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Franklin Hichborn - "Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909"

P. G. Wodehouse - "The Adventures of Sally"

Georg Ebers - "Arachne, Volume 2."

George Crabbe - "Inebriety and the Candidate"

Basil

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Basil




"I went back to London, bearing another assumed name; and tried, as a
last resource to save me from starvation, the resource of writing. I
served my apprenticeship to literature as a hack-author of the lowest
degree. Knowing I had talents which might be turned to account, I
tried to vindicate them by writing an original work. But my experience
of the world had made me unfit to dress my thoughts in popular
costume: I could only tell bitter truths bitterly; I exposed licenced
hypocrisies too openly; I saw the vicious side of many
respectabilities, and said I saw it--in short, I called things by
their right names; and no publisher would treat with me. So I stuck to
my low task-work; my penny-a lining in third-class newspapers; my
translating from Frenchmen and Germans, and plagiarising from dead
authors, to supply the raw material for bookmongering by more
accomplished bookmongers than I. In this life, there was one advantage
which compensated for much misery and meanness, and bitter, biting
disappointment: I could keep my identity securely concealed. Character
was of no consequence to me; nobody cared to know who I was, or to
inquire what I had been--the gallows-mark was smoothed out at last!

"While I was living thus on the offal of literature, I met with a
woman of good birth, and fair fortune, whose sympathies or whose
curiosity I happened to interest. She and her father and mother
received me favourably, as a gentleman who had known better days, and
an author whom the public had undeservedly neglected. How I managed to
gain their confidence and esteem, without alluding to my parentage, it
is not worth while to stop to describe. That I did so you will easily
imagine, when I tell you that the woman to whom I refer, consented,
with her father's full approval, to become my wife.

"The very day of the marriage was fixed. I believed I had successfully
parried all perilous inquiries--but I was wrong. A relation of the
family, whom I had never seen, came to town a short time before the
wedding. We disliked each other on our first introduction. He was a
clever, resolute man of the world, and privately inquired about me to
much better purpose in a few days, than his family had done in several
months. Accident favoured him strangely, everything was
discovered--literally everything--and I was contemptuously dismissed
the house. Could a lady of respectability marry a man (no matter how
worthy in _her_ eyes) whose father had been hanged, whose mother had
died in a madhouse, who had lived under assumed names, who had been
driven from an excellent country neighbourhood, for cruelty to a
harmless school-boy? Impossible!

"With this event, my long strife and struggle with the world ended.

"My eyes opened to a new view of life, and the purpose of life. My
first aspirations to live up to my birth-right position, in spite of
adversity and dishonour, to make my name sweet enough in men's
nostrils, to cleanse away the infamy on my father's, were now no more.
The ambition which--whether I was a hack-author, a travelling
portrait-painter, or an usher at a school--had once whispered to me:
low down as you are in dark, miry ways, you are on the path which
leads upward to high places in the sunshine afar-off; you are not
working to scrape together wealth for another man; you are
independent, self-reliant, labouring in your own cause--the daring
ambition which had once counselled thus, sank dead within me at last.
The strong, stern spirit was beaten by spirits stronger and sterner
yet--Infamy and Want.

"I wrote to a man of character and wealth; one of my friends of early
days, who had ceased to hold communication with me, like other
friends, but, unlike them, had given me up in genuine sorrow: I wrote,
and asked him to meet me privately by night. I was too ragged to go to
his house, too sensitive still (even if I had gone and had been
admitted) to risk encountering people there, who either knew my
father, or knew how he had died. I wished to speak to my former
friend, unseen, and made the appointment accordingly. He kept it.

