The History of David Grieve

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Nevertheless, the lad had far fewer enemies than might have been
expected. His manner had always been radiantly self-confident; but
there was about him a conspicuous element of quick feeling, of warm
humanity, which grew rather than diminished with his success. He
was frank, too, and did not try to gloss over a mistake or a
failure. Perhaps in his lordly way he felt he could afford himself
a few now and then, he was so much cleverer than his neighbours.

Upon no one did David's development produce more effect than upon
Mr. Ancrum. The lame, solitary minister, who only got through his
week's self-appointed tasks at a constant expense of bodily
torment, was dazzled and bewildered by the spectacle of so much
vitality spent with such ease and impunity.

'How many years of Manchester must one give him?' said Ancrum to
himself one night, when he was making his way home from a reading
of the 'Electra' with David. 'That six hundred pounds has quickened
the pace amazingly! Ten years, perhaps. Then London, and anything
you like. Bookselling slips into publishing, and publishing takes a
man into another class, and within reach of a hundred new
possibilities. Some day I shall be bragging of having taught him!
Taught him! He'll be turning the tables on me precious soon. Caught
me out twice to-night, and got through the tough bit of the chorus
much better than I did. How does he do it?--and with that mountain
of other things on his shoulders! There's one speck in the fruit,
however, as far as I can see-Miss Louie!'

From the first moment of his introduction to her, Ancrum had taken
particular notice of David's handsome sister, who, on her side, had
treated her old minister and teacher with a most thoroughgoing
indifference. He saw that now, after some three months of life
together, the brother and sister had developed separate existences,
which touched in two points only--a common liking for Dora Lomax,
and a common keenness for business.

Here, in this matter of business, they were really at one. David
kept nothing from her, and consulted her a good deal. She had the
same shrewd head that he had, and as it was her money as well as
his that was in question she was determined to know and to
understand what he was after. Anybody who had come upon the pair on
the nights when they made up their accounts, their dark heads
touching under the lamp, might have gone away moralising on the
charms of fraternal affection.

And all the while David had once more tacitly given up the attempt
either to love her or to control her. How indeed could he control
her? He was barely two years older, and she had a will of iron. She
made disreputable friends whom he loathed the sight of. But all he
could do was to keep them out of the house. She led John by this
time a dog's life. From the temptress she had become the tease and
tyrant, and the clumsy fellow, consumed with feverish passion,
slaved for her whenever she was near him with hardly the reward of
a kind look or a civil word in a fortnight. David set his teeth and
tried to recover possession of his friend. And as long as they two
were at the press or in the shop together alone, John was often his
old self, and would laugh out in the old way. But no sooner did
Louie appear than he followed her about like an animal, and David
could make no more of him. Whenever any dispute, too, arose between
the brother and sister, he took her part, whatever it might be,
with an acrimony which pushed David's temper hard.

Yet, on the whole, so Ancrum thought, the brother showed a
wonderful patience. He was evidently haunted by a sense of
responsibility towards his sister, and, at the same time, both
tormented and humiliated by his incompetence to manage or influence
her. It was curious, too, to watch how by antagonism and by the
constant friction of their life together, certain qualities in her
developed certain others in him. Her callousness, for instance, did
but nurture a sensitive humanity in him. She treated the lodgers in
the first pair back with persistent indifference and even
brutality, seeing that Mrs. Mason was a young, helpless creature
approaching every day nearer to a confinement she regarded with
terror, and that a little common kindness from the only other woman
in the house could have softened her lot considerably. But David's
books were stacked about in awkward and inconvenient places waiting
for the Masons' departure, and Louie had no patience with
them--with the wife at any rate. It once or twice occurred to David
that if the husband, a good-looking fellow and a very hard-worked
shopman, had had more hours at home, Louie would have tried her
blandishments upon him.

He on his side was goaded by Louie's behaviour into an unusual
complaisance and liberality towards his tenants. Louie once
contemptuously told him he would make a capital 'general help.' He
was Mrs. Mason's coal-carrier and errand-boy already.

In the same way Louie beat and ill-treated a half-starved
collie--one of the short-haired black sort familiar to the shepherd
of the north, and to David himself in his farm days--which would
haunt the shop and kitchen. Whereupon David felt all his heart melt
towards the squalid, unhandsome creature. He fed and cherished it;
it slept on his bed by night and followed him by day, he all the
while protecting it from Louie with a strong hand. And the more
evil was the eye she cast upon the dog, who, according to her,
possessed all the canine vices, the more David loved it, and the
more Tim was fattened and caressed.

