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Philistia

by Grant Allen · English · Gutenberg #6060 · 832,218 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Philistia

Author: Grant Allen


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6060]
                Most recently updated: May 24, 2013

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHILISTIA ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team










PHILISTIA

BY

GRANT ALLEN





CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

      I. CHILDREN OF LIGHT
     II. THE COASTS OF THE GENTILES
    III. MAGDALEN QUAD
     IV. A LITTLE MUSIC
      V. ASKELON VILLA, GATH
     VI. DOWN THE RIVER
    VII. GHOSTLY COUNSEL
   VIII. IN THE CAMP OF THE PHILISTINES
     IX. THE WOMEN OF THE LAND
      X. THE DAUGHTERS OF CANAAN
     XI. CULTURE AND CULTURE
    XII. THE MORE EXCELLENT WAY
   XIII. YE MOUNTAINS OF GILBOA
    XIV. WHAT DO THESE HEBREWS HERE
     XV. EVIL TIDINGS
    XVI. FLAT REBELLION
   XVII. COME YE OUT AND BE YE SEPARATE!
  XVIII. A QUIET WEDDING
    XIX. INTO THE FIRE
     XX. LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND THE DRAMA
    XXI. OFF WITH THE OLD LOVE
   XXII. THE PHILISTINES TRIUMPH
  XXIII. THE STREETS OF ASKELON
   XXIV. THE CLOUDS BEGIN TO BREAK
    XXV. HARD PRESSED
   XXVI. IRRECLAIMABLE
  XXVII. RONALD COMES OF AGE
 XXVIII. TELL IT NOT IN GATH
   XXIX. A MAN AND A MAID
    XXX. THE ENVIRONMENT FINALLY TRIUMPHS
   XXXI. DE PROFUNDIS
  XXXII. PRECONTRACT OF MARRIAGE
 XXXIII. A GLEAM OF SUNSHINE
  XXXIV. HOPE
   XXXV. THE TIDE TURNS
  XXXVI. OUT OF THE HAND OF THE PHILISTINES
 XXXVII. LAND AT LAST: BUT WHAT LAND?




CHAPTER I.

CHILDREN OF LIGHT.


It was Sunday evening, and on Sundays Max Schurz, the chief of the
London Socialists, always held his weekly receptions. That night
his cosmopolitan refugee friends were all at liberty; his French
disciples could pour in from the little lanes and courts in Soho,
where, since the  Commune, they had plied their peaceful trades as
engravers, picture-framers, artists'-colourmen, models, pointers,
and so forth--for most of them were hangers-on in one way or another
of the artistic world; his German adherents could stroll round,
pipe in mouth, from their printing-houses, their ham-and-beef shops,
or their naturalists' chambers, where they stuffed birds or set up
exotic butterflies in little cabinets--for most of them were more
or less literary or scientific in their pursuits; and his few English
sympathisers,  chiefly dissatisfied philosophical Radicals of the
upper classes, could drop in casually for a chat and a smoke, on
their way home from the churches to which they had been dutifully
escorting their un-emancipated wives and sisters. Max Schurz kept
open house for all on Sunday evenings, and there was not a drawing-room
in London better filled than his with the very advanced and not
undistinguished set who alone had the much-prized entrée of his
exclusive salon.

The salon itself did not form any component part of Max Schurz's
own private residence in any way. The great Socialist, the man whose
mandates shook the thrones of Russia and Austria, whose movements
spread terror in Paris and Berlin, whose dictates were even obeyed
in Kerry and in Chicago, occupied for his own use two small rooms
at the top of a shabby composite tenement in a doubtful district
of Marylebone. The little parlour where he carried on his trade of
a microscope-lens grinder would not have sufficed to hold one-tenth
of the eager half-washed crowd that pressed itself enthusiastically
upon him every Sunday. But a large room on the ground floor of the
tenement, opening towards the main street, was used during the
week by one of his French refugee friends as a dancing-saloon;
and in this room on every Sunday evening the uncrowned king of the
proletariate  Socialists was permitted to hold his royal levees.
Thither all that was best and truest in the socially rebellions
classes domiciled in London used to make its way; and there men
calmly talked over the ultimate chances of social revolutions which
would have made the hair of respectable Philistine Marylebone stand
stiffly on end, had it only known the rank political heresies that
were quietly hatching in its unconscious midst.

While Max Schurz's hall was rapidly filling with the polyglot crowd
of democratic solidarists, Ernest Le Breton and his brother were
waiting in the chilly little drawing-room at Epsilon Terrace,
Bayswater, for the expected arrival of Harry Oswald. Ernest had
promised to introduce Oswald to Max Schurz's reception; and it
was now past eight o'clock, getting rather a late hour for those
simple-minded, early-rising Communists. 'I'm afraid, Herbert,'
said Ernest to his brother, 'he forgets that Max is a working-man
who has to be at his trade again punctually by seven o'clock
to-morrow. He thinks he's going out to a regular society At Home,
where ten o'clock's considered just the beginning of the evening. Max
won't at all like his turning up so late; it smells of non-productivity.'

'If Herr Schurz wants to convert the world,' Herbert answered
chillily, rolling himself a tiny cigarette, 'he must convince the
unproductive as well as the proletariate before he can set things
fairly on the roll for better arrangement.  The proletariate's
all very well in its way, no doubt, but the unproductive happen to
hold the key of the situation. One convert like you or me is worth
a thousand ignorant East-end labourers, with nothing but their
hands and their votes to count upon.'

'But you are not a convert, Herbert.'

'I didn't say I was. I'm a critic. There's no necessity to throw
oneself open-armed into the embrace of either party. The wise man
can wait and watch the progress of the game, backing the winner
for the time being at all the critical moments, and hedging if
necessary when the chances turn momentarily against the favourite.
There's a ring at the bell: that's Oswald; let's go down to the
door to meet him.'

Ernest ran down the stairs rapidly, as was his wont; Herbert
followed in a more leisurely fashion, still rolling the cigarette
between his delicate finger and thumb.  'Goodness gracious, Oswald!'
Ernest exclaimed as his friend stepped in, 'why, you've actually
come in evening dress!  A white tie and all! What on earth will
Max say? He'll be perfectly scandalised at such a shocking and
unprecedented  outrage. This will never do; you must dissemble
somehow or other.'

Oswald laughed. 'I had no idea,' he said, 'Herr Schurz was such
a truculent sans-culotte as that comes to. As it was an evening
reception I thought, of course, one ought to turn up in evening
clothes.'

'Evening clothes! My dear fellow, how on earth do you suppose a
set of poor Leicester Square outlaws are going to get themselves
correctly set up in black broadcloth coats and trousers? They might
wash their white ties  themselves, to be sure; they mostly do their
own washing, I believe, in their own basins.' ('And not much at
that either,' put in Herbert, parenthetically.) 'But as to evening
clothes, why, they'd as soon think of arraying themselves for dinner
in full court dress as of putting on an obscurantist swallow-tail.
It's the badge of a class, a distinct aristocratic outrage; we must
alter it at once, I assure you, Oswald.'

'At any rate,' said Oswald laughing, 'I've had the pleasure of finding
myself accused for the first time in the course of my existence of
being aristocratic. It's quite worth while going to Max Schurz's
once in one's life, if it were only for the sake of that single
new sensation.'

'Well, my dear fellow, we must rectify you, anyhow, before you go.
Let me see; luckily you've got your dust-coat on, and you needn't
take that off; it'll do splendidly to hide your coat and waistcoat.
I'll lend you a blue tie, which will at once transform your upper
man entirely. But you show the cloven hoof below; the trousers
will surely betray you. They're absolutely inadmissible under any
circumstances whatsoever, as the Court Circular says, and you must
positively wear a coloured pair of Herbert's instead of them. Run
upstairs quickly, there's a good fellow, and get rid of the mark
of the Beast as fast as you can.'

Oswald did as he was told without demur, and in about a minute more
presented himself again, with the mark of the Beast certainly most
effectually obliterated, at least so far as outer appearance went.
His blue tie, light dust-coat, and borrowed grey trousers, made up
an ensemble much more like an omnibus conductor out for a holiday
than a gentleman  of the period in correct evening dress. 'Now
mind,' Ernest said seriously, as he opened the door, 'whatever you
do, Oswald, if you stew to death for it--and Schurz's rooms are
often very close and hot, I can assure you--don't for heaven's sake
go and unbutton your dust-coat. If you do they'll see at once you're
a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I shouldn't be at all surprised
if they were to turn and rend you. At least, I'm sure Max would be
very much annoyed with me for unsocially introducing a plutocratic
traitor into the bosom of the fold.'

They walked along briskly in the direction of Marylebone,  and
stopped at last at a dull, yellow-washed house, which bore on
its door a very dingy brass plate, inscribed in red letters, 'M.
et Mdlle. Tirard. Salon de Danse.' Ernest opened the door without
ringing, and turned down the passage towards the salon. 'Remember,'
he said, turning to Harry Oswald by way of a last warning, with his
hand on the inner door-handle, 'coûte que coûte, my dear fellow,
don't on any account open your dust-coat. No anti-social opinions;
and please bear in mind that Max is, in his own way, a potentate.'

The big hall, badly lighted by a few contribution candles (for the
whole colony subscribed to the best of its ability for the support
of the weekly entertainment), was all alive with eager figures and
the mingled busy hum of earnest conversation.  A few chairs ranged
round the wall were mostly occupied by Mdlle. Tirard and the other
ladies of the Socialist party; but the mass of the guests were
men, and they were almost all smoking, in utter indifference to the
scanty presence of the fair sex. Not that they were  intentionally
rude or boorish; that they never were; except where an emperor or an
aristocrat is concerned, there is no being on earth more courteous,
kindly, and considerate for the feelings of others than your
exiled Socialist. He has suffered much himself in his own time, and
so miseris  succurrere discit. Emperors he mentally classes with
cobras, tarantulas, and scorpions, as outside the pale of humanitarian
sympathies altogether; but, with this slight political exception,
he is the broadest and tenderest and most catholic in his feelings
of all living breathing creatures. However, the ladies of his party
have all been brought up from their  childhood onward in a mingled
atmosphere of smoke and  democracy; so that he no more thinks
of abstaining from tobacco in their presence than he thinks of
commiserating the poor fish for being so dreadfully wet, or the
unfortunate mole for his unpleasantly slimy diet of live earthworms.

'Herr Schurz,' said Ernest, singling out the great leader in the
gloom immediately, 'I've brought my brother Herbert here, whom
you know already, to see you, as well as another Oxford friend of
mind, Mr. Harry Oswald, Fellow and Lecturer  of Oriel. He's almost
one of us at heart, I'm happy to say, and at any rate I'm sure
you'll be glad to make his acquaintance.'

The little spare wizened-up grey man, in the threadbare brown velveteen
jacket, who stood in the middle of the hall, caught Ernest's hand
warmly, and held it for a moment fettered in his iron grip. There
was an honesty in that grip and in those hazy blue-spectacled eyes
that nobody could for a second misunderstand. If an emperor had
been introduced to Max Schurz he might have felt a little abashed
one minute at the old Socialist's royal disdain, but he could not
have failed to say to himself as he looked at him from head to
foot, 'Here, at least, is a true man.' So Harry Oswald felt, as
the spare grey thinker took his hand in his, and grasped it firmly
with a kindly pressure, but less friendly than that with which he
had greeted his known admirer, Ernest Le Breton. As for Herbert, he
merely bowed to him politely from a little distance; and Herbert,
who had picked up at once with a Polish exile in a corner, returned
the bow frigidly without coming up to the host himself at all for
a moment's welcome.

'I'm always pleased to meet friends of the cause from Oxford,'
Herr Schurz said, in almost perfect English. 'We want recruits most
of all among the thinking classes. If we are ever to make headway
against the banded monopolies--against the place-holders, the
land-grabbers, the labour-taxers, the robbers of the poor--we must
first secure the perfect undivided confidence of the brain-workers,
the thinkers, and the writers. At present everything is against us;
we are but a little leaven, trying vainly in our helpless fashion
to leaven the whole lump. The capitalist journals carry off all
the writing talent in the world; they are timid, as capital must
always be; they tremble for their tens of thousands a year, and
their vast circulations among the  propertied classes. We cannot
get at the heart of the people, save by the Archimedean lever of
the thinking world. For that reason, my dear Le Breton, I am always
glad to muster here your Oxford neophytes.'

'And yet, Herr Schurz,' said Ernest gently, 'you know we must not
after all despair. Look at the history of your own people! When
the cause of Jehovah seemed most hopeless, there were still seven
thousand left in Israel who had not bowed the knee to Baal. We are
gaining strength every day, while they are losing it.'

'Ah yes, my friend. I know that too,' the old man answered, with a
solemn shake of the head; 'but the wheels move slowly, they move
slowly--very surely, but oh, so slowly. You are young, friend
Ernest, and I am growing old. You look forward to the future with
hope; I look back to the past with regret: so many years gone, so
little, so very little done. It will come, it will come as surely
as the next glacial period, but I shall not live to see it. I stand
like Moses on Pisgah; I see the promised land before me; I look
down upon the equally allotted vineyards, and the glebe flowing
with milk and honey in the distance; but I shall not lead you into
it; I shall not even lead you against the Canaanites; another than
I must lead you in. But I am an old man, Mr. Oswald, an old man
now, and I am talking all about myself--an anti-social trick we have
inherited from our fathers. What is your friend's special line at
Oxford, did you say, Ernest?'

'Oswald is a mathematician, sir,' said Ernest, 'perhaps the greatest
mathematician among the younger men in the whole University.'

'Ah! that is well. We want exact science. We want clear and definite
thinking. Biologists and physicists and mathematicians, those are
our best recruits, you may depend upon it. We need logic, not mere
gas. Our French friends and our Irish friends--I have nothing in
the world to say against them; they are useful men, ardent men,
full of fire, full of enthusiasm, ready to do and dare anything--but
they lack ballast. You can't take the kingdom of heaven by storm.
The social revolution is not to be accomplished by violence, it is
not even to be carried by the most vivid  eloquence; the victory
will be in the end to the clearest brain and the subtlest intellect.
The orthodox political economists are clever sophists; they mask
and confuse the truth very speciously; we must have keen eyes and
sharp noses to spy out and scent out their tortuous fallacies. I'm
glad you're a mathematician, Mr. Oswald. And so you have thought
on social problems?'

'I have read "Gold and the Proletariate,"' Oswald answered modestly,
'and I learned much from it, and thought more. I won't say you have
quite converted me, Herr Schurz, but you have given me plenty of
food for future reflection.'

'That is well, said the old man, passing one skinny brown hand
gently up and down over the other. 'That is well.  There's no hurry.
Don't make up your mind too fast. Don't jump at conclusions. It's
intellectual dishonesty to do that.  Wait till you have convinced
yourself. Spell out your  problems slowly; they are not easy ones;
try to see how the present complex system works; try to probe
its inequalities and injustices; try to compare it with the ideal
commonwealth:  and you'll find the light in the end, you'll find
the light.'

As he spoke, Herbert Le Breton lounged up quietly from his farther
corner towards the little group. 'Ah, your brother, Ernest!' said
Max Schurz, drawing himself up a little more stiffly; 'he has found
the light already, I believe, but he neglects it; still he is not
with us, and he that is not with us is against us. You hold aloof
always, Mr. Herbert, is it not so?'

'Well, not quite aloof, Herr Schurz, I'm certain, but not on
your side exactly either. I like to look on and hold the balance
evenly, not to throw my own weight too lightly into either stale.
The objective attitude of the mere spectator is after all the right
one for an impartial philosopher to take up.'

'Ah, Mr. Herbert, this philosophy of your Oxford contemplative
Radicals is only another name for a kind of social selfishness,
I fancy,' said the old man solemnly. 'It seems to me your head is
with us, but your heart, your heart is elsewhere.'

Herbert Le Breton played a moment quietly with the Roman aureus of
Domitian on his watch-chain; then he said slowly in his clear cold
voice, 'There may be something in that, no doubt, Herr Schurz, for
each of us has his own game to play, and while the world remains
unreformed, he must play it on his own gambit to a great extent,
without reference to the independent game of others. We all agree
that the board is too full of counters, and as each counter is not
responsible for its own presence and position on the board, having
been put there without previous consultation by the players, we
must each do the best we can for ourselves in our own fashion. My
sympathies, as you say, are on your side, but perhaps my interests
lie the other way, and after all, till you start your millennium,
we must all rattle along as well as we can in the box together,
jarring against one another in our old ugly round of competition,
and supply and demand, and survival of the fittest, and mutual
accommodation,  and all the rest of it, to the end of the chapter.
Every man for himself and God for us all, you know. You have the
logic, to be sure, Herr Schurz, but the monopolists have the law
and the money.'

