cowslip. The men,
after their fit of cheering, appeared unwilling to recommence their play,
so he alighted and delivered the first ball, and then walked away with my
hand in his, saying:

'Yes, my son, we will return to them tenfold what they have done for you.
The eleventh day of May shall be a day of pleasure for Dipwell while I
last, and you will keep it in memory of me when I am gone. And now to see
the bed you have slept in.'

Martha Thresher showed him the bed, showed him flowers I had planted, and
a Spanish chestnut tree just peeping.

'Ha!' said he, beaming at every fresh sight of my doings: 'madam, I am
your life-long debtor and friend!' He kissed her on the cheek.

John Thresher cried out: 'Why, dame, you trembles like a maid.'

She spoke very faintly, and was red in the face up to the time of our
departure. John stood like a soldier. We drove away from a cheering crowd
of cricketers and farm-labourers, as if discharged from a great gun. 'A
royal salvo!' said my father, and asked me earnestly whether I had
forgotten to reward and take a particular farewell of any one of my
friends. I told him I had forgotten no one, and thought it was true,
until on our way up the sandy lane, which offered us a last close view of
the old wall-flower farm front, I saw little Mabel Sweetwinter, often my
playfellow and bedfellow, a curly-headed girl, who would have danced on
Sunday for a fairing, and eaten gingerbread nuts during a ghost-story.
She was sitting by a furze-bush in flower, cherishing in her lap a lamb
that had been worried. She looked half up at me, and kept looking so, but
would not nod. Then good-bye, thought I, and remembered her look when I
had forgotten that of all the others.




CHAPTER IV

I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR

Though I had not previously seen a postillion in my life, I gazed on the
pair bobbing regularly on their horses before me, without a thought upon
the marvel of their sudden apparition and connection with my fortunes. I
could not tire of hearing the pleasant music of the many feet at the
trot, and tried to explain to my father that the men going up and down
made it like a piano that played of itself. He laughed and kissed me; he
remembered having once shown me the inside of a piano when the keys were
knocked. My love for him as we drove into London had a recognized
footing: I perceived that he was my best friend and only true companion,
besides his being my hero. The wicked men who had parted us were no
longer able to do harm, he said. I forgot, in my gladness at their
defeat, to ask what had become of Shylock's descendant.

Mrs. Waddy welcomed us when we alighted. Do not imagine that it was at
the door of her old house. It was in a wide street opening on a splendid
square, and pillars were before the houses, and inside there was the
enchantment of a little fountain playing thin as whipcord, among ferns,
in a rock-basin under a window that glowed with kings of England, copied
from boys' history books. All the servants were drawn up in the hall to
do homage to me. They seemed less real and living than the wonder of the
sweet-smelling chairs, the birds, and the elegant dogs. Richest of
treats, a monkey was introduced to me. 'It 's your papa's whim,' Mrs.
Waddy said, resignedly; 'he says he must have his jester. Indeed it is no
joke to me.'

Yet she smiled happily, though her voice was melancholy. From her I now
learnt that my name was Richmond Roy, and not Harry Richmond. I said,
'Very well,' for I was used to change. Everybody in the house wore a
happy expression of countenance, except the monkey, who was too busy. As
we mounted the stairs I saw more kings of England painted on the
back-windows. Mrs. Waddy said: 'It is considered to give a monarchical
effect,'--she coughed modestly after the long word, and pursued: 'as it
should.' I insisted upon going to the top floor, where I expected to find
William the Conqueror, and found him; but that strong connecting link
between John Thresher and me presented himself only to carry my
recollections of the Dipwell of yesterday as far back into the past as
the old Norman days.

'And down go all the kings, downstairs,' I said, surveying them
consecutively.

'Yes,' she replied, in a tone that might lead one to think it their
lamentable fate. 'And did the people look at you as you drove along
through the streets, Master Richmond?'

I said 'Yes,' in turn; and then we left off answering, but questioned one
another, which is a quicker way of getting at facts; I know it is with
boys and women. Mrs. Waddy cared much less to hear of Dipwell and its
inhabitants than of the sensation created everywhere by our equipage. I
noticed that when her voice was not melancholy her face was. She showed
me a beautiful little pink bed, having a crown over it, in a room opening
to my father's. Twenty thousand magnificent dreams seemed to flash their
golden doors when I knew that the bed was mine. I thought it almost as
nice as a place by my father's side.

'Don't you like it, Mrs. Waddy?' I said.

She smiled and sighed. 'Like it? Oh! yes, my dear, to be sure I do. I
only hope it won't vanish.' She simpered and looked sad.

I had too many distractions, or I should have asked her whether my
amazing and delightful new home had ever shown symptoms of vanishing; it
appeared to me, judging from my experience, that nothing moved violently
except myself, and my principal concern was lest any one should carry me
away at a moment's notice. In the evening I was introduced to a company
of gentlemen, who were drinking wine after dinner with my father. They
clapped their hands and laughed immoderately on my telling them that I
thought those kings of England who could not find room on the windows
must have gone down to the cellars.