In another direction, too, the same antagonism appeared. The
sister's license of speech and behaviour towards the men who became
her acquaintances provoked in the brother what often seemed to
Ancrum--who, of course, remembered Reuben, and had heard many tales
of old James Grieve, the lad's grandfather--a sort of Puritan
reaction, the reaction of his race and stock against 'lewdness.'
Louie's complete independence, however, and the distance she
preserved between his amusements and hers, left David no other
weapon than sarcasm, which he employed freely. His fine sensitive
mouth took during these weeks a curve half mocking, half bitter,
which changed the whole expression of the face.

He saw, indeed, with great clearness after a month or so that
Louie's wildness was by no means the wildness of an ignorant
innocent, likely to slip unawares into perdition, and that, while
she had a passionate greed for amusement and pleasure, and a blank
absence of principle, she was still perfectly alive to the risks of
life, and meant somehow both to enjoy herself and to steer herself
through. But this gradual perception--that, in spite of her mode of
killing spare time, she was not immediately likely to take any
fatal false step, as he had imagined in his first dread--did but
increase his inward repulsion.

A state of feeling which was the more remarkable because he
himself, in Ancrum's eyes, was at the moment in a temper of moral
relaxation and bewilderment! His absorption in George Sand, and
through her in all the other French Romantics whose books he could
either find for himself or borrow from Barbier, was carrying a
ferment of passion and imagination through all his blood. Most
social arrangements, including marriage, seemed to have become open
questions to him. Why, then, this tone towards Louie and her
friends? Was it that, apart from the influence of heredity, the
young fellow's moral perception at this time was not ethical at
all, but aesthetic--a matter of taste, of the presence or absence
of certain ideal and poetic elements in conduct?

At any rate his friendship for old Barbier drew closer and closer,
and Ancrum, who had begun to feel a lively affection for him, could
see but little of him.

As to Barbier, it was a significant chance which had thrown
him across David's path. In former days this lively Frenchman
had been a small Paris journalist, whom the _coup d'etat_ had
struck down with his betters, and who had escaped to England
with one suit of clothes and eight francs in his pocket. He
reminded himself on landing of a cousin of his mother's settled
as a clerk in Manchester, found his way northwards, and had
now, for some seventeen years, been maintaining himself in the
cotton capital, mainly by teaching, but partly by a number of
small arts--ornamental calligraphy, _menu_-writing, and the
like--too odd and various for description. He was a fanatic, a Red,
much possessed by political hatreds which gave savour to an
existence otherwise dull and peaceable enough. Religious beliefs
were very scarce with him, but he had a certain literary creed, the
creed of 1830, when he had been a scribbler in the train of Victor
Hugo, which he did his best to put into David.

He was a formidable-looking person, six feet in height, and broad
in proportion, with bushy white eyebrows, and a mouth made hideous
by two projecting teeth. In speech he hated England and all her
ways, and was for ever yearning towards the misguided and yet
unequalled country which had cast him out. In heart he was
perfectly aware that England is free as not even Republican France
is free; and he was also sufficiently alive to the fact that he had
made himself a very tolerable niche in Manchester, and was
pleasantly regarded there--at least, in certain circles--as an
oracle of French opinion, a commodity which, in a great commercial
centre, may at any time have a cash value. He could, in truth,
have long ago revisited _la patrie_ had he had a mind, for
governments are seldom vindictive in the case of people who can
clearly do them no harm. This, however, was not at all his own
honest view of the matter. In the mirror of the mind he saw himself
perpetually draped in the pathos of exile and the dignity of
persecution, and the phrases by which he was wont to impress this
inward vision on the brutal English sense had become, in the course
of years, an effective and touching habit with him.

David had been Barbier's pupil in the first instance at one of the
classes of the Mechanics' Institute. Never in Barbier's memory had
any Manchester lad so applied himself to learn French before. And
when the boy's knowledge of the Encyclopaedists came out, and he
one day put the master right in class on some points connected with
Diderot's relations to Rousseau, the ex-journalist gaped with
astonishment, and then went home and read up his facts, half
enraged and half enraptured. David's zeal piqued him, made him a
better Frenchman and a better teacher than he had been for years.
He was a vain man, and David's capacities put him on his mettle.