'Ah, yes,' said the old Socialist grimly; 'Demas, Demas; he and his
silver mine; you remember your Bunyan, don't you? Well, all faiths
and systems have their Demases. The cares of this world and the
deceitfulness of riches. He's bursar of his college, isn't he, Ernest?
I thought so. "He had the bag, and bare what was put therein." A
dangerous office, isn't it, Mr. Oswald? A very dangerous office.
You can't touch pitch or property without being defiled.'

'You at least, sir, said Ernest, reverentially, 'have kept yourself
unspotted from the world.'

The old man sighed, and turned for a moment to speak in French to
a tall, big-bearded new-comer who advanced to meet him. 'Impossible!'
he said quickly; 'I am truly distressed to hear it. It is very
imprudent, very  unnecessary.'

'What is the news?' asked Ernest, also in French.

The new-comer answered him with a marked South Russian accent.
'There has been another attempt on the life of Alexander Nicolaiovitch.'

'You don't mean to say so!' cried Ernest in surprise.

'Yes, I do,' replied the Russian, 'and it has nearly succeeded
too.'

'An attempt on whom?' asked Oswald, who was new to the peculiar
vocabulary of the Socialists, and not particularly accustomed to
following spoken French.

'On Alexander Nicolaiovitch,' answered the red-bearded stranger.

'Not the Czar?' Oswald inquired of Ernest.

'Yes, the one whom you call Czar,' said the stranger, quickly, in
tolerable English. The confusion of tongues seemed to be treated as
a small matter at Max Schurz's receptions, for everybody appeared
to speak all languages at once, in the true spirit of solidarity,
as though Babel had never been.

Oswald did not attempt to conceal a slight gesture of horror. The
tall Russian looked down upon him commiseratingly.  'He is of the
Few?' he asked of Ernest, that being the slang of the initiated
for a member of the  aristocratic and capitalist oligarchy.

'Not exactly,' Ernest answered with a smile; 'but he has not entirely
learned the way we here regard these penal measures. His sympathies
are one-sided as to Alexander, no doubt. He thinks merely of the
hunted, wretched life the man bears about with him, and he forgets
poor bleeding, groaning, down-trodden, long-suffering Russia. It
is the common way of Englishmen. They do not realise Siberia and
Poland and the Third Section, and all the rest of it; they think
only of Alexander as of the benevolent despot who freed the serf
and befriended the Bulgarian. They never remember that they have
all the freedom and privileges themselves which you poor Russians
ask for in vain; they do not bear in mind that he has only to sign
his name to a  constitution, a very little constitution, and he
might walk abroad as light-hearted in St. Petersburg to-morrow as
you and I walk in Regent Street to-day. We are mostly lopsided,
we English, but you must bear with us in our obliquity; we have
had freedom ourselves so long that we hardly know how to make due
allowance for those unfortunate folks who are still in search of
it.'

'If you had an Alexander yourselves for half a day,' the Russian
said fiercely, turning to Oswald, 'you would soon see the difference.
You would forget your virtuous indignation against Nihilist assassins
in the white heat of your anger against unendurable tyranny. You
had a King Charles in England once--the mere shadow of a Russian
Czar--and you were not so very ceremonious with him, you order-loving
English, after all.'

'It is a foolish thing, Borodinsky,' said Max Schurz, looking up
from the long telegram the other had handed him, 'and I told Toroloff
as much a fortnight ago, when he spoke to me about the matter. You
can do no good by these constant attacks, and you only rouse the
minds of the oligarchy against you by your importunity. Bloodshed
will avail us nothing; the world cannot be regenerated by a baptism
like that. Every peasant won over, every student enrolled, every
mother engaged to feed her little ones on the gospel of Socialism
together with her own milk, is worth a thousand times more to
us and to the people than a dead Czar. If your friends had really
blown him up, what then?  You would have had another Czar, and
another Third Section, and another reign of terror, and another
raid and massacre; and we should have lost twenty good men from our
poor little side for ever. We must not waste the salt of the earth
in that reckless fashion. Besides, I don't like this dynamite. It's
a bad argument, it smacks too much of the old royal and repressive
method. You know the motto Louis Quatorze used to cast on his
bronze cannon--"Ultima ratio regum." Well, we Socialists ought to
be able to find better logic for our opponents than that, oughtn't
we?'

'But in Russia,' cried the bearded man hotly, 'in poor stricken-down
groaning Russia, what other argument have they left us? Are we to
be hunted to death without real law or trial, tortured into sham
confessions, deluded with mock pardons, arraigned before hypocritical
tribunals,  ensnared by all the chicanery, and lying, and treachery,
and ferreting of the false bureaucracy, with its spies, and its
bloodhounds, and its knout-bearing police-agents; and then are we
not to make war the only way we can--open war, mind you, with fair
declaration, and due formalities, and proper warning beforehand--against
the irresponsible autocrat  and his wire-pulled office-puppets who
kill us off  mercilessly? You are too hard upon us, Herr Schurz;
even you yourself have no sympathy at all for unhappy Russia.'

The old man looked up at him tenderly and regretfully.  'My poor
Borodinsky,' he said in a gentle tremulous voice, 'I have indeed
sympathy and pity in abundance for you. I do not blame you; you
will have enough and to spare to do that, even here in free England;
I would not say a harsh word against you or your terrible methods
for all the world.  You have been hard-driven, and you stand at
bay like tigers.  But I think you are going to work the wrong way,
not using your energies to the best possible advantage for the
proletariate. What we have really got to do is to gain over every
man, woman, and child of the working-classes individually, and to
array on our side all the learning and intellect and economical
science of the thinking classes individually; and then we can present
such a grand united front to the banded monopolists that for very
shame they will not dare to  gainsay us. Indeed, if it comes to
that, we can leave them quietly alone, till for pure hunger they
will come and beg our assistance. When we have enticed away all
the workmen  from their masters to our co-operative factories, the
masters may keep their rusty empty mills and looms and engines to
themselves as long as they like, but they must come to us in the
end, and ask us to give them the bread they used to refuse us. For
my part, I would kill no man and rob no man; but I would let no
man kill or rob another either.'

'And how about Alexander Nicolaiovitch, then?' persisted  the
Russian, eagerly. 'Has he killed none in his loathsome prisons and
in his Siberian quicksilver mines?  Has he robbed none of their own
hardly got earnings by his poisoned vodki and his autocratically
imposed taxes and imposts? Who gave him an absolute hereditary right
to put us to death, to throw us in prison, to take our money from
us against our will and without our leave, to treat us as if we
existed, body and soul, and wives and children, only as chattels
for the greater glory of his own orthodox imperial majesty? If we
may justly slay the highway robber who meets us, arms in hand, in
the outskirts of the city, and demands of us our money or our life,
may we not justly slay Alexander Nicolaiovitch, who comes to our
homes in the person of his tax-gatherers to take the bread out of
our children's mouths and to help himself to whatever he chooses by
the divine right of his Romanoff heirship? I tell you, Herr Max,
we may blamelessly lie in wait for him wherever we find him, and
whoso says us nay is siding with the wolf against the lambs, with
the robber and the slayer against the honest representative of
right and justice.'

'I never met a Nihilist before,' said Oswald to Ernest, in a
half-undertone,' and it never struck me to think what they might
have to say for themselves from their own side of the question.'

'That's one of the uses of coming here to Herr Schurz's,' Ernest
answered quickly. 'You may not agree with all you hear, but at
least you learn to see others as they see  themselves; whereas if
you mix always in English society, and read only English papers,
you will see them only as we English see them.'

'But just fancy,' Oswald went on, as they both stood back a little
to make way for others who wished for interviews  with the great
man, 'just fancy that this Borodinsky, or whatever his name may be,
has himself very likely helped in dynamite plots, or manufactured
nitro-glycerine cartridges  to blow up the Czar; and yet we stand
here talking with him as coolly as if he were an ordinary respectable
innocent Englishman.'

'What of that?' Ernest answered, smiling. 'Didn't we meet Prince
Strelinoffsky at Oriel last term, and didn't we talk with him too,
as if he was an honest, hard-working, bread-earning Christian? and
yet we knew he was a member of the St. Petersburg office clique,
and at the bottom of half the trouble in Poland for the last ten
years or so. Grant even that Borodinsky is quite wrong in his way
of dealing with noxious autocrats, and yet which do you think is
the worst criminal of the two--he with his little honest glazier's
shop in a back slum of Paddington, or Strelinoffsky with his jewelled
fingers calmly signing accursed warrants to send childing Polish
women to die of cold and hunger and ill-treatment on the way to
Siberia?'

'Well, really, Le Breton, you know I'm a passably good Radical,
but you're positively just one stage too Radical even for me.'

'Come here oftener,' answered Ernest; 'and perhaps you'll begin to
think a little differently about some things.'

An hour later in the evening Max Schurz found Ernest alone in a
quiet corner. 'One moment, my dear Le Breton,' he said; 'you know
I always like to find out all about people's political antecedents;
it helps one to fathom the potentialities of their characters. From
what social stratum, now, do we get your clever friend, Mr. Oswald?'

'His father's a petty tradesman in a country town in Devonshire,
I believe,' Ernest answered; 'and he himself is a good general
democrat, without any very pronounced socialistic colouring.'

'A petty tradesman! Hum, I thought so. He has rather the mental
bearing and equipment of a man from the petite bourgeoisie. I have
been talking to him, and drawing him out. Clever, very, and with
good instincts, but not wholly and entirely sound. A fibre wrong
somewhere, socially speaking, a false note suspected in his ideas
of life; too much acquiescence in the thing that is, and too little
faith or enthusiasm for the thing that ought to be. But we shall
make something of him yet. He has read "Gold" and understands it.
That is already a beginning. Bring him again. I shall always be
glad to see him here.'

'I will,' said Ernest, 'and I believe the more you know him, Herr
Max, the better you will like him.'

'And what did you think of the sons of the prophets?' asked Herbert
Le Breton of Oswald as they left the salon at the close of the
reception.

'Frankly speaking,' answered Oswald, looking half aside at Ernest,
'I didn't quite care for all of them--the Nihilists and Communards
took my breath away at first; but as to Max Schurz himself I think
there can be only one opinion possible about him.'

'And that is----?'

'That he's a magnificent old man, with a genuine apostolic
inspiration. I don't care twopence whether he is right or wrong,
but he's a perfectly splendid old fellow, as honest and transparent
as the day's long. He believes in it all, and would give his life
for it freely, if he thought he could forward the cause a single
inch by doing it.'

'You're quite right,' said Herbert calmly. 'He's an Elijah thrown
blankly upon these prosaic latter days; and what's more, his
gospel's all true; but it doesn't matter a sou to you or me, for
it will never come about in our time, no nor for a century after.
"Post nos millennium." So what on earth's the good of our troubling
our poor overworked heads about it?'

'He's the only really great man I ever knew,' said Ernest
enthusiastically, 'and I consider that his friendship's the one
thing in my life that has been really and truly worth living for.
If a pessimist were to ask me what was the use of human existence,
I should give him a card of introduction to go to Max Schurz's.'

'Excuse my interrupting your rhapsody, Ernest,' Herbert put in
blandly, 'but will you have your own trousers  tonight, Oswald, or
will you wear mine back to your lodgings now, and I'll send one of
the servants round with yours for them in the morning?'

'Thanks,' said Harry Oswald, slapping the sides of the unopened
dust-coat; 'I think I'll go home as I am at present, and I'll recover
the marks of the Beast again to-morrow.  You see, I didn't betray
my evening waistcoat after all, now did I?'

And they parted at the corner, each of them going his own way in
his own mood and manner.



CHAPTER II.

THE COASTS OF THE GENTILES.


The decayed and disfranchised borough of Calcombe Pomeroy, or
Calcombe-on-the-Sea, is one of the prettiest and quietest little
out-of-the-way watering-places in the whole smiling southern slope
of the county of Devon.  Thank heaven, the Great Western Railway,
when planning its organised devastations along the beautiful rural
region of the South Hams, left poor little Calcombe out in the cold;
and the consequence is that those few people who still love to
linger in the uncontaminated rustic England of our wiser forefathers
can here find a beach unspoiled by goat-carriages or black-faced
minstrels, a tiny parade uninvaded by stucco terraces or German
brass bands, and an ancient stone pier off which swimmers may take
a header direct, in the early morning, before the sumptuary edicts
of his worship the Mayor compel them to resort to the use of
bathing-machines and the decent covering of an approved costume,
between the hours of eight and eight. A board beside the mouth of
the harbour, signed by a Secretary of State to his late Majesty
King William the Fourth, still announces to a heedless  world the
tolls to be paid for entry by the ships that never arrive; and a
superannuated official in a wooden leg and a gold cap-band retains
the honourable sinecure of a harbour-mastership, with a hypothetical
salary nominally payable from the non-existent fees and port dues.
The little river Cale, at the bottom of whose combe the wee town
nestles snugly, has cut itself a deep valley in the soft  sandstone
hills; and the gap in the cliffs formed by its mouth gives room
for the few hundred yards of level on which the antiquated little
parade is warmly ensconced. On either hand tall bluffs of brilliant
red marl raise their honeycombed faces fronting the sea; and in the
distance the sheeny grey rocks of the harder Devonian promontories
gleam like watered satin in the slant rays of the afternoon sun.
Altogether  a very sleepy little old-world place is Calcombe Pomeroy,
specially reserved by the overruling chance of the universe to be
a summer retreat for quiet, peace-loving, old-world people.

The Londoner who escapes for a while from the great teeming human
ant-hill, with its dark foggy lanes and solid firmament of hanging
smoke, to draw in a little unadulterated atmosphere at Calcombe
Pomeroy, finds himself landed by the Plymouth slow train at Calcombe
Road Station, twelve miles by cross-country highway from his final
destination.  The little grey box, described in the time-tables
as a  commodious omnibus, which takes him on for the rest of his
journey, crawls slowly up the first six miles to the summit of
the intervening range at the Cross Foxes Inn, and jolts swiftly
down the other six miles, with red hot drag creaking and groaning
lugubriously, till it seems to topple over sheer into the sea
at the clambering High Street of the old borough.  As you turn to
descend the seaward slope at the Cross Foxes, you appear to leave
modern industrial England and the  nineteenth century well behind
you on the north, and you go down into a little isolated primaeval
dale, cut off from all the outer world by the high ridge that girds
it round on every side, and turned only on the southern front
towards the open Channel and the backing sun. Half-way down the
steep cobble-paved High Street, just after you pass the big dull
russet church, a small shop on the left-hand side bears a signboard
with the painted legend, 'Oswald, Family Grocer and Provision
Dealer.' In the front bay window of that  red-brick house, built
out just over the shop, Harry Oswald, Fellow and Lecturer of Oriel
College, Oxford, kept his big oak writing-desk; and at that desk
he might be seen reading or writing on most mornings during the
long vacation, after the end of his three weeks' stay at a London
West-end  lodging-house, from which he had paid his first visit to
Max Schurz's Sunday evening receptions.

'Two pounds of best black tea, good quality--yours is generally
atrocious, Mrs. Oswald--that's the next thing on the list,' said
poor trembling, shaky Miss Luttrell, the Squire's sister, a palsied
old lady with a quavering,  querulous, rasping voice. 'Two pounds
of best black tea, and mind you don't send it all dust, as you usually
do. No good tea to be got nowadays, since they took the duties off
and ruined the country. And I see a tall young man lounging about
the place sometimes, and never touching his hat to me as he ought
to do. Young people have no manners in these times, Mrs. Oswald, as
they used to have when you and I were young. Your son, I suppose,
come home from sea or something? He's in the fish-curing line,
isn't he, I think I've heard you say?'

'I don't rightly know who 'ee may mean, Miss Luttrell,' replied
the mother proudly, 'by a young man lounging about the place; but
my son's at home from Oxford at present for his vacations, and he
isn't in the fish-curing line at all, ma'am, but he's a Fellow of
his college, as I've told 'ee more than once already; but you're
getting old, I see, Miss Luttrell, and your memory isn't just what
it had used to be, dost know.'