"When we met, I said to him:--I have a last favour to ask of you. When
we parted years ago, I had high hopes and brave resolutions--both are
worn out. I then believed that I could not only rise superior to my
misfortune, but could make that very misfortune the motive of my rise.
You told me I was too quick of temper, too morbidly sensitive about
the slightest reference to my father's death, too fierce and
changeable under undeserved trial and disappointment. This might have
been true then; but I am altered now: pride and ambition have been
persecuted and starved out of me. An obscure, monotonous life, in
which thought and spirit may be laid asleep, never to wake again, is
the only life I care for. Help me to lead it. I ask you, first, as a
beggar, to give me from your superfluity, apparel decent enough to
bear the daylight. I ask you next, to help me to some occupation which
will just give me my bread, my shelter, and my hour or two of solitude
in the evening. You have plenty of influence to do this, and you know
I am honest. You cannot choose me too humble and obscure an
employment; let me descend low enough to be lost to sight beneath the
world I have lived in; let me go among people who want to know that I
work honestly for them, and want to know nothing more. Get me a mean
hiding-place to conceal myself and my history in for ever, and then
neither attempt to see me nor communicate with me again. If former
friends chance to ask after me, tell them I am dead, or gone into
another country. The wisest life is the life the animals lead: I want,
like them, to serve my master for food, shelter, and liberty to lie
asleep now and then in the sunshine, without being driven away as a
pest or a trespasser. Do you believe in this resolution?--it is my
last.

"He _did_ believe in it; and he granted what I asked. Through his
interference and recommendation, I entered the service of Mr.
Sherwin.--

"I must stop here for to-day. To-morrow I shall come to disclosures of
vital interest to you. Have you been surprised that I, your enemy by
every cause of enmity that one man can have against another, should
write to you so fully about the secrets of my early life? I have done
so, because I wish the strife between us to be an open strife on my
side; because I desire that you should know thoroughly what you have
to expect from my character, after such a life as I have led. There
was purpose in my deceit, when I deceived you--there is purpose in my
frankness, when I now tell you all."

-----

"I began in Mr. Sherwin's employment, as the lowest clerk in his
office. Both the master and the men looked a little suspiciously on
me, at first. My account of myself was always the same--simple and
credible; I had entered the counting-house with the best possible
recommendation, and I acted up to it. These circumstances in my
favour, joined to a manner that never varied, and to a steadiness at
my work that never relaxed, soon produced their effect--all curiosity
about me gradually died away: I was left to pursue my avocations in
peace. The friend who had got me my situation, preserved my secret as
I had desired him; of all the people whom I had formerly known,
pitiless enemies and lukewarm adherents, not one ever suspected that
my hiding-place was the back office of a linen-draper's shop. For the
first time in my life, I felt that the secret of my father's
misfortune was mine, and mine only; that my security from exposure was
at length complete.

"Before long, I rose to the chief place in the counting-house. It was
no very difficult matter for me to discover, that my new master's
character had other elements besides that of the highest
respectability. In plain terms, I found him to be a pretty equal
compound by nature, of the fool, the tyrant, and the coward. There was
only one direction in which what grovelling sympathies he had, could
be touched to some purpose. Save him waste, or get him profit; and he
was really grateful. I succeeded in working both these marvels. His
managing man cheated him; I found it out; refused to be bribed to
collusion; and exposed the fraud to Mr. Sherwin. This got me his
confidence, and the place of chief clerk. In that position, I
discovered a means, which had never occurred to my employer, of
greatly enlarging his business and its profits, with the least
possible risk. He tried my plan, and it succeeded. This gained me his
warmest admiration, an increase of salary, and a firm footing in his
family circle. My projects were more than fulfilled: I had money
enough, and leisure enough; and spent my obscure existence exactly as
I had proposed.

"But my life was still not destined to be altogether devoid of an
animating purpose. When I first knew Margaret Sherwin, she was just
changing from childhood to girlhood. I marked the promise of future
beauty in her face and figure; and secretly formed the resolution
which you afterwards came forward to thwart, but which I have
executed, and will execute, in spite of you.

"The thoughts out of which that resolution sprang, counselled me more
calmly than you can suppose. I said within myself: 'The best years of
my life have been irrevocably wasted; misery and humiliation and
disaster have followed my steps from my youth; of all the pleasant
draughts which other men drink to sweeten existence, not one has
passed my lips. I will know happiness before I die; and this girl
shall confer it. She shall grow up to maturity for _me:_ I will
imperceptibly gain such a hold on her affections, while they are yet
young and impressible, that, when the time comes, and I speak the
word--though my years more than double hers, though I am dependent on
her father for the bread I eat, though parents' voice and lover's
voice unite to call her back--she shall still come to my side, and of
her own free will put her hand in mine, and follow me wherever I go;
my wife, my mistress, my servant, which I choose.