Very soon he and the lad had become intimate. He had described to
David the first night of _Hernani_, when he had been one of
the long-haired band of _rapins_, who came down in their
scores to the Theatre Francais to defend their chief, Hugo, against
the hisses of the Philistine. The two were making coffee in
Barbier's attic, at the top of a side street off the Oxford Road,
when these memories seized upon the old Romantic. He took up the
empty coffee-pot, and brandished it from side to side as though it
had been the sword of Hernani; the miserable Academy hugging its
Moliere and Racine fled before him; the world was once more
regenerate, and Hugo its high priest. Passages from the different
parts welled to his old lips; he gave the play over again--the
scene between the lover and the husband, where the husband lays
down the strange and sinister penalty to which the lover
submits--the exquisite love-scene in the fifth act--and the cry of
agonised passion with which Dona Sol defends her love against his
executioner. All these things he declaimed, stumping up and down,
till the terrified landlady rose out of her bed to remonstrate, and
got the door locked in her face for her pains, and till the
_bourgeois_ baby in the next room woke up and roared, and so
put an abrupt end to the performance. Old Barbier sat down
swearing, poked the fire furiously, and then, taking out a huge red
handkerchief, wiped his brow with a trembling hand. His stiff white
hair, parted on either temple, bristled like a high _loupie_
over his round, black eyes, which glowed behind his spectacles. And
meanwhile the handsome boy sat opposite, glad to laugh by way of
reaction, but at bottom stirred by the same emotion, and ready to
share in the same adorations.

Gradually David learnt his way about this bygone world of Barbier's
recollection. A vivid picture sprang up in him of these strange
leaders of a strange band, these cadaverous poets and artists of
Louis Philippe's early days, beings in love with Lord Byron and
suicide, having Art for God, and Hugo for prophet, talking of
were-wolves, vampires, cathedrals, sunrises, forests, passion and
despair, hatted like brigands, cloaked after Vandyke, curled like
Absalom, making new laws unto themselves in verse as in morals, and
leaving all petty talk of duty or common sense to the Academy and
the nursery.

George Sand walking the Paris quays in male dress--George Sand at
Fontainebleau roaming the midnight forest with Alfred de Musset, or
wintering with her dying musician among the mountains of Palma;
Gerard de Nerval, wanderer, poet, and suicide; Alfred de Musset
flaming into verse at dead of night amid an answering and
spendthrift blaze of wax candles; Baudelaire's blasphemies and
eccentricities--these characters and incidents Barbier wove into
endless highly coloured tales, to which David listened with
perpetual relish.

'_Mon Dieu_! _Mon Dieu_! What times! What memories!' the
old Frenchman would cry at last, fairly re-transported to the world
of his youth, and, springing up, he would run to the little
cupboard by his bed head, where he kept a score or so of little
paper volumes--volumes which the tradesman David soon discovered,
from a curious study of French catalogues, to have a fast-rising
money value--and out would come Alfred de Musset's 'Nuit de Mai,'
or an outrageous verse from Baudelaire, or an harmonious nothing
from Gautier. David gradually learnt to follow, to understand, to
range all that he heard in a mental setting of his own. The France
of his imagination indeed was a strange land! Everybody in it was
either girding at priests like Voltaire, or dying for love like
George Sand's Stenio.

But whether the picture was true to life or no, it had a very
strongly marked effect on the person conceiving it. Just as the
speculative complexion of his first youth had been decided by the
chance which brought him into daily contact with the French
eighteenth century--for no self-taught solitary boy of quick and
covetous mind can read Voltaire continuously without bearing the
marks of him henceforward--so in the same way, when he passed, as
France had done before him, from the philosophers to the Romantics,
this constant preoccupation with the French literature of passion
in its romantic and idealist period left deep and lasting results.