'Oh, at Oxford, is he?' Miss Luttrell chimed on vacantly, wagging
her wrinkled old head in solemn deprecation of the evil omen. She
knew it as well as Mrs. Oswald herself did, having heard the fact
at least a thousand times before; but she made it a matter of
principle never to encourage these upstart pretensions on the part
of the lower orders, and just to keep them rigorously at their
proper level she always made a feint of forgetting any steps in
advance which they might have been bold enough to take, without
humbly obtaining  her previous permission, out of their original
and natural obscurity. 'Fellow of his college is he, really?  Fellow
of a college! Dear me, how completely Oxford is going to the dogs.
Admitting all kinds of odd people into the University, I understand.
Why, my second brother--the  Archdeacon, you know--was a Fellow of
Magdalen for some time in his younger days. You surprise me, quite.
Fellow of a college! You're perfectly sure he isn't a National
schoolmaster at Oxford instead, and that you and his father haven't
got the two things mixed up together in your heads, Mrs. Oswald?'

'No, ma'am, we'in perfectly sure of it, and we haven't got the
things mixed up in our heads at all, no more nor you have, Miss
Luttrell. He was a scholar of Trinity first, and now he's got
a Fellowship at Oriel. You must mind hearing all about it at the
time, only you're getting so forgetful like now, with years and
such like.' Mrs. Oswald knew there was nothing that annoyed the old
lady so much as any allusion to her increasing age or infirmities,
and she took her revenge out of her in that simple retributive
fashion.

'A scholar of Trinity, was he? Ah, yes, patronage will do a great
deal in these days, for certain. The Rector took a wonderful
interest in your boy, I think, Mrs. Oswald. He went to Plymouth
Grammar School, I remember now, with a nomination no doubt; and
there, I dare say, he attracted some attention, being a decent,
hard-working lad, and got sent to Oxford with a sizarship, or
something of the sort; there are all kinds of arrangements like
that at the Universities,  I believe, to encourage poor young men
of respectable character. They become missionaries or ushers in
the end, and often get very good salaries, considering everything,
I'm told.'

'There you're wrong, again, ma'am,' put in Mrs. Oswald, stoutly.
'My husband, he sent Harry to Plymouth School at our own expense;
and after that he got an exhibition from the school, and an open
scholarship, I think they call it, at the college; and he's been no
more beholden to patronage, ma'am, than your brother the Archdeacon
was, nor for the matter o' that not so much neither; for I've a'ways
understood the old Squire sent him first to the Charterhouse, and
afterwards he got a living through Lord Modbury's influence, as
the Squire voted regular with the Modbury people for the borough
and county. But George was always independent, Miss Luttrell, and
beholden to neither Luttrells nor Modburies,  and that I tell 'ee
to your face, ma'am, and no shame of it either.'

'Well, well, Mrs. Oswald,' said the old lady, shaking her head more
violently than ever at this direct discomfiture, 'I don't want to
argue with you about the matter. I dare say your son's a very worthy
young man, and has worked his way up into a position he wasn't
intended for by Providence.  But it's no business of mine, thank
heaven, it's no business of mine, for I'm not responsible for all
the vagaries of all the tradespeople on my brother's estate, nor
don't want to be.  There's Mrs. Figgins, now, the baker's wife; her
daughter has just chosen to get married to a bank clerk in London;
and I said to her this morning, "Well, Mrs. Figgins, so you've let
your Polly go and pick up with some young fellow from town that
you've never seen before, haven't you? And that's the way of all you
people. You marry your girls to bank clerks without a reference, for
the sake of getting 'em off your hands, and what's the consequence?
They rob their employers to keep up a pretty household for their
wives, as if they were fine ladies; and then at last the thing's
discovered, there comes a smash, they run away to America, and you
have your daughters and their children thrown back again penniless
upon your hands." That's what I said to her, Mrs. Oswald.  And how's
YOUR daughter, by the way--Jemima I think you call her; how's she,
eh, tell me?'

'I beg your pardon, Miss Luttrell, but her name's not Jemima; it's
Edith.'

'Oh, Edith, is it? Well to be sure! The grand names girls have
dangling about with them nowadays! My name's plain Catherine, and
it's good enough for me, thank  goodness. But these young ladies
of the new style must be Ediths and Eleanors and Ophelias, and all
that heathenish kind of thing, as if they were princesses of the
blood or  play-actresses, instead of being good Christian Susans
and Janes and Betties, like their grandmothers were before them.
And Miss Edith, now, what is SHE doing?'

'She's doing nothing in particular at this moment, Miss Luttrell,
leastways not so far as I know of; but she's going up to Oxford
part of this term on a visit to her brother.'

'Going up to Oxford, my good woman! Why, heaven bless the girl,
she'd much better stop at home and learn her catechism. She should
try to do her duty in that station of life to which it has pleased
Providence to call her, instead of running after young gentlemen
above her own rank and place in society at Oxford. Tell her so
from me, Mrs. Oswald, and mind you don't send the tea dusty. Two
pounds of your best, if you please, as soon as you can send it.
Good-morning.' And Miss Luttrell, having discovered the absolute
truth of the shocking rumour which had reached her about Edith's
projected visit, the confirmation of which was the sole object of
her colloquy, wagged her way out of the shop again successfully,
and was duly assisted by the page-boy into her shambling little
palsied donkey-chair.

'That was all the old cat came about, you warr'nt you,' muttered
Mr. Oswald himself from behind his biscuit-boxes.  'Must have heard
it from the Rector's wife, and wanted to find out if it was true,
to go and tell Mrs. Walters o' such a bit o' turble presumptiousness.'

Meanwhile, in the little study with the bow-window over the shop,
Harry and Edie Oswald were busily discussing the necessary preparations
for Edie's long-promised visit to the University.

'I hope you've got everything nice in the way of dress, you know,
Edie,' said Harry. 'You'll want a decent dinner dress, of course,
for you'll be asked out to dine at least once or twice; and I want
you to have everything exceedingly proper and pretty.'

'I think I've got all I need in that way, Harry; I've my dark poplin,
cut square in the bodice, for one dinner dress, and my high black
silk to fall back upon for another. Worn open in front, with a lace
handkerchief and a locket, it does really very nicely. Then I've
got three afternoon dresses, the grey you gave me, the sage-greeny
aesthetic one, and the peacock-blue with the satin box-pleats. It's
a charming dress, the peacock-blue; it looks as if it might have
stepped straight out of a genuine Titian. It came home from Miss
Wells's this morning. Wait five minutes, like a dear boy, and I'll
run and put it on and let you see me in it.'

'That's a good girl, do. I'm so anxious you should have all your
clothes the exact pink of perfection, Popsy. Though I'm afraid I'm
a very poor critic in that matter--if you were only a problem in
space of four dimensions, now! Yet, after all, every man or woman
is more of a problem than anything in x square plus y square you
can possibly set yourself.'

Edie ran lightly up into her own room, and soon reappeared  clad
resplendent in the new peacock-blue dress, with hat and parasol
to match, and a little creamy lamb's-wool scarf thrown with artful
carelessness around her pretty neck and shoulders. Harry looked at
her with unfeigned admiration.  Indeed, you would not easily find
many lighter or more fairly-like little girls than Edie Oswald,
even in the beautiful half-Celtic South Hams of Devon. In figure
she was rather small than short, for though she was but a wee thing,
her form was so exactly and delicately modelled that she might have
looked tall if she stood alone at a little distance.  She never
walked, but seemed to dance about from place to place, so buoyant
and light, that Harry doubted whether in her case gravitation could
really vary as the square of the distance--it seemed, in fact,
to be almost diminished in the proportions of the cube. Her hair
and eyes--such big bright eyes!--were dark; but her complexion
was scarcely brunette, and the colour in her cheeks was rich and
peach-like, after the true Devonian type. She was dimpled whenever
she smiled, and she smiled often; her full lips giving a peculiar
ripe look to her laughing mouth that suited admirably with her
light and delicate style of beauty. Perhaps some people might have
thought them too full; certainly they irresistibly suggested to
a critical eye the distinct notion of kissability.  As she stood
there, faintly blushing, waiting to be admired by her brother, in
her neatly fitting dainty blue dress, her lips half parted, and her
arms held carelessly at her side, she looked about as much like a
fairy picture as it is given to mere human flesh and blood to look.

'It's delicious, Edie,' said Harry, surveying her from, head
to foot with a smile of satisfaction which made her blush deepen;
'it's simply delicious. Where on earth did you get the idea of it?'

'Well, it's partly the present style,' said Edie; 'but I took the
notion of the bodice partly too from that Vandyck, you know, in
the Palazzo Bossi at Genoa.'

'I remember, I remember,' Harry answered, contemplating  her with
an admiring eye. 'Now just turn round and show me how it sits
behind, Edie. You recollect Théophile Gautier says the one great
advantage which a beautiful woman possesses over a beautiful statue
is this, that while a man has to walk round the beautiful statue
in order to see it from every side, he can ask the beautiful woman
to turn herself round and let him see her, without requiring to
take that trouble.'

'Théophile Gautier was a horrid man, and if anybody but my brother
quoted such a thing as that to me I should be very angry with him
indeed.'

'Théophile Gautier was quite as horrid as you consider him to be,
and if you were anybody but my sister it isn't probable I should
have quoted him to you. But if there is any statue on earth prettier
or more graceful than you are in that dress at this moment, Edie,
then the Venus of Milo ought immediately to be pulverised to ultimate
atoms for a rank artistic impostor.'

'Thank you, Harry, for the compliment. What pretty things you must
be capable of saying to somebody else's sister, when you're so
polite and courtly to your own.'

'On the contrary, Popsy, when it comes to somebody else's sister
I'm much too nervous and funky to say anything of the kind. But
you must at least do Gautier the justice to observe that if I had
described a circle round you, instead of allowing you to revolve
once on your own axis, I shouldn't have been able to get the gloss
on the satin in the sunlight as I do now that you turn the panniers
toward the window.  That, you must admit, is a very important
aesthetic consideration.'

'Oh, of course it's essentially a sunshiny dress,' said Edie,
smiling. 'It's meant to be worn out of doors, on a fine afternoon,
when the light is falling slantwise, you know, just as it does now
through the low window. That's the light painters always choose
for doing satin in.'

'It's certainly very pretty,' Harry went on, musing; 'but I'm afraid
Le Breton would say it was a serious piece of economic hubris.'

'Piece of what?' asked Edie quickly.

'Piece of hubris--an economical outrage, don't you see; a gross
anti-social and individualist demonstration. Hubris, you know, is
Greek for insolence; at least, not quite  insolence, but a sort
of pride and overweening rebelliousness against the gods, the kind
of arrogance that brings Nemesis after it, you understand. It was
hubris in Agamemnon and Xerxes to go swelling about and ruffling
themselves like turkey-cocks, because they were great conquerors
and all that sort of thing; and it was their Nemesis to get murdered
by Clytemnestra, or jolly well beaten by the Athenians at Salamis.
Well, Le Breton always uses the word for  anything that he thinks
socially wrong--and he thinks a good many things socially wrong,
I can tell you--anything that partakes of the nature of a class
distinction, or a mere vulgar ostentation of wealth, or a useless
waste of good, serviceable, labour-gotten material. He would call
it hubris to have silver spoons when electroplate would do just as
well; or to keep a valet for your own personal attendant, making
one man into the mere bodily appanage of another; or to buy anything
you didn't really need, causing somebody else to do work for you
which might otherwise have been avoided.'

'Which Mr. Le Breton--the elder or the younger one?'

'Oh, the younger--Ernest. As for Herbert, the Fellow of St. Aldate's,
he's not troubled with any such scruples; he takes the world as he
finds it.'

'They've both gone in for their degrees, haven't they?'

'Yes, Herbert has got a fellowship; Ernest's up in residence still
looking about for one.'


'It's Ernest that would think my dress a piece of what-you-may-call-it?'

'Yes, Ernest.'

'Then I'm sure I shan't like him. I should insist upon every woman's
natural right to wear the dress or hat or bonnet that suits her
complexion best.'

'You can't tell, Edie, till you've met him. He's a very good
fellow; and of one thing I'm certain, whatever he thinks right he
does, and sticks to it.'

'But do YOU think, Harry, I oughtn't to wear a new peacock-blue
camel-hair dress on my first visit up to Oxford?'

'Well, Edie dear, I don't quite know what my own opinions are
exactly upon that matter. I'm not an economist, you see, I'm a man
of science. When I look at you, standing there so pretty in that
pretty dress, I feel inclined to say to myself, "Every woman ought
to do her best to make herself look as beautiful as she can for the
common delectation of all humanity." Your beauty, a Greek would
have said, is a gift from the gods to us all, and we ought all
gratefully to make the most of it. I'm sure _I_ do.'

'Thank you, Harry, again. You're in your politest humour this
afternoon.'

'But then, on the other hand, I know if Le Breton were here he'd
soon argue me over to the other side. He has the enthusiasm of
humanity so strong upon him that you can't help agreeing with him
as long as he's talking to you.'

'Then if he were here you'd probably make me put away the peacock-blue,
for fear of hubris and Nemesis and so forth, and go up to Oxford
a perfect fright in my shabby old Indian tussore!'

'I don't know that I should do that, even then, Edie.  In the first
place, nothing on earth could make you look a perfect fright, or
anything like one, Popsy dear; and in the second place, I don't
know that I'm Socialist enough myself ever to have the courage of
my opinions as Le Breton has.  Certainly, I should never attempt to
force them unwillingly upon others. You must remember, Edie, it's
one thing for Le Breton to be so communistic as all that comes to,
and quite another thing for you and me. Le Breton's father was a
general and a knight, you see; and people will never forget that
his mother's Lady Le Breton still, whatever he does.  He may do
what he likes in the way of social eccentricities, and the world
will only say he's such a very strange advanced young fellow. But
if I were to take you up to Oxford badly dressed, or out of the
fashion, or looking peculiar in any way, the world wouldn't put it
down to our political beliefs, but would say we were mere country
tradespeople by birth, and didn't know any better. That makes a
lot of difference, you know.'

'You're quite right, Harry; and yet, do you know, I think there must
be something, too, in sticking to one's own opinions, like Mr. Le
Breton. I should stick to mine, I'm sure, and wear whatever dress
I liked, in spite of anybody.  It's a sweet thing, really, isn't
it?' And she turned herself round, craning over her shoulder to look
at the effect, in a vain attempt to assume an objective attitude
towards her own back.

'I'm glad I'm going to Oxford at last, Harry,' she said, after a
short pause. 'I HAVE so longed to go all these years while you were
an undergraduate; and I'm dying to have got there, now the chance
has really come at last, after all.  I shall glory in the place,
I'm certain; and it'll be so nice to make the acquaintance of all
your clever friends.'

'Well, Edie,' said her brother, smiling gently at the light, joyous,
tremulous little figure, 'I think I've done right in putting it
off till now. It's just as well you haven't gone up to Oxford till
after your trip on the Continent with me.  That three months in
Paris, and Switzerland, and Venice, and Florence, did you a lot of
good, you see; improved you, and gave you tone, and supplied you
with things to talk about.'

'Why, you oughtn't to think I needed any improvement at all, sir,'
Edie answered, pouting; 'and as to talking, I'm not aware I had ever
any dearth of subjects for conversation even before I went on the
Continent. There are things enough to be said about heaven and earth
in England, surely, without one having to hurry through France and
Italy, like Cook's excursionists, just to hunt up something fresh
to chatter about. It's my belief that a person who can't find
anything new to say about the every-day world around her won't
discover much suggestive matter for conversation in a Continental
Bradshaw. It's like that feeble watery lady I met at the table
d'hote at Geneva. From something she said I gathered she'd been
in India, and I asked her how she liked it. "Oh," she said, "it's
very hot." I told her I had heard so before. Presently she said
something casually about having been in Brazil. I asked her what
sort of place Brazil was. "Oh." she said, "it's dreadfully hot."
I told her I'd heard that too. By-and-by she began to talk again
about Barbadoes. "What did you think of the West Indies?" I said.
"Oh," said she, "they're terribly hot, really." I told her I had
gathered as much from previous travellers.  And that was positively
all in the end I ever got out of her, for all her travels.'