"This was my project. To execute it, time and opportunity were mine;
and I steadily and warily made use of them, hour by hour, day by day,
year by year. From first to last, the girl's father never suspected
me. Besides the security which he felt in my age, he had judged me by
his own small commercial standard, and had found me a model of
integrity. A man who had saved him from being cheated, who had so
enlarged and consolidated his business as to place him among the top
dignitaries of the trade; who was the first to come to the desk in the
morning, and the last to remain there in the evening; who had not only
never demanded, but had absolutely refused to take, a single
holiday--such a man as this was, morally and intellectually, a man in
ten thousand; a man to be admired and trusted in every relation of
life!

"His confidence in me knew no bounds. He was uneasy if I was not by to
advise him in the simplest matters. My ears were the first to which he
confided his insane ambition on the subject of his daughter--his
anxiety to see her marry above her station--his stupid resolution to
give her the false, flippant, fashionable education which she
subsequently received. I thwarted his plans in nothing,
openly--counteracted them in everything, secretly. The more I
strengthened my sources of influence over Margaret, the more pleased
he was. He was delighted to hear her constantly referring to me about
her home-lessons; to see her coming to me, evening after evening, to
learn new occupations and amusements. He suspected I had been a
gentleman; he had been told I spoke pure English; he felt sure I had
received a first-rate education--I was nearly as good for Margaret as
good society itself! When she grew older, and went to the fashionable
school, as her father had declared she should, my offer to keep up her
lessons in the holidays, and to examine what progress she had made,
when she came home regularly every fortnight for the Sunday, was
accepted with greedy readiness, and acknowledged with servile
gratitude. At this time, Mr. Sherwin's own estimate of me, among his
friends, was, that he had got me for half nothing, and that I was
worth more to him than a thousand a-year.

"But there was one member of the family who suspected my intentions
from the first. Mrs. Sherwin--the weak, timid, sickly woman, whose
opinion nobody regarded, whose character nobody understood--Mrs.
Sherwin, of all those who dwelt in the house, or came to the house,
was the only one whose looks, words, and manner kept me constantly on
my guard. The very first time we saw each other, that woman doubted
_me,_ as I doubted _her;_ and for ever afterwards, when we met, she
was on the watch. This mutual distrust, this antagonism of our two
natures, never openly proclaimed itself, and never wore away. My
chance of security lay, not so much in my own caution, and my perfect
command of look and action under all emergencies, as in the
self-distrust and timidity of her nature; in the helpless inferiority
of position to which her husband's want of affection, and her
daughter's want of respect, condemned her in her own house; and in the
influence of repulsion--at times, even of absolute terror--which my
presence had the power of communicating to her. Suspecting what I am
assured she suspected--incapable as she was of rendering her
suspicions certainties--knowing beforehand, as she must have known,
that no words she could speak would gain the smallest respect or
credit from her husband or her child--that woman's life, while I was
at North Villa, must have been a life of the direst mental suffering
to which any human being was ever condemned.

"As time passed, and Margaret grew older, her beauty both of face and
form approached nearer to perfection than I had foreseen, closely as I
watched her. But neither her mind nor her disposition kept pace with
her beauty. I studied her closely, with the same patient, penetrating
observation, which my experience of the world has made it a habit with
me to direct on every one with whom I am brought in contact--I studied
her, I say, intently; and found her worthy of nothing, not even of the
slave-destiny which I had in store for her.

"She had neither heart nor mind, in the higher sense of those words.
She had simply instincts--most of the bad instincts of an animal; none
of the good. The great motive power which really directed her, was
Deceit. I never met with any human being so inherently disingenuous,
so naturally incapable of candour even in the most trifling affairs of
life, as she was. The best training could never have wholly overcome
this vice in her: the education she actually got--an education under
false pretences--encouraged it. Everybody has read, some people have
known, of young girls who have committed the most extraordinary
impostures, or sustained the most infamous false accusations; their
chief motive being often the sheer enjoyment of practising deceit. Of
such characters was the character of Margaret Sherwin.