The strongest of these results lay in the realm of moral and social
sense. What struck the lad's raw mind with more and more force as
he gathered his French books about him was the profound gulf which
seemed to divide the average French conception of the relation
between the sexes from the average English one. In the French
novels he read every young man had his mistress; every married
woman her lover. Tragedy frequently arose out of these relations,
but that the relations must and did obtain, as a matter of course,
was assumed. For the delightful heroes and heroines of a whole
range of fiction, from 'Manon Lescaut' down to Murger's 'Vie de
Boheme,' marriage did not apparently exist, even as a matter of
argument. And as to the duties of the married woman, when she
passed on to the canvas, the code was equally simple. The husband
might kill his wife's lover--that was in the game; but the young
man's right to be was as good as his own. '_No human being can
control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for
losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood._' So says
the husband in George Sand's 'Jacques' when he is just about to
fling himself down an Alpine precipice that his wife and Octave may
have their way undisturbed. And all the time, what poetry and
passion in the presentation of these things! Beside them the mere
remembrance of English ignorance, prudishness, and conventionality
would set the lad swelling, as he read, with a sense of superior
scorn, and of wild sympathy for a world in which love and not law,
truth and not legal fiction, were masters of human relations.

Some little time after Reuben's visit to him he one day told
Barbier the fact of his French descent. Barbier declared that he
had always known it, had always realised something in David
distinct from the sluggish huckstering English temper. Why, David's
mother was from the south of France; his own family came from
Carcassonne. No doubt the rich Gascon blood ran in both their
veins. _Salut au compatriole!_

Thenceforward there was a greater solidarity between the two than
ever. Barbier fell into an incessant gossip of Paris--the Paris of
Louis Philippe--reviving memories and ways of speech which had been
long dead in him, and leaving on David's mind the impression of a
place where life was from morning till night amusement,
exhilaration, and seduction; where, under the bright smokeless sky,
and amid the stateliest streets and public buildings in Europe, men
were always witty and women always attractive.

Meanwhile the course of business during the spring months and the
rise of his trade in foreign books rapidly brought the scheme of a
visit to France, which had been at first a mere dream and fancy,
within the region of practical possibility, and even advantage, for
the young bookseller. Two things he was set on. If he went he was
determined to go under such conditions as would enable him to see
French life--especially French artistic and student life--from the
inside. And he saw with some clearness that he would have to take
his sister with him.

Against the latter notion Barbier protested vehemently.

'What do you want to tie yourself to a petticoat for? If you take
the girl you will have to look after her. Paris, my boy, let me
inform you, is not the best place in the world for _la jeune
personne;_ and the Paris _rapin_ may be an amusing scoundrel,
but don't trust him with young women if you can help it. Leave
Mademoiselle Louie at home, and let her mind the shop. Get
Mademoiselle Dora or some one to stay with her, or send her to
Mademoiselle Dora.'

So said the Frenchman with sharp dictatorial emphasis. What a
preposterous suggestion!

'I can't stop her coming,' said David, quietly--'if she wants to
come--and she'll be sure to want. Besides, I'll not leave her alone
at home, and she'll not let me send her anywhere--you may be sure
of that.'

The Frenchman stared and stormed. David fell silent. Louie was what
she was, and it was no use discussing her. At last Barbier, being
after all tolerably well acquainted with the lad's relations to his
sister, came to a sudden end of his rhetoric, and began to think
out something practicable.

That evening he wrote to a nephew of his living as an artist in the
Quartier Montmartre. Some months before Barbier's vanity had been
flattered by an adroit letter from this young gentleman, written,
if the truth were known, at a moment when a pecuniary situation,
pinched almost beyond endurance, had made it seem worth while to
get his uncle's address out of his widowed mother. Barbier, a
bachelor, and a man of some small savings, perfectly understood why
he had been approached, and had been none the less extraordinarily
glad to hear from the youth. He was a _rapin?_ well and good;
all the great men had been _rapins_ before him. Very likely he
had the _rapin's_ characteristic vices and distractions. All
the world knew what the life meant for nine men out of ten. What
was the use of preaching? Youth was youth. Clearly the old
man--himself irreproachable--would have been disappointed not to
find his nephew a sad dog on personal acquaintance.

'Tell me, Xavier,' his letter ran, 'how to put a young friend of
mine in the way of seeing something of Paris and Paris life, more
than your fool of a tourist generally sees. He is a bookseller, and
will, of course, mind his trade; but he is a young man of taste and
intelligence besides, and moreover half French. It would be a pity
that he should visit Paris as any _sacre_ British Philistine
does. Advise me where to place him. He would like to see something
of your artist's life. But mind this, young man, he brings a sister
with him as handsome as the devil, and not much easier to manage:
so if you do advise--no tricks--tell me of something _convenable_.'