'My dear Edie, I've always admitted that you were simply perfect,'
Harry said, glancing at her with visible admiration, 'and I
don't think anything on earth could  possibly improve you--except
perhaps a judicious course of differential and integral calculus,
which might possibly serve to tone down slightly your exuberant
and excessive vitality.  Still, you know, from the point of view
of society, which is a force we have always to reckon with--a
constant, in fact, that we may call Pi--there can be no doubt in
the world that to have been on the Continent is a differentiating
factor in one's social position. It doesn't matter in the least
what your own private evaluation of Pi may be; if you don't happen
to know the particular things and places that Pi knows, Pi's evaluation
of you will be approximately a  minimum, of that you may be certain.'

'Well, for my part, I don't care twopence about Pi as you call it,'
said Edie, tossing her pretty little head  contemptuously; 'but
I'm very glad indeed to have been on the Continent for my own sake,
because of the pictures, and palaces, and mountains, and waterfalls
we've seen, and not because of Pi's opinion of me for having seen
them. I would have been the same person really whether I'd seen
them or not; but I'm so much the richer myself for that view from
the top of the Col de Balme, and for that Murillo--oh, do you
remember the flood of light on that Murillo?--in the far corner
of that delicious gallery at Bologna. Why, mother darling, what on
earth has been vexing you?'

'Nothing at all, Edie dear; leastways, that is, nothing to speak
of,' said her mother, coming up from the shop hot and flurried from
her desperate encounter with the redoubtable Miss Luttrell.

'Oh, I know just what it is, darling,' cried the girl, putting her
arm around her mother's waist caressingly, and drawing her down to
kiss her face half a dozen times over in her outburst of sympathy.
'That horrid old Miss Catherine has been here again, I'm sure, for
I saw her going out of the shop just now, and she's been saying
something or other spiteful, as she always does, to vex my dearie.
What did she say to you to-day, now do tell us, duckie mother?'

'Well, there,' said Mrs. Oswald, half laughing and half crying, 'I
can't tell 'ee exactly what she did say, but it was just the kind
of thing that she mostly does, impudent like, just to hurt a body's
feelings. She said you'd better not go to Oxford, Edie, but stop
at home and learn your catechism.'

'You might have pointed out to her, mother dear,' said the young
man, smoothing her hair softly with his hand, and kissing her
forehead, 'that in the most advanced intellectual centres the Church
catechism is perhaps no longer regarded as the absolute ultimatum
of the highest and deepest economical wisdom.'

'Bless your heart, Harry, what'd be the good of talking that way
to the likes of she? She wouldn't understand a single word of what
you were driving at. It must be all plain sailing with her, without
it's in the way of spite, and then she sees her chance to tack round
the hardest corner with half a wind in her sails only, as soon as
look at it. Her sharpness goes all off toward ill-nature, that it
do. Why, she said you'd got on at Oxford by good patronage!'

'There, you see, Edie,' cried Harry demonstratively, 'that's
an infinitesimal fraction of Pi; that's a minute decimal of this
great, sneering, ugly aggregate "society" that we have to deal with
whether we will or no, and that rends us and grinds us to powder
if only it can once get in the thin end of a chance. Take shaky
bitter old Miss Catherine for your unit, multiply her to the nth,
and there you see the irreducible power we have to fight against.
All one's political economy is very well in its way; but the
practical master of the situation is Pi, sitting autocratically in
many-headed judgment on our poor solitary little individualities,
and crushing us irretrievably with the dead weight of its inexorable
cumulative nothingness. And to think that that quivering old mass of
perambulating jealousy--that living incarnation of envy, hatred,
malice, and all  uncharitableness--should be able to make you
uncomfortable for a single moment, mother darling, with her petty,
dribbling, doddering venom, why, it's simply unendurable.'

'There now, Harry,' said Mrs. Oswald, relenting, 'you mustn't be
too hard, neither, on poor old Miss Catherine.  She's a bit soured,
you see, by disappointments and one thing and another. She doesn't
mean it, really, but it's just her nature. Folks can't be blamed
for their nature, now, can they?'

'It occurs to me,' said Harry quietly, 'that vipers only sting because
it's their nature; and Dr. Watts has made a similar observation
with regard to the growling and fighting of bears and lions. But
I'm not aware that anybody has yet proposed to get up a Society
for the protection of those much-misunderstood creatures, on the
ground that they are not really responsible for their own inherited
dispositions.  Mr. William Sikes had a nature (no doubt congenital)
which impelled him to beat his wife--I'm not sure that she was
even his wife at all, now I come to think of it, but that's a mere
detail--and to kick his familiar acquaintances casually about the
head. We, on the other hand, have natures which impel us, when we
catch Mr. William Sikes indulging in these innate idiosyncrasies
by way of recreation, to clap him promptly into prison, and even,
under certain aggravating conditions, to cause him to be hanged
by the neck till he be dead. This may be a regrettable incident of
our own peculiar  dispositions, mother dear, but it has at least
the same justification as Mr. Sikes's or the bears' and lions',
that 'tis our nature to. And I feel pretty much the same way about
old Miss Luttrell.'

'Well, there,' said his mother, kissing him gently, 'you're a bad
rebellious boy to be calling names, like a chatter-mag, and I won't
listen to you any longer. How pretty Edie do look in her new dress,
to be sure, Harry.  I'll warr'nt there won't be a prettier girl
in Oxford next week than what she is; no, nor a better one and a
sweeter one neither.'

Harry put his arms round both their waists at once, with an
affectionate pressure; and they went down to their old-fashioned
tea together in the little parlour behind the shop, looking out over
the garden, and the beach, and the great cliffs beyond on either
hand, to the very farthest edge of the distant clear-cut blue
horizon.



CHAPTER III.

MAGDALEN QUAD.


The Reverend Arthur Collingham Berkeley, curate of St.  Fredegond's,
lounged lazily in his own neatly padded wickerwork easy-chair,
opposite the large lattice-paned windows of his pretty little
first-floor rooms in the front quad of Magdalen.

'There's a great deal to be said, Le Breton, in favour of October
term,' he observed, in his soft, musical voice, as he gazed pensively
across the central grass-plot to the crimson drapery of the Founder's
Tower. 'Just look at that magnificent  Virginia creeper over there,
now; just look at the way the red on it melts imperceptibly into
Tyrian purple and cloth of gold! Isn't that in itself argument
enough to fling at Hartmann's head, if he ventured to come here
sprinkling about his heresies, with his affected little spray-shooter,
in the midst of a drowsy Oxford autumn? The Cardinal never saw
Virginia creeper, I suppose; a man of his taste wouldn't have been
guilty of committing such a gross practical anachronism as that,
any more than he would have smoked a cigarette before tobacco was
invented; but if only he could have seen the October effect on that
tower yonder, he'd have acknowledged that his own hat and robe were
positively nowhere in the running, for colour, wouldn't he?'

'Well,' answered Herbert, putting down the Venetian glass goblet
he had been examining closely with due care into its niche in the
over-mantel, 'I've no doubt Wolsey had too much historical sense
ever to step entirely out of his own century, like my brother Ernest,
for instance; but I've never heard his opinion on the subject of
colour-harmonies, and I should suspect it of having been distinctly
tinged with nascent symptoms of renaissance vulgarity. This is a
lovely bit of Venetian, really, Berkeley. How the dickens do you
manage to pick up all these pretty things, I wonder? Why can't I
afford them, now?'

'What a question for the endowed and established to put to a poor
starving devil of a curate like me!' said Berkeley lightly. 'You,
an incarnate sinecure and vested interest, a creature revelling in
an unearned income of fabulous Oriental magnificence--I dare say,
putting one thing with another, fully as much as five hundred a
year--to ask me, the  unbeneficed and insignificant, with my wretched
pittance of eighty pounds per annum and my three pass-men a term
for classical mods, how I scrape together the few miserable, hoarded
ha'pence which I grudgingly invest in my pots and pipkins! I save
them from my dinner, Mr. Bursar--I save them. If the Church only
recognised modest merit as it ought to do!--if the bishops only
listened with due attention to the sound and scholarly exegesis of
my Sunday evening discourses at St. Fredegond's!--then, indeed, I
might be disposed to regard things through a more satisfied
medium--the medium of a nice, fat, juicy country living. But for you,
Le Breton--you, sir, a pluralist and a sanguisorb of the deepest
dye--to reproach me with my Franciscan poverty--oh, it's too
cruel!'

'I'm an abuse, I know,' Herbert answered, smiling and waving his
hand gracefully. 'I at once admit it. Abuses exist, unhappily; and
while they continue do so, isn't it better they should envisage
themselves as me than as some other and probably less deserving
fellow?'

'No, it's not, decidedly. I should much prefer that one of them
envisaged itself as me.'

'Ah, of course. From your own strictly subjective point of view
that's very natural. I also look at the question abstractly from
the side of the empirical ego, and correctly deduce a corresponding
conclusion. Only then, you see, the terms of the minor premiss are
luckily reversed.'

'Well, my dear fellow,' said the curate, 'the fact about the
tea-things is this. You eat up your income, devour your substance
in riotous living; I prefer to feast my eyes and ears to my grosser
senses. You dine at high table, and fare sumptuously every day;
I take a commons of cold beef for lunch, and have tea off an egg
and roll in my own rooms at seven. You drink St. Emilion or still
hock; I drink water from the well or the cup that cheers but
not obfuscates.  The difference goes to pay for the crockery. Do
likewise, and with your untold wealth you might play Aunt Sally at
Oriental blue, and take cock-shots with a boot-jack at hawthorn-pattern
vases.'

'At any rate, Berkeley, you always manage to get your money's worth
of amusement out of your money.'

'Of course, because I lay myself out to do it. Buy a bottle of
champagne, drink it off, and there you have to show for your total
permanent investment on the transaction the memory of a noisy evening
and a headache the next morning. Buy a flute, or a book of poems,
or a little picture, or a Palissy platter, and you have something
to turn to with delight and admiration for half a lifetime.'

'Ah, but it isn't everybody who can isolate himself so utterly
from the workaday world and live so completely in his own little
paradise of art as you can, my dear fellow.  Non omnia possumus
omnes. You seem to be always up in the aesthetic clouds, with your
own music automatically laid on, and no need of cherubim or seraphim
to chant continually  for your gratification. Play me something of
your own on your flute now, like a good fellow.'

'No, I won't; because the spirit doesn't move me. It's treachery
to the divine gift to play when you don't want to.  Besides, what's
the use of playing before YOU when you're not the dean of a musical
cathedral? David was wiser; he played only before Saul, who had
of course all the livings in his own gift, no doubt. I've got a
new thing running in my head this very minute that you shall hear
though, all the same, as soon as I've hammered it into shape--a
sort of villanette in music, a little whiff of country freshness,
suggested by the new ethereal acquisition, little Miss Butterfly.
Have you seen Miss Butterfly yet?'

'Not by that name, at any rate. Who is she?'

'Oh, the name's my own invention. Mademoiselle Volauvent,  I
mean--the little bit of whirligig thistledown from Devonshire,
Oswald's sister, you know, of Oriel.'

'Ah, that one! Yes; just caught a glimpse of her in the High on
Thursday. Very pretty, certainly, and as airy as a humming-bird.'

'That's her! She's coming here to lunch this morning.  If you're
a good boy, and will promise not to say anything naughty, you may
stop and meet her. She's a nice little thing, but rather timid at
seeing so many fresh faces. You mustn't frighten her by discussing
the Absolute and the  Unconditioned, or bore her by talking about
Aristotle's Politics, or the revolutions in Corcyra. For you know,
my dear Le Breton, if you HAVE a fault, it is that you're such a
consummate and irrepressible prig; now aren't you really?'

'I'm hardly a fair judge on that subject, I suppose, Berkeley; but
if YOU have a rudimentary glimmering of a virtue, it is that you're
such a deliciously frank and yet  considerate critic. I'll pocket
your rudeness though, and eat your lunch, in spite of it. Is Miss
Butterfly, as you call her, as stand-off as her brother?'

'Not at all. She's accueillante to the last degree.'

'Very restricted, I suppose--a country girl of the first water?
Horizon absolutely bounded by the high hedges of her native parish?'

'Oh dear no! Anything but that. She's like her brother, naturally
quick and adaptive.'

'Oswald's an excellent fellow in his way,' said Herbert, button-holing
his own waistcoat; 'but he's spoilt by two bad traits. In the first
place, he's so dreadfully conscious of the fact that he has risen
from a lower position; and then, again, he's so engrossingly and
pervadingly mathematical.  X square seems to have seized upon him
bodily, and to have wormed its fatal way into his very marrow.'

'Ah, you must remember, he's true to his first love.  Culture came
to him first, while yet he abode in Philistia, under the playful
disguise of a conic section. He scaled his way out of Gath by means
of a treatise on elementary  trigonometry, and evaded Askelon on
the wings of an undulatory theory of light. It is different with
us, you know, who have emerged from the land of darkness by the
regular classical and literary highway. We feed upon Rabelais and
Burton; he flits carelessly from flower to flower of the theory of
Quantics. If he were an idealist painter, like Rossetti, he would
paint great allegorical pictures for us, representing an asymptotic
curve appearing to him in a dream, and introducing  that blushing
maiden, Hyperbola, to his affectionate consideration.'

As Berkeley spoke, a rap sounded on the oak, and Ernest Le Breton
entered the room.

'What, you here, Herbert?' he said with a shade of  displeasure in
his tone. 'Are you, too, of the bidden?'

'Berkeley has asked me to stop and lunch with him, if that's what
you mean.'

'We shall be quite a party,' said Ernest, seating himself, and looking
abstractedly round the room. 'Why, Berkeley,' as his eye fell upon
the Venetian vase, 'you've positively got some more gew-gaws here.
This one's new, isn't it? Eh!'

'Yes. I picked it up for a song, this long, at a stranded village
in the Apennines. Literally for a song, for it cost me just what
I got from Fradelli for that last little piece of mine. It's very
pretty, isn't it?'

'Very; exquisite, really; the blending of the tones is so perfect.
I wish I knew what to think about these things.  I can't make up
my mind about them. Sometimes I think it's all right to make them
and buy them; sometimes I think it's all wrong.'

'Oh, if that's your difficulty,' said Berkeley, pulling his white
tie straight at the tiny round looking-glass, 'I can easily reassure
you. Do you think a hundred and eighty pounds a year an excessive
sum for one person to spend upon his own entire living?'

'It doesn't seem so, as expenses go amongst US,' said Ernest, seriously,
'though I dare say it would look like shocking extravagance to a
working man with a wife and family.'

'Very well, that's the very outside I ever spend upon myself in
any one year, for the excellent reason that it's all I ever get to
spend in any way. Now, why shouldn't I spend it on the things that
please me best and are joys for ever, instead of on the things that
disappear at once and perish in the using?'

'Ah, but that's not the whole question,' Ernest answered, looking
at the curate fixedly. 'What right have you and I to spend so much
when others are wanting for bread? And what right have you or I
to make other people work at producing  these useless trinkets for
our sole selfish gratification?'

'Well now, Le Breton,' said the parson, assuming a more serious tone,
'you know you're a reasonable creature, so I don't mind discussing
this question with you. You've got an ethical foundation to
your nature, and you want to see things done on decent grounds of
distributive justice. There I am one with you. But you've also got
an aesthetic side to your nature, which makes you worth arguing
with upon the matter. I won't argue with your vulgar materialised
socialist, who would break up the frieze of the Parthenon for road
metal, or pull down Giotto's frescoes because they represent scenes
in the fabulous lives of saints and martyrs.  You know what a work
of art is when you see it; and therefore  you're worth arguing
with, which your vulgar Continental  socialist really isn't. The
one cogent argument for him is the whiff of grape-shot.'

'I recognise,' said Ernest, 'that the works of art, of poetry, or
of music, which we possess are a grand inheritance from the past;
and I would do all I could to preserve them intact for those that
come after us.'

'I'm sure you would. No restoration or tinkering in you, I'm
certain. Well, then, would you give anything for a world which
hadn't got this aesthetic side to its corporate existence? Would
you give anything for a world which didn't care at all for painting,
sculpture, music, poetry? I wouldn't. I don't want such a world.
I won't countenance such a world. I'll do nothing to further or
advance such a world. It's utterly repugnant to me, and I banish
it, as Themistocles banished the Athenians.'

'But consider,' said Ernest, 'we live in a world where men and women
are actually starving. How can we reconcile  to our consciences the
spending of one penny on one useless thing when others are dying
of sheer want, and cold, and nakedness? That's the great question
that's always oppressing my poor dissatisfied conscience.'