"She had strong passions, but not their frequent accompaniment--strong
will, and strong intellect. She had some obstinacy, but no firmness.
Appeal in the right way to her vanity, and you could make her do the
thing she had declared she would not do, the minute after she had made
the declaration. As for her mind, it was of the lowest schoolgirl
average. She had a certain knack at learning this thing, and
remembering that; but she understood nothing fairly, felt nothing
deeply. If I had not had my own motive in teaching her, I should have
shut the books again, the first time she and I opened them together,
and have given her up as a fool.

"All, however, that I discovered of bad in her character, never made
me pause in the prosecution of my design; I had carried it too far for
that, before I thoroughly knew her. Besides, what mattered her
duplicity to _me?_--I could see through it. Her strong passions?--I
could control them. Her obstinacy?--I could break it. Her poverty of
intellect?--I cared nothing about her intellect. What I wanted was
youth and beauty; she was young and beautiful and I was sure of her.

"Yes; sure. Her showy person, showy accomplishments, and showy manners
dazzled all eyes but mine--Of all the people about her, I alone found
out what she really was; and in that lay the main secret of my
influence over her. I dreaded no rivalry. Her father, prompted by his
ambitious hopes, kept most young men of her class away from the house;
the few who did come were not dangerous; _they_ were as incapable of
inspiring, as _she_ was of feeling, real love. Her mother still
watched me, and still discovered nothing; still suspected me behind my
back, and still trembled before my face. Months passed on
monotonously, year succeeded to year; and I bided my time as
patiently, and kept my secret as cautiously as at the first. No change
occurred, nothing happened to weaken or alter my influence at North
Villa, until the day arrived when Margaret left school and came home
for good.

-----

"Exactly at the period to which I have referred, certain business
transactions of great importance required the presence of Mr. Sherwin,
or of some confidential person to represent him, at Lyons. Secretly
distrusting his own capabilities, he proposed to me to go; saying that
it would be a pleasant trip for me, and a good introduction to his
wealthy manufacturing correspondents. After some consideration, I
accepted his offer.

"I had never hinted a word of my intentions towards her to Margaret;
but she understood them well enough--I was certain of that, from many
indications which no man could mistake. For reasons which will
presently appear, I resolved not to explain myself until my return
from Lyons. My private object in going there, was to make interest
secretly with Mr. Sherwin's correspondents for a situation in their
house. I knew that when I made my proposals to Margaret, I must be
prepared to act on them on the instant; I knew that her father's fury
when he discovered that I had been helping to educate his daughter
only for myself, would lead him to any extremities; I knew that we
must fly to some foreign country; and, lastly, I knew the importance
of securing a provision for our maintenance, when we got there. I had
saved money, it is true--nearly two-thirds of my salary, every
year--but had not saved enough for two. Accordingly, I left England to
push my own interests, as well as my employer's; left it, confident
that my short absence would not weaken the result of years of steady
influence over Margaret. The sequel showed that, cautious and
calculating as I was, I had nevertheless overlooked the chances
against me, which my own experience of her vanity and duplicity ought
to have enabled me thoroughly to foresee.

"Well: I had been some time at Lyons; had managed my employer's
business (from first to last, I was faithful, as I had engaged to be,
to his commercial interests); and had arranged my own affairs securely
and privately. Already, I was looking forward, with sensations of
happiness which were new to me, to my return and to the achievement of
the one success, the solitary triumph of my long life of humiliation
and disaster, when a letter arrived from Mr. Sherwin. It contained the
news of your private marriage, and of the extraordinary conditions
that had been attached to it with your consent.

"Other people were in the room with me when I read that letter; but my
manner betrayed nothing to them. My hand never trembled when I folded
the sheet of paper again; I was not a minute late in attending a
business engagement which I had accepted; the slightest duties of
other kinds which I had to do, I rigidly fulfilled. Never did I more
thoroughly and fairly earn the evening's leisure by the morning's
work, than I earned it that day.