A few days later Barbier appeared in Potter Street just after David
had put up the shutters, announcing that he had a proposal to make.

David unlocked the shop-door and let him in. Barbier looked round
with some amazement on the small stuffy place, piled to bursting by
now with books of every kind, which only John's herculean efforts
could keep in passable order.

'Why don't you house yourself better--_hein?_' said the
Frenchman. 'A business growing like this, and nothing but a den to
handle it in!'

'I shall be all right when I get my other room,' said David
composedly. 'Couldn't turn out the lodger before. The woman was only
confined last week.'

And as he spoke the wailing of an infant and a skurrying of feet
were heard upstairs.

'So it seems,' said Barbier, adjusting his spectacles in
bewilderment. '_Jesus!_ What an affair! What did you permit it
for? Why didn't you turn her out in time?'

'I would have turned myself out first,' said David. He was
lounging, with his hands in his pockets, against the books; but
though his attitude was nonchalant, his tone had a vibrating
energy.

'Barbier!'

'Yes.'

'What do women suffer for like that?'

The young man's eyes glowed, and his lips twitched a little, as
though some poignant remembrance were at his heart.

Barbier looked at him with some curiosity.

'Ask _le bon Dieu_ and Mother Eve, my friend. It lies between
them,' said the old scoffer, with a shrug.

David looked away in silence. On his quick mind, greedy of all
human experience, the night of Mrs. Mason's confinement, with its
sounds of anguish penetrating through all the upper rooms of the
thin, ill-built house, had left an ineffaceable impression of awe
and terror. In the morning, when all was safely over, he came down
to the kitchen to find the husband--a man some two or three years
older than himself, and the smart foreman of an ironmongery shop in
Deansgate--crouching over a bit of fire. The man was too much
excited to apologise for his presence in the Grieves' room. David
shyly asked him a question about his wife.

'Oh, it's all right, the doctor says. There's the nurse with her,
and your sister's got the baby. She'll do; but, oh, my God! it's
awful--_it's awful!_ My poor Liz! Give me a corner here, will
you! I'm all upset like.'

David had got some food out of the cupboard, made him eat it, and
chatted to him till the man was more himself again. But the crying
of the new-born child overhead, together with the shaken condition
of this clever, self-reliant young fellow, so near his own age,
seemed for the moment to introduce the lad to new and unknown
regions of human feeling.

While these images were pursuing each other through David's mind,
Barbier was poking among his foreign books, which lay, backs
upwards, on the floor to one side of the counter.

'Do you sell them--_hein?_' he said, looking up and pointing
to them with his stick.

'Yes. Especially the scientific books. These are an order.
So is that batch. Napoleon III. 's "Caesar," isn't it? And
those over there are "on spec." Oh, I could do something if
I knew more! There's a man over at Oldham. One of the biggest
weaving-sheds--cotton velvets--that kind of thing. He's awfully
rich, and he's got a French library; a big one, I believe. He
came in here yesterday. I think I could make something out
of him; but he wants all sorts of rum things--last-century
memoirs, out-of-the-way ones--everything about Montaigne--first
editions--Lord knows what! I say, Barbier, I dare say he'd buy
your books. What'll you let me have them for?'

'_Diantre!_ Not for your heart's blood, my young man. It's
like your impudence to ask. You could sell more if you knew more,
you think? Well now listen to me.'

The Frenchman sat down, adjusted his spectacles, and, taking a
letter from his pocket, read it with deliberation.

It was from the nephew, Xavier Dubois, in answer to his uncle's
inquiries. Nothing, the writer declared, could have been more
opportune. He himself was just off to Belgium, where a friend had
procured him a piece of work on a new Government building. Why
should not his uncle's friends inhabit his rooms during his
absence? He must keep them on, and would find it very convenient,
that being so, that some one should pay the rent. There was his
studio, which was bare, no doubt, but quite habitable, and a little
_cabinet de toilette_, adjoining, and shut off, containing a
bed and all necessaries. Why should not the sister take the
bedroom, and let the brother camp somehow in the studio? He could
no doubt borrow a bed from some friend before they came, and with a
large screen, which was one of the 'studio properties,' a very
tolerable sleeping room could be improvised, and still leave a good
deal of the studio free. He understood that his uncle's friends
were not looking for luxury. But _le stricte necessaire_ he
could provide.