'So it does everybody's--except Herbert's: he explains it all on
biological grounds as the beautiful discriminative action of natural
selection. Simple, but not consolatory.  Still, look at the other
side of the question. Suppose you and everybody else were to give
up all superfluities, and confine all your energies to the unlimited
production of bare necessaries. Suppose you occupy every acre
of land with your corn-fields, or your piggeries; and sweep away
all the parks, and woods, and heaths, and moorlands in England.
Suppose you keep on letting your population multiply as fast as it
chooses--and it WILL multiply, you know, in that ugly, reckless,
anti-Malthusian fashion of its own--till every rood of ground
maintains its man, and only just maintains him; and what will you
have got then?'

'A dead level of abject pauperism,' put in Herbert blandly; 'a
reductio ad absurdum of all your visionary Schurzian philosophy,
my dear Ernest. Look at it another way, now, and just consider.
Which really and truly matters most to you and me, a great work
of art or a highly respectable horny-handed son of toil, whose
acquaintance we have never had the pleasure of personally making?
Suppose you read in the Times that the respectable horny-handed
one has fallen off a scaffolding and broken his neck; and that the
Dresden Madonna has been burnt by an unexpected accident; which
of the two items of intelligence affects you the most acutely? My
dear fellow, you may push your humanitarian enthusiasm as far as
ever you like; but in your heart of hearts you know as well as I
do that you'll deeply regret the loss of the Madonna, and you'll
never think again about the fate of the respectable horny-handed,
his wife or children.'

Ernest's answer, if he had any to make, was effectually nipped in
the bud by the entrance of the scout, who came in to announce Mr.
and Miss Oswald and Mrs. Martindale.  Edie wore the grey dress,
her brother's present, and flitted into the room after her joyous
fashion, full of her first fresh delight at the cloistered quad of
Magdalen.

'What a delicious college, Mr. Berkeley!' she said, holding  out
her hand to him brightly. 'Good-morning, Mr. Le Breton; this is
your brother, I know by the likeness. I thought New College very
beautiful, but nothing I've seen is quite as beautiful as Magdalen.
What a privilege to live always in such a place! And what an
exquisite view from your window here!'

'Yes,' said Berkeley, moving a few music-books from the seat in the
window-sill; 'come and sit by it, Miss Oswald.  Mrs. Martindale,
won't you put your shawl down? How's the Professor to-day? So sorry
he couldn't come.'

'Ah, he had to go to sit on one of his Boards,' said the old lady,
seating herself. 'But you know I'm quite accustomed  to going out
without him.'

Arthur Berkeley knew as much; indeed, being a person of minute
strategical intellect, he had purposely looked out a day on which
the Professor had to attend a meeting of the delegates of something
or other, so as to secure Mrs. Martindale's  services without the
supplementary drawback of that prodigious bore. Not that he was
particularly anxious for Mrs. Martindale's own society, which was
of the most strictly negative character; but he didn't wish Edie
to be the one lady in a party of four men, and he invited the
Professor's wife as an excellent neutral figure-head, to keep her
in countenance. Ladies were scarcer then in Oxford than they are
nowadays. The married fellow was still a tentative problematical
experiment in those years, and the invasion of the Parks by young
couples had hardly yet begun in earnest.  So female society was
still at a considerable local premium, and Berkeley was glad enough
to secure even colourless old Mrs. Martindale to square his party
at any price.

'And how do you like Oxford, Miss Oswald?' asked Ernest, making
his way towards the window.

'My dear Le Breton, what a question to put to her!' said Berkeley,
smiling. 'As if Oxford were a place to be appraised offhand, on
three days' acquaintance. You remind me of the American who went
to look at Niagara, and made an approving note in his memorandum
book to say that he found it really a very elegant cataract.'

'Oh, but you MUST form some opinion of it at least, at first sight,'
cried Edie; 'you can't help having an impression of a place from
the first moment, even if you haven't a  judgment on it, can you
now? I think it really surpasses my expectations, Mr. Le Breton,
which is always a pleasant surprise. Venice fell below them; Florence
just came up to them; but Oxford, I think, really surpasses them.'

'We have three beautiful towns in Britain,' Berkeley said. ('As if
he were a Welsh Triad,' suggested Herbert Le Breton, parenthetically.)
'Torquay, Oxford, Edinburgh.  Torquay is all nature, spoilt by what
I won't call art; Oxford is all art, superimposed on a swamp that
I won't call nature; Edinburgh is both nature and art, working pretty
harmoniously together, to make up a unique and exquisite picture.'

'Just like Naples, Venice, and Heidelberg,' said Edie, half to
herself; but Berkeley caught at the words quickly as she said them.
'Yes,' he answered; 'a very good parallel, only Oxford has a trifle
more nature about it than Venice.  The lagoon, without the palaces,
would be simply hideous; the Oseney flats, without the colleges,
would be nothing worse than merely dull.'

'We owe a great deal,' said Ernest, gazing out towards the quadrangle,
'to the forgotten mass of labouring humanity who piled all those
blocks of shapeless stone into beautiful forms for us who come after
to admire and worship. I often wonder, when I sit here in Berkeley's
window-seat, and look across the quad to the carved pinnacles on
the Founder's Tower there, whether any of us can ever hope to leave
behind to our successors any legacy at all comparable to the one
left us by those nameless old mediaeval masons. It's a very saddening
thought that we for whom all these beautiful things have been put
together--we whom labouring humanity has pampered and petted from
our cradles upward, feeding us on its whitest bread, and toiling
for us with all its weary sinews--that we probably will never do
anything at all for it and for the world in return, but will simply
eat our way through life aimlessly, and die forgotten in the end like
the beasts that perish. It ought to make us, as a class, terribly
ashamed of our own utter and abject inutility.'

Edie looked at him with a sort of hushed surprise; she was accustomed
to hear Harry talk radical talk enough after his own fashion, but
radicalism of this particular pensive tinge she was not accustomed
to. It interested her, and made her wonder what sort of man Mr. Le
Breton might really be.

'Well, you know, Mr. Le Breton,' said old Mrs. Martindale,
complacently, 'we must remember that Providence has wisely ordained
that we shouldn't all of us be masons or  carpenters. Some of us are
clergymen, now, and look what a useful, valuable life a clergyman's
is, after all, isn't it, Mr. Berkeley?' Berkeley smiled a faint
smile of amusement, but said nothing. 'Others are squires and
landed gentry; and I'm sure the landed gentry are very desirable
in keeping up the tone of the country districts, and setting a
pattern of virtue and refinement to their poorer neighbours. What
would the country villages be, for example, if it weren't for the
centres of culture afforded by the rectory and the hall, eh, Miss
Oswald.' Edith thought of quavering old Miss Catherine Luttrell
gossiping with the rector's wife, and held her peace. 'You may depend
upon it Providence has ordained these distinctions of classes for
its own wise  purposes, and we needn't trouble our heads at all
about trying to alter them.'

'I've always observed,' said Harry Oswald, 'that Providence  is
supposed to have ordained the existing order for the time being,
whatever it may be, but not the order that is at that exact moment
endeavouring to supplant it. If I were to visit Central Africa,
I should confidently expect to be told by the rain-doctors that
Providence had ordained the absolute power of the chief, and the
custom of massacring his wives and slaves at his open grave side.
I believe in Russia it's usually allowed that Providence has placed
the orthodox Czar at the head of the nation, and that any attempt
to obtain a constitution  from him is simply flat rebellion and
flying in the face of Providence. In England we had a King John
once, and we extracted a constitution out of him and sundry other
kings by main force; and here, it's acquiescence in the present
limited aristocratic government that makes up  obedience to
the Providential arrangement of things apparently.  But how about
America? eh, Mrs. Martindale? Did Providence  ordain that George
Washington was to rebel against his most sacred majesty King George
III., or did it not?  And did it ordain that George Washington was
to knock his most sacred majesty's troops into a cocked hat, or
did it not? And did it ordain that Abraham Lincoln was to free the
slaves, or did it not? What I want to know is this: can it be said
that Providence has ordained every class distinction in the whole
world, from Dahomey to San  Francisco? And has it ordained every
Government, past and present, from the Chinese Empire to the French
Convention?  Did it ordain, for example, the revolution of '89?
That's the question I should like to have answered.'

'Dear me, Mr. Oswald,' said the old lady meekly, taken aback by
Harry's voluble vehemence: 'I suppose Providence permits some things
and ordains others.'

'And does it permit American democracy or ordain it?' asked the
merciless Harry.

'Don't you see, Mrs. Martindale,' put in Berkeley, coming gently
to her rescue, 'your principle amounts in effect to saying that
whatever is, is right.'

'Exactly,' said the old lady, forgetting at once all about Dahomey
or the Convention, and coming back mentally to her squires and
rectors. 'The existing order is wisely arranged by Providence, and
we mustn't try to set ourselves up against it.'

'But if whatever is, is right,' Edie said, laughing, 'then Mr. Le
Breton's socialism must be right too, you see, because it exists
in him no doubt for some wise purpose of Providence; and if he and
those who think with him can succeed in changing  things generally
according to their own pattern, then the new system that they
introduce will be the one that Providence  has shown by the result
to be the favoured one.'

'In short,' said Ernest, musingly, 'Mrs. Martindale's principle
sanctifies success. It's the old theory of "treason never
prospers--what's the reason? Because whene'er it prospers 'tis not
treason." If we could only introduce a socialist republic, then it
would be the reactionaries who would be setting themselves up against
constituted authority, and so flying in the face of Providence.'

'Fancy lecturing a recalcitrant archbishop and a remonstrant
ci-devant duchess,' cried Berkeley, lightly, 'upon the moral guilt
and religious sinfulness of rebellion against the constituted
authority of a communist phalanstery. It would be simply charming.
I can imagine myself composing a dignified exhortation to deliver
to his grace, entirely  compiled out of his own printed pastorals, on
the duty of  submission and the danger of harbouring an insubordinate
spirit.  Do make me chaplain-in-ordinary to your house of correction
for irreclaimable aristocrats, Le Breton, as soon as you once get
your coming socialist republic fairly under way.'

'Luncheon is on the table, sir,' said the scout, breaking in
unceremoniously upon their discussion.

If Arthur Berkeley lunched by himself upon a solitary commons of
cold beef, he certainly did not treat his friends and guests in
corresponding fashion. His little entertainment  was of the daintiest
and airiest character, so airy that, as Edie herself observed
afterwards to Harry, it took away all the sense of meat and drink
altogether, and left one only a pleased consciousness of full
artistic gratification. Even Ernest, though he had his scruples
about the aspic jelly, might eat the famous Magdalen chicken cutlets,
his brother said, 'with a distinct feeling of exalted gratitude to
the arduous culinary evolution of collective humanity.'

'Consider,' said Herbert, balancing neatly a little pyramid  of
whip cream and apricot jam upon his fork, 'consider what ages of
slow endeavour must have gone to the development  of such a complex
mixture as this, Ernest, and thank your stars that you were born
in this nineteenth century of Soyer and Francatelli, instead of
being condemned to devour a Homeric feast with the unsophisticated
aid of your own five fingers.'

'But do tell me, Mr. Le Breton,' asked Edie, with one of her pretty
smiles, 'what will this socialist republic of yours be like when
it actually comes about? I'm dying to know all about it.'

'Really, Miss Oswald,' Ernest answered, in a half-embarrassed tone,
'I don't quite know how to reply to such a very wide and indefinite
question. I haven't got any  cut-and-dried constitutional scheme of
my own for reorganising the whole system of society, any distinct
panacea to cure all the ills that collective flesh is heir to. I
leave the details of the future order to your brother Harry. The
thing that troubles me is not so much how to reform the world at
large as how to shape one's own individual course aright in the
actual midst of it. As a single unit of the whole, I want rather
guidance for my private conduct than a scheme for redressing the
universal dislocation of things in general. It seems to me, every
man's first duty is to see that he himself is in the right attitude
towards society, and afterwards he may proceed to enquire whether
society is in the right  attitude towards him and all its other
members. But if we were all to begin by redressing ourselves,
there would be nothing left to redress, I imagine, when we turned
to attack the second half of our problem. The great difficulty I
myself  experience is this, that _I_ can't discover any adequate
social justification for my own personal existence. But I really
oughtn't to bore other people with my private  embarrassments upon
that head.'

'You see,' said Herbert Le Breton, carelessly, 'my brother represents
the ethical element in the socialist  movement, Miss Oswald, while
Harry represents the political element. Each is valuable in its
way; but Oswald's is the more practical. You can move great masses
into demanding their rights; you can't so easily move them into
cordially recognising their duties. Hammer, hammer, hammer at the
most obvious abuses; that's the way all the political victories
are finally won. If I were a radical at all, I should go with you,
Oswald. But happily I'm not one; I prefer the calm philosophic
attitude of perfectly objective neutrality.'

'And if I were a radical,' said Berkeley, with a tinge of sadness
in his voice as he poured himself out a glass of hock, 'I should
go with Le Breton. But unfortunately I'm not one, Miss Oswald, I'm
only a parson.'



CHAPTER IV.

A LITTLE MUSIC.


After lunch, Herbert Le Breton went off for his afternoon ride--a
grave social misdemeanour, Ernest thought it--and Arthur Berkeley
took Edie round to show her about the college and the shady gardens.
Ernest would have liked to walk with her himself, for there was
something in her that began to interest him somewhat; and besides,
she was so pretty, and so graceful, and so sympathetic: but he
felt he must not take her away from her host for the time being,
who had a sort of proprietary right in the pleasing duty of acting
as showman to her over his own college. So he dropped behind with
Harry Oswald and old Mrs. Martindale,  and endeavoured to simulate
a polite interest in the old lady's scraps of conversation upon
the heads of houses, their wives and families.

'This is Addison's Walk, Miss Oswald,' said Berkeley, taking her
through the gate into the wooded path beside the Cherwell; 'so
called because the ingenious Mr. Addison is said to have specially
patronised it. As he was an undergraduate  of this college, and a
singularly lazy person, it's very probable that he really did so;
every other undergraduate certainly does, for it's the nearest walk
an idle man can get without ever taking the trouble to go outside
the grounds of Magdalen.'

'The ingenious Mr. Addison was quite right then,' Edie answered,
smiling; 'for he couldn't have chosen a lovelier place on earth to
stroll in. How exquisite it looks just now, with the mellow light
falling down upon the path through this beautiful autumnal foliage!
It's just a natural cathedral aisle, with a lot of pale straw-coloured
glass in the painted windows, like that splendid one we went to
see the other day at Merton Chapel.'

'Yes, there are certainly tones in that window I never saw in any
other,' Berkeley said, 'and the walk to-day is very much the same
in its delicate colouring. You're fond of colour, I should think,
Miss Oswald, from what you say.'

'Oh, nobody could help being struck by the autumn colouring of the
Thames valley, I should fancy,' said Edie, blushing. 'We noticed
it all the way up as we came in the train from Reading, a perfect
glow of crimson and orange at Pangbourne, Goring, Mapledurham, and
Nuneham. I always thought the Dart in October the loveliest blaze
of warm reds and yellows I had ever seen anywhere in nature, but
the Thames valley beats it hollow, as Harry says. This walk to-day
is just one's ideal picture of Milton's Vallombrosa.'

'Ah, yes, I always look forward to the first days of October term,'
said Berkeley, slowly, 'as one of the greatest and purest treats
in the whole round workaday twelvemonth.  When the creeper on the
Founder's Tower first begins to redden and crimson in the autumn,
I could sit all day long by my open window, and just look at that
glorious sight alone instead of having my dinner. But I'm very fond
of these walks in full summer time too. I often stop up alone all
through the long (being tied to my curacy here permanently, you
know), and then I have the run of the place entirely to myself.
Sometimes I take my flute out, and sit under the shade here and
compose some of my little pieces.'

'I can easily understand that they were composed here,' said Edie
quickly. 'They've caught exactly the flavour of the place--especially
your exquisite little Penseroso.'

'Ah, you know my music, then, Miss Oswald?'

'Oh yes, Harry always brings me home all your pieces whenever he
comes back at the end of term. I can play every one of them without
the notes. But the Penseroso is my special favourite.'

'It's mine, too. I'm so glad you like it. But I'm working  away at
a little thing now which you shall hear as soon as I've finished
it; something lighter and daintier than  anything else I've ever
attempted. I shall call it the Butterfly Canzonet.'

'Why don't you publish your music under your own name, Mr. Berkeley?'