"Leaving the town at the close of afternoon, I walked on till I came
to a solitary place on the bank of the great river which runs near
Lyons. There I opened the letter for the second time, and read it
through again slowly, with no necessity now for self-control, because
no human being was near to look at me. There I read your name,
constantly repeated in every line of writing; and knew that the man
who, in my absence, had stepped between me and my prize--the man who,
in his insolence of youth, and birth, and fortune, had snatched from
me the one long-delayed reward for twenty years of misery, just as my
hands were stretched forth to grasp it, was the son of that honourable
and high-born gentleman who had given my father to the gallows, and
had made me the outcast of my social privileges for life.

"The sun was setting when I looked up from the letter; flashes of
rose-light leapt on the leaping river; the birds were winging nestward
to the distant trees, and the ghostly stillness of night was sailing
solemnly over earth and sky, as the first thought of the vengeance I
would have on father and son began to burn fiercely at my heart, to
move like a new life within me, to whisper to my spirit--Wait: be
patient; they are both in your power; you can now foul the father's
name as the father fouled yours--you can yet thwart the son, as the
son has thwarted _you._

"In the few minutes that passed, while I lingered in that lonely place
after reading the letter, I imagined the whole scheme which it
afterwards took a year to execute. I laid the whole plan against you
and your father, the first half of which, through the accident that
led you to your discovery, has alone been carried out. I believed
then, as I believe now, that I stood towards you both in the place of
an injured man, whose right it was, in self-defence and
self-assertion, to injure you. Judged by your ideas, this may read
wickedly; but to me, after having lived and suffered as I have, the
modern common-places current in the world are so many brazen images
which society impudently worships--like the Jews of old--in the face
of living Truth.

-----

"Let us get back to England.

"That evening, when we met for the first time, did you observe that
Margaret was unusually agitated before I came in? I detected some
change, the moment I saw her. Did you notice that I avoided speaking
to her, or looking at her? it was because I was afraid to do so. I saw
that, with my return, my old influence over her was coming back: and I
still believe that, hypocritical and heartless though she was, and
blinded though you were by your passion for her, she would
unconsciously have betrayed everything to you on that evening, if I
had not acted as I did. Her mother, too! how her mother watched me
from the moment when I came in!

"Afterwards, while you were trying hard to open, undetected, the
sealed history of my early life, I was warily discovering from
Margaret all that I desired to know. I say 'warily,' but the word
poorly expresses my consummate caution and patience, at that time. I
never put myself in her power, never risked offending, or frightening,
or revolting her; never lost an opportunity of bringing her back to
her old habits of familiarity; and, more than all, never gave her
mother a single opportunity of detecting me. This was the sum of what
I gathered up, bit by bit, from secret and scattered investigations,
persevered in through many weeks.

"Her vanity had been hurt, her expectations disappointed, at my having
left her for Lyons, with no other parting words than such as I might
have spoken to any other woman whom I looked on merely as a friend.
That she felt any genuine love for me I never have believed, and never
shall: but I had that practical ability, that firmness of will, that
obvious personal ascendancy over most of those with whom I came in
contact, which extorts the respect and admiration of women of all
characters, and even of women of no character at all. As far as her
senses, her instincts, and her pride could take her, I had won her
over to me but no farther--because no farther could she go. I mention
pride among her motives, advisedly. She was proud of being the object
of such attentions as I had now paid to her for years, because she
fancied that, through those attentions, I, who, more or less, ruled
everyone else in her sphere, had yielded to her the power of ruling
_me._ The manner of my departure from England showed her too plainly
that she had miscalculated her influence, and that the power, in her
case, as in the case of others, was all on my side. Hence the wound to
her vanity, to which I have alluded.

"It was while this wound was still fresh that you met her, and
appealed to her self-esteem in a new direction. You must have seen
clearly enough, that such proposals as yours far exceeded the most
ambitious expectations formed by her father. No man's alliance could
have lifted her much higher out of her own class: she knew this, and
from that knowledge married you--married you for your station, for
your name, for your great friends and connections, for your father's
money, and carriages, and fine houses; for everything, in short, but
yourself.

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