'They are going,' my father said. He drank off a glassful of wine and
sighed prodigiously. 'They are going, gentlemen, going there, like good
wine, like old Port, which they tell us is going also. Favour me by
drinking to the health of Richmond Roy the younger.'

They drank to me heartily, but my father had fallen mournful before I
left the room.

Pony-riding, and lessons in boxing and wrestling, and lessons in French
from a French governess, at whose appearance my father always seemed to
be beginning to dance a minuet, so exuberantly courteous was he; and
lessons in Latin from a tutor, whom my father invited to dinner once a
fortnight, but did not distinguish otherwise than occasionally to take
down Latin sentences in a notebook from his dictation, occupied my
mornings. My father told the man who instructed me in the art of
self-defence that our family had always patronized his profession. I
wrestled ten minutes every day with this man's son, and was regularly
thrown. On fine afternoons I was dressed in black velvet for a drive in
the park, where my father uncovered his head to numbers of people, and
was much looked at. 'It is our duty, my son, never to forget names and
persons; I beg you to bear that in mind, my dearest Richie,' he said. We
used to go to his opera-box; and we visited the House of Lords and the
House of Commons; and my father, though he complained of the decay of
British eloquence, and mourned for the days of Chatham, and William Pitt
(our old friend of the cake and the raspberry jam), and Burke, and
Sheridan, encouraged the orators with approving murmurs.

My father no longer laid stress on my studies of the Peerage. 'Now I have
you in the very atmosphere, that will come of itself,' he said. I wished
to know whether I was likely to be transported suddenly to some other
place. He assured me that nothing save a convulsion of the earth would do
it, which comforted me, for I took the firmness of the earth in perfect
trust. We spoke of our old Sunday walks to St. Paul's and Westminster
Abbey as of a day that had its charm. Our pew among a fashionable
congregation pleased him better. The pew-opener curtseyed to none as she
did to him. For my part, I missed the monuments and the chants, and
something besides that had gone--I knew not what. At the first indication
of gloom in me, my father became alarmed, and, after making me stand with
my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like a dragon in a piece of
tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and try to be the same that
he had been in Mrs. Waddy's lodgings. Then we read the Arabian Nights
together, or, rather, he read them to me, often acting out the incidents
as we rode or drove abroad. An omission to perform a duty was the fatal
forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper on the cream-tarts; if my father
subjected me to an interrogation concerning my lessons, he was the dread
African magician to whom must be surrendered my acquisition of the ring
and the musty old lamp. We were quite in the habit of meeting fair
Persians. He would frequently ejaculate that he resembled the Three
Calendars in more respects than one. To divert me during my recovery from
measles, he one day hired an actor in a theatre, and put a cloth round
his neck, and seated him in a chair, rubbed his chin with soap, and
played the part of the Barber over him, and I have never laughed so much
in my life. Poor Mrs. Waddy got her hands at her sides, and kept on
gasping, 'Oh, sir! oh!' while the Barber hurried away from the
half-shaved young man to consult his pretended astrolabe in the next
room, where we heard him shouting the sun's altitude, and consulting its
willingness for the impatient young man to be further shaved; and back he
came, seeming refreshed to have learnt the sun's favourable opinion, and
gabbling at an immense rate, full of barber's business. The servants were
allowed to be spectators; but as soon as the young man was shaved, my
father dismissed them with the tone of a master. No wonder they loved
him. Mrs. Waddy asked who could help it?

I remember a pang I had when she spoke of his exposure to the risk of
marrying again; it added a curious romantic tenderness to my adoration of
him, and made me feel that he and I stood against the world. To have his
hand in mine was my delight. Then it was that I could think earnestly of
Prince Ahmed and the kind and beautiful Peribanou, whom I would not have
minded his marrying. My favourite dream was to see him shooting an arrow
in a match for a prize, and losing the prize because of not finding his
arrow, and wondering where the arrow had flown to, and wandering after it
till he passed out of green fields to grassy rocks, and to a stony
desert, where at last he found his arrow at an enormous distance from the
shooting line, and there was the desert all about him, and the sweetest
fairy ever imagined going to show herself to him in the ground under his
feet. In his absence I really hungered for him, and was jealous.