'Oh, because it would never do. I'm a parson now, and I must
keep up the dignity of the cloth by fighting shy of any aesthetic
heterodoxies. It would be professional suicide for me to be suspected
of artistic leanings. All very well in an archdeacon, you know,
to cultivate his tastes for chants and anthems, but for a simple
curate!--and secular songs too!--why, it would be sheer contumacy.
His chances of a living would shrink at once to what your brother
would call a vanishing quantity.'

'Well, you can't imagine how much I admire your songs and airs,
Mr. Berkeley. I was so pleased when you invited us, to think I was
going to lunch with a real composer.  There's no music I love so
much as yours.'

'I'm very glad to hear it, Miss Oswald, I assure you.  But I'm only
a beginner and a trifler yet. Some day I mean to produce something
that will be worth listening to. Only, do you remember what some
French novelist once said?--"A poet's sweetest poem is always
the one he has never been able to compose." I often think that's
true of music, too.  Away up in the higher stories of one's brain
somewhere, there's a tune floating about, or rather a whole oratorio
full of them, that one can never catch and fix upon ruled paper.
The idea's there, such a beautiful and vague idea, so familiar to
one, but so utterly unrealisable on any known instrument--a sort
of musical Ariel, flitting before one and tantalising one for
ever, but never allowing one to come up with it and see its real
features. I'm always dissatisfied with what I've actually written,
and longing to crystallise into a score the imaginary airs I can
never catch. Except in this last piece of mine; that's the only
thing I've ever done that thoroughly and completely pleases me.
Come and see me next week, and I'll play it over to you.'

They walked all round the meadows, and back again beside the arches
of the beautiful bridge, and then returned to Berkeley's rooms once
more for a cup of afternoon tea, and an air or two of Berkeley's
own composing. Edie  enjoyed the walk and the talk immensely; she
enjoyed the music even more. In a way, it was all so new to her.
For though she had always seen much of Harry, and though Harry, who
was the kindest and proudest of brothers, had always instinctively
kept her up to his own level of thought and conversation, still,
she wasn't used to seeing so many intelligent and educated young
men together, and the novelty of their society was delightfully
exhilarating to her eager little mind. To a bright girl of nineteen,
wherever she may come from, the atmosphere of Oxford has a wonderfully
cheering and stimulating effect; to a country tradesman's  daughter
from a tiny west-country village it is like a little paradise on
earth with a ceaseless round of intensely enjoyable breakfasts,
luncheons, dinners, and water-parties.

Ernest, for his part, was not so well pleased. He wanted to have a
little conversation with Oswald's sister; and he was compelled by
politeness to give her up in favour of Arthur Berkeley. However, he
made up for it when he returned, and monopolised the pretty little
visitor himself for almost the entire tea-hour.

As soon as they had gone, Arthur Berkeley sported his oak, and sat
down by himself in his comfortable  crimson-covered basket chair.
'I won't let anybody come and disturb me this evening,' he said to
himself moodily. 'I won't let any of these noisy Magdalen men come
with their racket and riot to cut off the memory of that bright little
dream. No desecration after she has gone. Little Miss Butterfly!
What a pretty, airy, dainty, delicate little morsel it is! How she
flits, and sips, and natters about every possible subject, just
touching the tip of it so gracefully with her tiny white fingers,
and blushing so unfeignedly when she thinks she's paid you a
compliment, or you've paid her one. How she blushed when she said
she liked my music! How she blushed when I said she had a splendid
ear for minute discrimination!  Somehow, if I were a falling-in-love
sort of fellow, I half fancy I could manage to fall in love with her
on the spot.  Or rather, if I were a good analytical psychologist,
perhaps I ought more correctly to say I AM in love with her already.'

He sat down idly at the piano and played a few bars softly
to himself--a beautiful, airy sort of melody, as it shaped itself
vaguely in his head at the moment, with a little of the new wine of
first love running like a trill through the midst of its fast-flowing
quavers and dainty undulations.  'That will do,' he said to himself
approvingly. 'That will do very well; that's little Miss Butterfly.
Here she flits, flits, flits, flickers, sip, sip, sip, at her
honeyed flowers; twirl away, whirl away, off in the sunshine--there
you go, Miss Butterfly, eddying and circling with your painted
mate.  Flirt, flirt, flirt, coquetting and curvetting, in your
pretty rhythmical aërial quadrille. Down again, down to the hare-bell
on the hill side; sip at it, sip at it, sip at it, sweet little
honey-drops, clear little honey-drops, bright little honey-drops;
oh, for a song to be set to the melody! Tra-la-la, tro-lo-lo, up
again, Butterfly. Little silk handkerchief, little lace neckerchief,
fluttering, fluttering! Feathery wings of her, bright little eyes
of her, flit, flit, flicker! Now, she blushes, blushes, blushes;
deep crimson; oh, what a colour!  Paint it, painter! Now she speaks.
Oh, what laughter!  Silvery, silvery, treble, treble, treble; trill
away, trill away, silvery treble. Musical, beautiful; beautiful,
musical; little Miss Butterfly--fly--fly--fly away!' And he brought
his fingers down upon the gamut at last, with a hasty, flickering
touch that seemed really as delicate as Edie's own.

'I can never get words for it in English,' he said again, half
speaking with his parted lips; 'it's too dactylic in rhythm for
English verse to go to it. Béranger might have written a lilt for
it, as far as mere syllables go, but Béranger to write about Miss
Butterfly!--pho, no Frenchman could possibly catch it. Swinburne
could fit the metres, I dare say, but he couldn't fit the feeling.
It shall be a song without words, unless I write some Italian lines
for it myself. Animula, blandula vagula--that's the sort of ring
for it, but Latin's mostly too heavy. Io, Hymen, Hymenae, Io; Io,
Hymen, Hymenae! What's that? A wedding song of Catullus--absit omen.
I must be in love with her indeed.' He got up from the piano, and
paced quickly and feverishly up and down the room.

'And yet,' he went on, 'if only I weren't bound down so by this
unprofitable trade of parson! A curate on eighty pounds a year,
and a few pupils! The presumptuousness of the man in venturing to
think of falling in love, as if he were actually one of the beneficed
clergy! What are deacons coming to, I wonder! And yet, hath not a
deacon eyes; hath not a deacon hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions?  If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle
us, do we not laugh? And if you show us a little Miss Butterfly,
beautiful to the finger-ends, do we not fall in love with her at
least as unaffectedly as if we were canons residentiary or rural
deans? Fancy little Miss Butterfly a rural deaness!  the notion's
too ridiculous. Fly away, little Miss Butterfly; fly away, sweet
little frolicsome, laughsome creature. I won't try to tie you down
to a man in a black clerical coat with a very distant hypothetical
reversionary prospect of a dull and dingy country parsonage. Flit
elsewhere, little Miss Butterfly,  flit elsewhere, and find yourself
a gayer, gaudier-coloured mate!'

He sat down again, and strummed a few more bars of his half-composed,
half-extemporised melody. Then he leant back on the music-stool,
and said gently to himself once more: 'Still, if it were possible,
how happy I should try to make her! Bright little Miss Butterfly,
I would try never to let a cold cloud pass chillily over your
sunshiny head! I would live for you, and work for you, and write
songs for your sake, all full of you, you, you, and so all full of
life and grace and thrilling music. What's my life good for, to me
or to the world? "A clergyman's life is such a useful one," that
amiable old conventionality gurgled out this morning; what's the
good of mine, as it stands now, to its owner or to anybody else,
I should like to know, except the dear old Progenitor? A mere bit
of cracked blue china, a fanciful air from a comic opera, masquerading
in black and white as a piece of sacred music! What good am I to
anyone on earth but the Progenitor (God bless him!), and when he's
gone, dear old fellow, what on earth shall I have left to live
for. A selfish blank, that's all. But with HER, ah, how different!
With her to live for and to cherish, with an object to set before
oneself as worth one's consideration, what mightn't I do at last?
Make her happy--after all, that's the great thing. Make her fond
of my music, that music that floats and evades me now, but would
harden into scores as if by magic with her to help one to spell it
out--I know it would, at last, I know it would. Ah, well, perhaps
some day I may be able; perhaps some day the dream will realise
itself; till then, work, work, work; let me try to work towards
making it possible, a living or a livelihood, no matter which.  But
not a breath of it to you meanwhile, Miss Butterfly; flit about
freely and joyously while you may; I would not spoil your untrammelled
flight for worlds by trying to tether it too soon around the fixed
centre of my own poor doubtful diaconal destinies.'

At the same moment while Arthur Berkeley was thus garrulously conversing
with his heated fancy, Harry and Edie Oswald were strolling lazily
down the High, to Edie's lodgings.

'Well, what do you think now of Berkeley and Le Breton, Edie?'
asked her brother. 'Which of them do you like the best?'

'I like them both immensely, Harry; I really can't choose between
them. When Mr. Berkeley plays, he almost makes me fall in love with
him; and when Mr. Le Breton talks, he almost makes me transfer my
affections to him instead... But Mr. Berkeley plays divinely... And
Mr. Le Breton talks beautifully... You know, I've never seen such
clever men before--except you, of course, Harry dear, for you're
cleverer and nicer than anybody. Oh, do let me look at those lovely
silks over there?' And she danced across the road before he could
answer her, like a tripping sylph in a painter's dreamland.

'Mr. Le Breton's very nice,' she went on, after she had duly examined
and classified the silks, 'but I don't exactly understand what it
is he's got on his conscience.'

'Nothing whatsoever, except the fact of his own existence,' Harry
answered with a laugh. 'He has conscientious scruples against the
existence of idle people in the community--do-nothings and eat-alls--and
therefore he has conscientious scruples against himself for not
immediately committing suicide. I believe, if he did exactly what
he thought was abstractly right, he'd go away and cut his own throat
incontinently for an unprofitable, unproductive, useless citizen.'

'Oh, dear, I hope he'll do nothing of the sort,' cried Edie hastily.
'I think I shall really ask him not to for my sake, if not for
anybody else's.'

'He'd be very much flattered indeed by your interposition on his
behalf, no doubt, Popsy; but I'm afraid it wouldn't produce much
effect upon his ultimate decision.'

'Tell me, Harry, is Mr. Berkeley High Church?'

'Oh dear no, I shouldn't say so. I don't suppose he ever gave the
subject a single moment's consideration.'

'But St. Fredegond's is very High Church, I'm told.'

'Ah, yes; but Berkeley's curate of St. Fredegond's, not in virtue
of his theology--I never heard he'd got any to speak of--but in
virtue of his musical talents. He went into the Church, I suppose,
on purely aesthetic grounds. He liked a musical service, and it
seemed natural to him to take part in one, just as it seemed natural
to a mediaeval Italian with artistic tendencies to paint Madonnas
and St. Sebastians.  There's nothing more in his clerical coat than
that, I fancy, Edie. He probably never thought twice about it on
theological grounds.'

'Oh, but that's very wrong of him, Harry. I don't mean having
no particular theological beliefs, of course; one  expects that
nowadays; but going into the Church without them.'

'Well, you see, Edie, you mustn't judge Berkeley in quite the same
way as you'd judge other people. In his mind, the aesthetic side
is always uppermost; the logical side is comparatively in abeyance.
Questions of creed, questions of philosophical belief, questions
of science don't interest him at all; he looks at all of them from
the point of view of the impression alone. What he sees in the
Church is not a body of dogmas, like the High Churchmen, nor a set
of opinions, like the Low Churchmen, but a close  corporation of
educated and cultivated gentlemen, charged with the duty of caring
for a number of beautiful mediaeval  architectural monuments,
and of carrying on a set of grand and impressive musical or oral
services. To him, a cathedral is a magnificent historical heritage;
a sermon is a sort of  ingenious literary exercise; and a hymn is
a capital vehicle for very solemn emotional music. That's all; and
we can hardly blame him for not seeing these things as we should
see them.'

'Well, Harry, I don't know. I like them both immensely.  Mr.
Berkeley's very nice, but perhaps I like Mr. Le Breton the best
of the two.'



CHAPTER V.

ASKELON VILLA, GATH.


Number, 28, Epsilon Terrace, Bayswater, was one of the very smallest
houses that a person with any pretensions to move in that Society
which habitually spells itself with a capital initial could ever
possibly have dreamt of condescending  to inhabit. Indeed, if
Dame Eleanor, relict of the late Sir Owen Le Breton, Knight, had
consulted merely the length of her purse and the interests of her
personal comfort, she would doubtless have found for the same rental
a far more convenient and roomy cottage in Upper Clapton or Stoke
Newington. But Lady Le Breton was a thoroughly and conscientiously
religious woman, who in all things  consulted first and foremost
the esoteric interests of her  ingrained creed. It was a prime
article of this cherished social faith that nobody with any shadow
of personal  self-respect could endure to live under any other
postal letter than W. or S.W. Better not to be at all than to drag
out a miserable existence in the painful obscurity of N. or S.E.
Happily for people situated like Lady Le Breton, the metropolitan
house-contractor (it would be gross flattery to describe  him
as a builder) has divined, with his usual practical sagacity, the
necessity for supplying this felt want for eligible family residences
at once comparatively cheap and relatively fashionable. By driving
little culs-de-sac and re-entrant alleys at the back of his larger
rows of shoddy mansions, he is enabled to run up a smaller terrace,
or crescent, or place, as the case may be, composed of tiny shallow
cottages with the narrowest possible frontage, and the tallest
possible elevation, which will yet entitle their occupiers to feel
themselves within the sacred pale of social salvation, in the blest
security of the mystic W. Narrowest, shallowest, and tallest of
these marginal Society residences is the little block of blank-faced,
stucco-fronted, porticoed rabbit-hutches, which blazons itself
forth in the Court Guide under the imposing designation of Epsilon
Terrace, Bayswater.

The interior of No. 28 in this eminently respectable back alley was
quite of a piece, it must be confessed, with the vacant Philistinism
of its naked exterior. 'Mother has really an immense amount of
taste,' Herbert Le Breton used to say, blandly, 'and all of it of
the most atrocious description; she picked it up, I believe, when
my poor father was quartered at Lahore, a station absolutely fatal
to the aesthetic faculties; and she will never get rid of it again
as long as she lives.' Indeed, when once Lady Le Breton got anything
whatsoever into her head, it was not easy for anybody else to get
it out again; you might much more readily expect to draw one of her
double teeth than to eliminate one of her pet opinions. Not that
she was a stupid or a near-sighted woman--the mother of clever
sons never is--but she was a perfectly immovable rock of social
and political orthodoxy. The three Le Breton boys--for there was
a third at home--would gladly have reformed the terrors of that
awful drawing-room if they had dared; but they knew it was as much
as their places were worth, Herbert said, to attempt a remonstrance,
and they wisely left it alone, and said nothing.

Of course the house was not vulgarly furnished, at least in the
conventional sense of the word; Lady Le Breton was far too rigid
in her social orthodoxy to have admitted into her rooms anything
that savoured of what she considered bad form, according to her
lights. It was only vulgar with the underlying vulgarity of mere
tasteless fashionable uniformity. There was nothing in it that any
well-bred footman  could object to; nothing that anybody with one
grain of genuine originality could possibly tolerate. The little
occasional chairs and tables set casually about the room were of
the strictest négligé Belgravian type, a sort of studied protest
against the formal stiffness of the ordinary unused middle-class
drawing-room. The portrait of the late Sir Owen in the wee library,
presented by his brother-officers, was painted by that distinguished
R. A., Sir Francis Thomson, a light of the middle of this century;
and an excellent work of art it was too, in its own solemn academic
kind. The dining-room, tiny as it was, possessed that inevitable
Canaletti without which no gentleman's dining-room in England
is ever considered to be complete. Everything spoke at once the
stereotyped Society style of a dozen years ago (before Mr. Morris
had reformed the outer aspect of the West End), entirely free from
anything so startling or indecorous as a gleam of spontaneity in
the possessor's mind. To be sure, it was very far indeed from the
centre round-table and brilliant-flowered-table-cover style of the
utter unregenerate Philistine household; but it was further still
from the simple natural taste and graceful fancy of Edie Oswald's
cosy little back parlour behind the village grocer's shop at
Calcombe-Pomeroy.

The portrait and the Canaletti were relics of Lady Le Breton's best
days, when Sir Owen was alive, and the boys were still in their
first babyhood. Sir Owen was an Indian officer of the old school,
a simple-minded, gentle, brave man, very religious after his
own fashion, and an excellent soldier, with the true Anglo-Indian
faculty for administration and organisation. It was partly from
him, no doubt, that the boys inherited their marked intelligence;
and it was wholly from him, beyond any doubt at all, that Ernest
and his younger brother Ronald inherited their moral or religious
sincerity--for that was an element in which poor formally orthodox
Lady Le Breton was wholly deficient. The good General had been
brought up in the strictest doctrines of the Clapham sect; he had
gone to India young, as a cadet from Haileybury; and he had applied
his intellect all his life long rather to the arduous task of
extending 'the blessings of British rule' to Sikhs and Ghoorkas, than
to those abstract ethical or theological questions which agitated
the souls of a later generation. If a new district had to be
assimilated in settlement to the established model of the British
raj, if a tribe of hill-savages had to be conciliated by gentler
means than rifles or bayonets, if a difficult bit of diplomatic
duty had to be performed on the debateable frontiers, Sir Owen Le
Breton was always the person chosen to undertake it.  An earnest,
honest, God-fearing man he remained to the end, impressed by a
profound sense of duty as he understood  it, and a firm conviction
that his true business in life consisted in serving his Queen and
country, and in bringing more and more of the native populations
within the pale of the Company's empire, and the future evangelisation
that was ultimately to follow. But during the great upheaval of
the Mutiny, he fell at the head of his own unrevolted regiment in
one of the hottest battles of that terrible time, and my Lady Le
Breton found herself left alone with three young children, on little
more than the scanty pension of a general officer's widow on the
late Company's establishment.

Happily, enough remained to bring up the boys, with the aid
of their terminable annuities (which fell in on their attaining
their majority), in decent respect for the feelings and demands of
exacting Society; and as the two elder were decidedly clever boys,
they managed to get scholarships  at Oxford, which enabled them
to tide over the dangerous  intermediate period as far as their
degree. Herbert then stepped at once into a fellowship and sundry
other good things of like sort; and Ernest was even now trying to
follow in his brother's steps, in this particular. Only the youngest
boy, Ronald, still remained quite unprovided for.  Ronald was a
tall, pale, gentle, weakly, enthusiastic young fellow of nineteen,
with so marked a predisposition to lung disease that it had not been
thought well to let him run the chance of over-reading himself; and
so he had to be content with remaining at home in the uncongenial
atmosphere of Epsilon Terrace, instead of joining his two elder
brothers at the university. Uncongenial, because Ronald alone
followed Sir Owen in the religious half of his nature, and found
the 'worldliness' and conventionality of his unflinching mother a
serious bar to his enjoyment of home society.

'Ronald,' said my lady, at the breakfast-table on the very morning
of Arthur Berkeley's little luncheon party, 'here's a letter for
you from Mackenzie and Anderson. No doubt your Aunt Sarah's will
has been recovered and proved at last, and I hope it'll turn out
satisfactory, as we wish it.'

'For my part, I really almost hope it won't, mother,' said Ronald,
turning it over; 'for I don't want to be  compelled to profit by
Ernest's excessive generosity. He's too good to me, just because he
thinks me the weaker vessel; but though we must bear one another's
burdens, you know, we should each bear his own cross as well,
shouldn't we, mother?'

'Well, it can't be much in any case,' said his mother, a little
testily, 'whoever gets it. Open the envelope at once, my boy, and
don't stand looking at it like a goose in that abstracted way.'

'Oh, mother, she was my father's only sister, and I'm not in such
a hurry to find out how she has disposed of her mere perishing
worldly goods,' answered Ronald, gravely.  'It seems to me a terrible
thing that before poor dear good Aunt Sarah is cold in her grave
almost, we should be  speculating and conjecturing as to what she
has done with her poor little trifle of earthly riches.'

'It's always usual to read the will immediately after the funeral,'
said Lady Le Breton, firmly, to whom the ordinary usage of society
formed an absolutely unanswerable  argument; 'and how you, Ronald,
who haven't even the common decency to wear a bit of crape around
your arm for her--a thing that Ernest himself, with all his
nonsensical theories, consents to do--can talk in that absurd way
about what's quite right and proper to be done, I for my part,
really can't imagine.'

'Ah, but you know, mother, I object to wearing crape on the ground
that it isn't allowable for us to sorrow as them that have no hope:
and I'm sure I'm paying no disrespect  to dear Aunt Sarah's memory
in this matter, for she was always the first herself, you remember,
to wish that I should follow the dictates of my own conscience.'

'I remember she always upheld you in acts of opposition to your own
mother, Ronald,' Lady Le Breton said coldly, 'and I suppose you're
going to do honour to her religious precepts now by not opening
that letter when your mother tells you to do so. In MY Bible, sir,
I find a place for the Fourth Commandment.'

Ronald looked at her gently and unreprovingly; but though a quiet
smile played involuntarily around the corners of his mouth, he
resisted the natural inclination to correct her mistake, and to
suggest blandly that she probably alluded to the fifth. He knew
he must turn his left cheek also--a Christian virtue which he had
abundant opportunities  of practising in that household; and he felt
that to score off his mother for such a verbal mistake as the one
she had just made would not be in keeping with the spirit of the
commandment to which, no doubt, she meant to refer him. So without
another word he opened the envelope and glanced rapidly at the
contents of the letter it enclosed.

'They've found the second will,' he said, after a moment, with a
rather husky voice, 'and they're taking steps to get it confirmed,
whatever that may be.'

'Broad Scotch for getting probate, I believe,' said Lady Le Breton,
in a slight tone of irony; for to her mind any departure from the
laws or language she was herself  accustomed to use, assumed at once
the guise of a rank and offensive provincialism. 'Your poor Aunt
WOULD go and marry a Scotchman, and he a Scotch business man too;
so of course we must expect to put up with all kinds of  ridiculous
technicalities and Edinburgh jargon accordingly. All law's bad
enough in the way of odd words, but commend me to Scotch law for
utter and meaningless incomprehensibility.  Well, and what does
the second will say, Ronald?'

'There, mother,' cried Ronald, flinging the letter down hurriedly
with a burst of tears. 'Read it yourself, if you will, for I can't.
Poor dear Aunt Sarah, and dear, good unselfish Ernest! It makes me
cry even to think of them.'

Lady Le Breton took the paper up from the table without a word and
read it carefully through. 'I am very glad to hear it,' she said,
'very glad indeed to hear it. "And in order to guard against any
misinterpretation of my reasons for making this disposition of my
property," your Aunt says, "I wish to put it on record that I had
previously drawn up another will, bequeathing my effects to be divided
between my two nephews Ernest and Ronald Le Breton equally; that I
communicated the contents of that will"--a horrid Scotticism--"to
my nephew Ernest; and that at his express desire I have now revoked
it, and drawn up this present testament, leaving the share intended
for him to his brother Ronald." Why, she never even mentions dear
Herbert!'

'She knew that Herbert had provided for himself,' Ronald answered,
raising his head from his hands, 'while Ernest and I were unprovided
for. But Ernest said he could fight the world for himself, while
I couldn't; and that unearned wealth ought only to be accepted
in trust for those who were incapacitated by nature or misfortune
from earning  their own bread. I don't always quite agree with
all Ernest's theories any more than you do, but we must both admit
that at least he always conscientiously acts up to them himself,
mother, mustn't we?'

'It's a very extraordinary thing,' Lady Le Breton went on, 'that Aunt
Sarah invariably encouraged both you boys in all your absurdities
and Quixotisms. She was Quixotic herself at heart, that's the truth
of it, just like your poor dear father. I remember once, when we
were quartered at Meean Meer in the Punjaub, poor dear Sir Owen
nearly got into disgrace with the colonel--he was only a sub. in
those days--because he wanted to go trying to convert his syces,
which was a most imprudent thing to do, and directly opposed to
the Company's orders. Aunt Sarah was just the same. Herbert's the
only one of you three who has never given me one moment's anxiety,
and of course poor Herbert must be passed over in absolute silence.
However, I'm very glad she's left the money to you, Ronald, as
you need it the most, and Mackenzie and Anderson say it'll come to
about a hundred and sixty a year.'

'One can do a great deal of good with that much money,' said Ronald
meditatively. 'I mean, after arranging with you, mother, for the
expenses of my maintenance at home, which of course I shall do, as
soon as the pension ceases, and after meeting one's own necessary
expenditure in the way of clothing and so forth. It's more than
any one Christian man ought to spend upon himself, I'm sure.'

'It's not at all too much for a young man in your position in
society, Ronald; but there--I know you'll want to spend half of
it on indiscriminate charity. However, there'll be time enough to
talk about that when you've actually got it, thank goodness.'

Ronald murmured a few words softly to himself, of which Lady Le
Breton only caught the last echo--'laid them down at the apostles'
feet; and distribution was made unto every man according as he had
need.'

'Just like Ernest's communistic notions,' she murmured in return,
half audibly. 'I do declare, between them both, a plain woman hardly
knows whether she's standing on her head or on her heels. I live
in daily fear that one or other of them will be taken up by the
police, for being implicated in some dynamite plot or other, to blow
up the Queen or destroy the Houses of Parliament.' Ronald smiled
again, gently, but answered nothing. 'There's another letter for
you there, though, with the Exmoor coronet upon it. Why don't you
open it? I hope it's an invitation for you to go down and stop at
Dunbude for a week or two. Nothing on earth would do you so much
good as to get away for a while from your ranters and canters, and
mix occasionally in a little decent and rational society.'

Ronald took up the second letter with a sigh. He feared as much
himself, and had doleful visions of a painful fortnight to be
spent in a big country house, where the conversation would be all
concerning the slaughter of pheasants and the torture of foxes,
which his soul loathed to listen to. 'It's from Lady Hilda,' he
said, glancing through it, 'and it ISN'T an invitation after all.'
He could hardly keep down a faint tone of gratification as he
discovered this reprieve. 'Here's what she says:--

'"DEAR MR. LE BRETON,--Mamma wishes me to write and tell you that
Lynmouth's tutor, Mr. Walsh, is going to leave us at Christmas,
and she thinks it just possible that one of your two brothers at
Oxford might like to come down to Dunbude and give us their kind
aid in taking charge of Lynmouth. He's a dreadful pickle, as you
know; but we are very anxious to get somebody to look after him in
whom mamma can have perfect confidence. We don't know your brothers'
addresses or we would have written to them direct about it. Perhaps
you will kindly let them hear this  suggestion; and if they think
the matter worth while, we might afterwards arrange details as to
business and so forth. With kind regards to Lady Le Breton, believe
me,

'"Yours very sincerely,

'"HILDA TREGELLIS."'

'My dear Ronald,' said Lady Le Breton, much more warmly than before,
'this is really quite providential. Are they at Dunbude now?'

'No, mother. She writes from Wilton Place. They're up in town for
Lord Exmoor's gout, I know. I heard they were on Sunday.'

'Then I shall go and see Lady Exmoor this very morning about it.
It's exactly the right place for Ernest. A little good society
will get rid of all his nonsensical notions in a month or two. He's
lived too exclusively among his radical set at Oxford. And then
it'll be such a capital thing for him to be in the house continually
with Hilda; she's a girl of such excellent tone. I fancy--I'm not
quite sure, but I fancy--that Ernest has a decided taste for the
company of people, and even of young girls, who are not in Society.
He's so fond of that young man Oswald, who Herbert tells me is
positively the son of a grocer--yes, I'm sure he said a grocer!--and
it seems, from what Herbert writes me, that this Oswald has brought
a sister of his up this term from behind the counter, on purpose
to set her cap at Ernest.  Now you boys have, unfortunately, no
sisters, and therefore you haven't seen as much of girls of a good
stamp--not daily and domestically I mean--as is desirable for you,
from the point of view of Society. But if Ernest can only be induced
to take this tutorship at the Exmoors', he'll have an  opportunity
of meeting daily with a really nice girl, like Hilda; and though
of course it isn't likely that Hilda would take a fancy to her
brother's tutor--the Exmoors are such VERY  conservative people
in matters of rank and wealth and family and so forth--quite
un-Christianly so, I consider--yet it can't fail to improve Ernest's
tone a great deal, and raise his standard of female society generally.
It's really a very distressing thought to me, Ronald, that all my
boys, except dear Herbert, should show such a marked preference for
low and vulgar companionship. It seems to me, you both positively
prefer as far as possible the society of your natural inferiors.
There's Ernest must go and take up with the friendship of that
snuffy old German Socialist glass-cutter; while you are always
running after your Plymouth Brethren and your Bible Christians,
and your other ignorant fanatical people, instead of going with
me respectably to St. Alphege's to hear the dear Archdeacon! It's
very discouraging to a mother, really, very discouraging.'



CHAPTER VI.

DOWN THE RIVER.


'Berkeley couldn't come to-day, Le Breton: it's Thursday, of
course: I forgot about it altogether,' Oswald said, on the barge
at Salter's. 'You know he pays a mysterious flying visit to town
every Thursday afternoon--to see an imprisoned lady-love, I always
tell him.'

'It's very late in the season for taking ladies on the water, Miss
Oswald,' said Ernest, putting his oar into the rowlock, and secretly
congratulating himself on the deliverance;  'but better go now than
not see Iffley church and Nuneham woods at all. You ought to have
come up in summer term, and let us have the pleasure of showing you
over the place when it was in its full leafy glory. May's decidedly
the time to see Oxford to the greatest advantage.'

'So Harry tells me, and he wanted me to come up then, but it wasn't
convenient for them at home to spare me just at that moment, so I
was obliged to put it off till late in the autumn. I have to help
my mother a good deal in the house, you know, and I can't always
go dancing about the world whenever I should like to. Which string
must I pull, Harry, to make her turn into the middle of the river?
She always seems to twist round the exact way I don't want her to.'

'Right, right, hard right,' cried Harry from the bow--they were in
a tub pair bound down the river for Iffley.  'Keep to the Oxfordshire
shore as far as the willows; then cross over to the Berkshire. Le
Breton'll tell you when and where to change sides; he knows the
river as well as I do.'

'That'll do splendidly for the present,' Ernest said, looking
ahead over his shoulder. 'Mind the flags there; don't go too near
the corner. You certainly ought to see these meadows in early
spring, when the fritillaries are all out over the spongy places,
Miss Oswald. Has your brother ever sent you any of the fritillaries?'

'What? snake-heads? Oh, boxes full of them. They're lovely flowers,
but not lovelier than our own Devonshire daffodils. You should see
a Devonshire water-meadow in April! Why don't you come down some
time to Calcombe Pomeroy? It's the dearest little peaceful seaside
corner in all England.'

Harry bit his lip, for he was not over-fond of bringing people down
to spy out his domestic sanctities; but Ernest answered cordially,
'I should like it above everything in the world, Miss Oswald. If
you will let me, I certainly shall as soon as possible. Mind, quick,
get out of the way of that practising eight, or we shall foul her!
Left, as hard as you can! That'll do. The cox was getting as red
as a salamander, till he saw it was a lady steering. When coxes
catch a man fouling them, their language is apt to be highly
unparliamentary.--Yes, I shall try to get away to Calcombe as soon
as ever I can manage to leave Oxford. It wouldn't surprise me if
I were to run down and spend Christmas there.'

'You'd find it as dull as ditch-water at Christmas, Le Breton,'
said Harry. 'Much better wait till next summer.'

'I'm sure I don't think so, Harry dear,' Edie interrupted, with that
tell-tale blush of hers. 'If Mr. Le Breton wants to come then, I
believe he'd really find it quite delightful.  Of course he wouldn't
expect theatres, or dances, or anything  like that, in a country
village; and we're dreadfully busy just about Christmas day itself,
sending out orders, and all that sort of thing,'--Harry bit his
lip again:--'but if you don't mind a very quiet place and a very
quiet time, Mr. Le Breton, I don't think myself our cliffs ever look
grander, or our sea more impressive, than in stormy winter weather.'

'I wish to goodness she wasn't so transparently candid and guileless,'
thought Harry to himself. 'I never CAN teach her duly to respect
the prejudices of Pi. Not that it matters twopence to Le Breton,
of course: but if she talks that way to any of the other men here,
they'll be laughing in every common-room in Oxford over my Christmas
raisins and pounds of sugar--commonplace cynics that they are.
I must tell her about it the moment we get home again, and adjure
her by all that's holy not to repeat the indiscretion.'

'A penny for your thoughts, Harry,' cried Edie, seeing by his look
that she had somehow vexed him. 'What are you thinking of?'

'Thinking that all Oxford men are horrid cynics,' said Harry, boldly
shaming the devil.

'Why are they?' Edie asked.