During this Arabian life, we sat on a carpet that flew to the Continent,
where I fell sick, and was cured by smelling at an apple; and my father
directed our movements through the aid of a telescope, which told us the
titles of the hotels ready to receive us. As for the cities and
cathedrals, the hot meadows under mountains, the rivers and the
castles-they were little more to me than an animated book of geography,
opening and shutting at random; and travelling from place to place must
have seemed to me so much like the life I had led, that I was generally
as quick to cry as to laugh, and was never at peace between any two
emotions. By-and-by I lay in a gondola with a young lady. My father made
friends fast on our travels: her parents were among the number, and she
fell in love with me and enjoyed having the name of Peribanou, which I
bestowed on her for her delicious talk of the blue and red-striped posts
that would spout up fountains of pearls if they were plucked from their
beds, and the palaces that had flown out of the farthest corners of the
world, and the city that would some night or other vanish suddenly,
leaving bare sea-ripple to say 'Where? where?' as they rolled over. I
would have seen her marry my father happily. She was like rest and dreams
to me, soft sea and pearls. We entered into an arrangement to correspond
for life. Her name was Clara Goodwin; she requested me to go always to
the Horse Guards to discover in what part of the world Colonel Goodwin
might be serving when I wanted to write to her. I, in return, could give
no permanent address, so I related my history from the beginning. 'To
write to you would be the same as writing to a river,' she said; and
insisted that I should drop the odious name of Roy when I grew a man. My
father quarrelled with Colonel Goodwin. Months after I felt as if I had
only just been torn from Clara, but she stood in a mist, irrecoverably
distant. I had no other friend.

Twelve dozen of splendid Burgundy were the fruit of our tour, to be laid
down at Dipwell farm for my arrival at my majority, when I should be a
legal man, embarked in my own ship, as my father said. I did not taste
the wine. 'Porter for me that day, please God!' cried Mrs. Waddy, who
did. My father eyed her with pity, and ordered her to send the wine down
to Dipwell, which was done. He took me between his knees, and said
impressively, 'Now, Richie, twelve dozen of the best that man can drink
await you at the gates of manhood. Few fathers can say that to their
sons, my boy! If we drink it together, blessings on the day! If I'm gone,
Richie, shut up in the long box,' his voice shook, and he added, 'gone to
Peribanou underneath, you know, remember that your dada saw that the wine
was a good vintage, and bought it and had it bottled in his own presence
while you were asleep in the Emperor's room in the fine old Burgundy
city, and swore that, whatever came to them both, his son should drink
the wine of princes on the day of his majority.' Here my father's tone
was highly exalted, and he sat in a great flush.

I promised him I would bend my steps toward Dipwell to be there on my
twenty-first birthday, and he pledged himself to be there in spirit at
least, bodily if possible. We sealed the subject with some tears. He
often talked of commissioning a poet to compose verses about that
wonderful coming day at Dipwell. The thought of the day in store for us
sent me strutting as though I had been in the presence of my
drill-master. Mrs. Waddy, however, grew extremely melancholy at the
mention of it.

'Lord only knows where we shall all be by that time!' she sighed.

'She is a dewy woman,' said my father, disdainfully They appeared always
to be at variance, notwithstanding her absolute devotion to him. My
father threatened to have her married to somebody immediately if she
afflicted him with what he called her Waddyism. She had got the habit of
exclaiming at the end of her remarks, 'No matter; our clock strikes
soon!' in a way that communicated to me an obscure idea of a door going
to open unexpectedly in one of the walls, and conduct us, by subterranean
passages, into a new country. My father's method of rebuking her anxious
nature was to summon his cook, the funniest of Frenchmen, Monsieur
Alphonse, and issue orders for a succession of six dinner-parties. 'And
now, ma'am, you have occupation for your mind,' he would say.

To judge by the instantaneous composure of her whole appearance, he did
produce a temporary abatement of her malady. The good soul bustled out of
the room in attendance upon M. Alphonse, and never complained while the
dinners lasted, but it was whispered that she had fits in the upper part
of the house. No sooner did my father hear the rumour than he accused her
to her face of this enormity, telling her that he was determined to
effect a permanent cure, even though she should drive him to unlimited
expense. We had a Ball party and an Aladdin supper, and for a fortnight
my father hired postillions; we flashed through London. My father backed
a horse to run in the races on Epsom Downs named Prince Royal, only for
the reason that his name was Prince Royal, and the horse won, which was,
he said, a proof to me that in our country it was common prudence to
stick to Royalty; and he bade me note that if he went in a carriage and
two, he was comparatively unnoticed, whereas when he was beheld in a
carriage and four, with postillions, at a glance from him the country
people tugged their forelocks, and would like, if he would let them, to
kiss his hand. 'We will try the scarlet livery on one of our drives,
Richie,' said he. Mrs. Waddy heard him. 'It is unlawful, sir,' she said.
'For whom, ma'am?' asked my father. 'None but Royal . . .' she was
explaining, but stopped, for he showed her an awful frown, and she cried
so that my heart ached for her. My father went out to order the livery on
the spot. He was very excited. Then it was that Mrs. Waddy, embracing me,
said, 'My dear, my own Master Richmond, my little Harry, prepare your
poor child's heart for evil days.' I construed her unintelligible speech
as an attack upon my father, and abused her violently.