'I suppose because it's an inexpensive substitute for wit or
intellect,' Harry answered. 'Indeed, I'm a bit of a cynic myself,
I believe, for the same reason and on strictly  economical principles.
It saves one the trouble of having any intelligible or original
opinion of one's own upon any subject.'

Below Iffley Lock they landed for half an hour, in order to give
Edie time for a pencil sketch of the famous old Norman church-tower,
with its quaint variations on the dog-tooth ornament, and its
ancient cross and mouldering yew-tree behind. Harry sat below in
the boat, propped on the cushions, reading the last number of the
'Nineteenth Century;'  Ernest and Edie took their seat upon the
bank above, and had a first chance of an unbroken tête-à-tête.

'How delicious to live in Oxford always!' said Edie, sketching in
the first outline of the great round arches. 'I would give anything
to have the opportunity of settling here for life. Some day I shall
make Harry set up house, and bring me up here as his housekeeper:--I
mean,' she added with a blush, thinking of Harry's warning look
just before, 'as soon as they can spare me from home.' She purposely
avoided saying 'when they retire from business,' the first phrase
that sprang naturally to her simple little lips. 'Let me see, Mr.
Le Breton; you haven't got any permanent appointment here yourself,
have you?'

'Oh no,' Ernest answered: 'no appointment of any sort at all, Miss
Oswald. I'm loitering up casually on the  look-out for a fellowship.
I've been in for two or three already, but haven't got them.'

'Why didn't you?' asked Edie, with a look of candid surprise.

'I suppose I wasn't clever enough,' Ernest answered simply. 'Not
so clever, I mean, as the men who actually got them.'

'Oh, but you MUST be,' Edie replied confidently; 'and a great deal
cleverer, too, I'm sure. I know you must, because Harry told me
you were one of the very cleverest men in the whole 'Varsity. And
besides, I see you are, myself. And Harry says most of the men who
get fellowships are really great donkeys.'

'Harry must have been talking in one of those cynical moods he
told us about,' said Ernest, laughing. 'At any rate, the examiners
didn't feel satisfied with my papers, and I've never got a fellowship
yet. Perhaps they thought my political economy just a trifle too
advanced for them.'

'You may depend upon it, that's it,' said Edie, jumping at the
conclusion with the easy omniscience of a girl of nineteen. 'Next
time, make your political economy a little more moderate, you
know, without any sacrifice of principle, just to suit them. What
fellowship are you going in for now?'

'Pembroke, in November.'

'Oh, I do hope you'll get it.'

'Thank you very much. So do I. It would be very nice to have one.'

'But of course it won't matter so much to you as it did to Harry.
Your family are such very great people, aren't they?'

Ernest smiled a broad smile at her delicious simplicity.  'If by
very great people you mean rich,' he said, 'we couldn't very well
be poorer--for people of our sort, I mean. My mother lives almost
entirely on her pension; and we boys have only been able to come
up to Oxford, just as Harry was, by the aid of our scholarships. If
we hadn't saved in our first two years, while we had our government
allowances, we shouldn't have been able to stop up for our degrees
at all.  So if I don't get a fellowship I shall have to take
to school-mastering  or something of the sort, for a livelihood.
Indeed, this at Pembroke will be my very last chance, for I can't
hold on much longer.'

'And if you got a fellowship you could never marry, could you?'
asked Edie, going on with her work.

'Not, while I held it, certainly. But I wouldn't hold it long. I
regard it only as a makeshift for a time. Unhappily, I don't know
how to earn my own bread by the labour of my hands, as I think we
ought all to do in a well-constituted society; so unless I choose
to starve (about the rightfulness of which I don't feel quite certain),
I MUST manage somehow to get over the interval. But as soon as I
could I would try to find some useful work to do, in which I could
repay society the debt I owe it for my bringing up. You see, I've
been fed and educated by a Government grant, which of course came
out of the taxes--your people have had to help, whether they would
or not, in paying for my board and lodging--and I feel that I owe
it as a duty to the world to look out some employment in which I
could really repay it for the cost of my maintenance.'

'How funnily you do look at everything, Mr. Le Breton,' said Edie.
'It would never have struck me to think of a pension from the army
in that light. And yet of course it's the right light; only we don't
most of us take the trouble to go to the bottom of things, as you
do. But what will you do if you don't get the fellowship?'

'In that case, I've just heard from my mother that she would like
me to take a tutorship at Lord Exmoor's,' Ernest answered. 'Lynmouth,
their eldest son, was my junior at school by six or seven years,
and now he's going to prepare for Christ Church. I don't quite know
whether it's a right place for me to accept or not; but I shall ask
Max Schurz about it, if I don't get Pembroke. I always take Herr
Max's advice in all questions of conscience, for I'm quite sure
whatever he approves of is the thing one ought to do for the greatest
good of humanity.'

'Harry told me about Herr Schurz,' Edie said, filling in the details
of the doorway. 'He thinks him a very earnest, self-convinced,
good old man, but a terrible revolutionist.  For my part, I believe
I rather like revolutionists, provided, of course, they don't cut
off people's heads. Harry made me read Carlyle, and I positively
fell in love with Camille Desmoulins; only I don't really think he
ought to have approved of QUITE so much guillotining, do you? But
why shouldn't you take the tutorship at the Exmoors'?'

'Oh, because it isn't a very useful work in the world to prepare a
young hereditary loafer like Lynmouth for going to Christ Church.
Lynmouth will be just like his father when he grows up--an amiable
wholesale partridge-slayer; and I don't see that the world at large
will be any the better or the worse off for his being able to grope
his way somehow through two plays of Sophocles and the first six
books of Euclid. If only one were a shoemaker now! What a delightful
thing to sit down at the end of a day and say to oneself, "I have
made two pairs of good, honest boots for a fellow-mortal this
week, and now I deserve to have my supper!" Still, it'll be better,
anyway, than doing nothing at all, and living off my mother.'

'If you went to Dunbude, when would you go?'

'After the Christmas vacation, I suppose, from what Lady Hilda
says.'

'Lady Hilda? Oh, so there's a sister, is there?'

'Yes. A very pretty girl, about twenty, I should say, and rather
clever too, I believe. My mother knows them a little.'

Poor little Edie! What made her heart jump so at the mere mention
of Lady Hilda? and what made the last few strokes at the top
of the broken yew-tree look so very weak and shaky? How absurd of
herself, she thought, to feel so much moved at hearing that there
was another girl in the world whom Ernest might possibly fall in
love with! And yet she had never even seen Ernest only ten days
ago!  Lady Hilda! What a grand name, to be sure, and what a grand
person she must be. And then Ernest himself belonged  by birth to
the same class! For in poor little Edie's mind, innocent as she was
of the nice distinctions of the peerage, Lady So-and-So was Lady
So-and-So still, whoever she might be, from the wife of a premier
marquis to the wife of the latest created knight bachelor. To
her, Lady Hilda Tregellis and Lady Le Breton were both 'ladies of
title'; and the difference between their positions, which seemed
so immense to Ernest, seemed nothing at all to the merry little
country girl who sat sketching beside him. After all, how could
she ever have even vaguely fancied that such a young man as Ernest,
in spite of all his socialistic whims, would ever dream of caring
for a girl of the people like her? No doubt he would go to the
Exmoors', fall naturally in love with Lady Hilda, and marry decorously
in what Edie considered  his own proper sphere of life! She went
on with the finishing touches of her little picture in silence, and
folded it up into the tiny portfolio at last with a half-uttered
sigh.  So her poor wee castle in the air was knocked down before
she had begun to build it up in any real seriousness, and she turned
to join Harry in the boat almost without speaking.

'I hope you'll get the Pembroke fellowship,' she said again, a
little later, as they rowed onward down the river to Nuneham. 'But
in any case, Mr. Le Breton, you mustn't forget you've half promised
to come and look us up at Calcombe Pomeroy in the Christmas vacation.'

Ernest smiled, and nodded acquiescence.

Meanwhile, on that same Thursday afternoon, Arthur Berkeley had
gone up from Oxford by the fast train to  Paddington, as was his
weekly wont, and had dived quickly down one of the small lanes that
open out from the left-hand side of Praed Street. He walked along
it for a little way, humming an air to himself as he went, and
then stopped at last in front of a small, decent brick house, with
a clean muslin blind across the window (clean muslin forms a notable
object in most London back streets), and a printed card hanging from
the central pane, bearing the inscription, 'G. Berkeley, Working
Shoemaker.--The Trade supplied with Ready-closed Uppers.' At the
window a beaming face was watching for his appearance, and Arthur
said to himself as he saw it through the curtain, 'The dear old
Progenitor's looking better again this week, God bless him!' In a
moment he had opened the door, and greeted his father in the old
boyish fashion, with an honest kiss on either cheek. They had kissed
one another so whenever they met  from Arthur's childhood upward;
and the Oxford curate had never felt himself grown too much of a
man to keep up a habit which seemed to him by far the most sacred
thing in his whole existence.

'Well, father dear, I needn't ask you how you are to-day,' said
Arthur, seating himself comfortably in the second easy-chair of
the trim little workshop parlour. 'I can see at once you're a good
deal better. Any more pain in the head and eyes, eh, or any trouble
about the forehead?'

The old shoemaker passed his hand over his big, bulging brow, bent
outward as it is so often in men of his trade by the constant habit
of stooping over their work, and said briskly, 'No, Artie, my boy,
not a sign of it this week--not a single sign of it. I've been
taking a bit of holiday, you see, and it's done me a lot of good,
I can tell you;--made me feel another man entirely. I've been
playing my violin till the neighbours began to complain of it; and
if I hadn't asked them to come and hear me tune up a bit, I really
believe they'd have been having me up before the magistrate for a
public nuisance.'

'That's right, Daddy dear; I'm always glad when you've been having
a little music. It does you more good than anything. And the jelly--I
hope you've eaten the jelly?'

'Oh, I've eaten it right enough, Artie, thank your dear heart;
and the soup too, dearie. Came by a boy from Walters's every day,
addressed to "Berkeley, Esquire, 42 Whalley Street;" and the boy
wouldn't leave it the first day, because he thought there must
have been a mistake about the address. His contention was that a
journeyman shoemaker wasn't an esquire; and my contention was that
the "Berkeley" was essential, and the "Esquire" accidental,  which
was beyond his logic, bless you, Artie; for I've often noticed, my
son, that your errand-boy is a naturally illogical and contradictory
creature. Now, shoemakers aren't, you know. I've always taken a just
pride in the profession, and I've always asserted that it develops
logic; it develops logic, Artie, or else why are all cobblers good
Liberals, I should like to know? Eh, can you tell me that; with
all your Oxford training, sir, can you tell me that?'

'It develops logic beyond the possibility of a doubt.  Daddy;
and it develops a good kind heart as well,' said Arthur, smiling.
'And it develops musical taste, and literary talent, and a marked
predilection for the beautiful in art and nature. In fact, whenever
I meet a good man of any sort, anywhere, I always begin now by
inquiring which of his immediate ancestors can have been a journeyman
shoemaker.  Depend upon it, Daddy, there's nothing like leather.'

'There you are, poking fun at your poor old Progenitor again,' said
the old cobbler, with a merry twinkle in the corner of his eye.
'If it weren't for the jelly, and the natural affections always
engendered by shoemaking, I think I should almost feel inclined to
cut you off with a shilling, Artie, my boy--to cut you off with a
shilling. Well, Artie, I'm quite convalescent now (don't you call
it? I'm afraid of my long shoemaker's words before you, nowadays,
you've grown so literary; for I suppose parsons are more literary
than even shoemakers). I'm quite convalescent now, and I think, my
boy, I must get to work again this week, and have no more of your
expensive soups and jellies. If I didn't keep a sharp look-out
upon you, Artie, lad, I believe you'd starve yourself outright up
there at Oxford to pamper your poor old useless father here with
luxuries he's never been accustomed to in his whole life.'

'My dear simple old Progenitor, you don't know how utterly you're
mistaken,' cried Arthur, eagerly. 'I believe I'm really the most
selfish and unnatural son in all Christendom.  I'm positively
rolling in wealth up there at Magdalen; I've had my room papered
again since you saw it last long vacation; and I live like a prince,
absolutely like a Russian prince, upon my present income. I assure
you on my solemn word of honour, Father, that I eat meat for
lunch--that's my dinner--every day; and an egg for tea as regular
as clockwork. I often think when I look around my palatial rooms
in college, what a shame it is that I should let you, who are worth
ten of me, any day, live any longer in a back street up here in
London; and I won't allow it, Daddy, I really won't allow it from
this day forth, I'm determined.  I've come up especially to speak
to you about it this  afternoon, for I've made up my mind that
this abnormal state of things can't continue.'--'Very good word,
abnormal,'  murmured his father.--'And I've also made up my mind,'
Arthur said, almost firmly, for him, 'that you shall come up and
live at Oxford. I can't bear having you so far away from me, now
that you're weaker than you used to be, Father dear, and so often
ailing.'

The old shoemaker laughed aloud. 'Oh no, Artie, my boy,' he
said cheerily, shaking his head with a continuous series of merry
chuckles. 'It won't do at all, it won't do, I assure you. I may be
a terrible free-thinker and all that kind of thing, as the neighbours
say I am--poor bodies, they never read a word of modern criticism
in their lives, heaven bless 'em--stragglers from the march of
intellect, mere stragglers--but I've too much respect for the cloth
to bring a curate of St. Fredegond's into such disgrace as that
would mean for you, Artie. You shan't have your career at Oxford
spoiled by its being said of you that your father was a  working
shoemaker. What with the ready-closed uppers, and what with your
ten shillings a week, and what with all the presents you give me,
and what with the hire of the piano, I'm as comfortable as ever I
want to be, growing into a gentleman in my old age, Artie, and I
even begin to have my doubts as to whether it's quite consistent
in me as a good Radical to continue my own acquaintance with
myself--I'm getting to be such a regular idle do-nothing aristocrat!
Go to Oxford and mend shoes, indeed, with you living there as a
full-fledged parson in your own rooms at Magdalen! No, no, I won't
hear of it. I'll come up for a day or two in long vacation, my boy,
as I've always done hitherto, and take a room in Holywell, and look
in upon you a bit, accidentally, so as not to shame you before the
scouts (who are a servile set of flunkeys, incapable of understanding
the elevated  feelings of a journeyman shoemaker); but I wouldn't
dream of going to live in the place, any more than I'd dream of
asking to be presented at court on the occasion of my receiving a
commission for a pair of evening shoes for the Queen's head footman.'

'Father,' said Arthur, smiling, 'you're absolutely incorrigible.  Such
a dreadful old rebel against all constituted authority, human and
divine, I never did meet in the course of my existence, I believe
you're really capable of arguing a point of theology against an
archbishop. But I don't want you to come up to Oxford as a shoemaker;
I mean you to come up and live with me in rooms of our own, out
of college. Whenever I think of you, dear Father--you, who are
so infinitely nobler, and better, and truer, and more really a
gentleman than any other than I ever knew in my life--whenever I
think of you, coming secretly up to Oxford as if you were ashamed
of yourself, and visiting your own son by stealth in his rooms in
college as if you were a dun coming to ask him for money, instead
of the person whom he delights to honour--whenever I think of it,
Father, it makes my cheeks burn with shame, and I loathe myself for
ever allowing you so to bemean your own frank, true, noble nature.
I oughtn't to permit it, Father, I oughtn't to permit it; and I
won't permit it any longer.'

'Well, you never would have permitted it, Artie, if I hadn't compelled
you; for I've got all the prudence and common sense of the family
bottled up here in my own forehead,' said the old man, tapping
his bulging brow significantly. 'I don't deny that Oxford may be
an excellent school for Greek and Latin, and philosophy, and so
forth; but if you want prudence and sagacity and common-sense it's
a well-known fact that there's nothing like the practice of making
ready-closed uppers, sir, to develop 'em. If I'd taken your advice,
my boy, I'd have come up to visit you when you were an undergraduate,
and ruined your prospects at the very outset. No, no, Artie, I shall
stop here, and stick to my last, my dear boy, stick to my last, to
the end of all things.'

'You shall do nothing of the sort, Daddy; that I'm determined upon,'
Arthur cried vehemently. 'I'm not going to let you do any more
shoemaking. The time has come when you must retire, and devote all
your undivided energies to the constant study of modern criticism.
Whether you come to Oxford or stop in London, I've made up my mind
that you shan't do another stroke of work as long as you live. Look
here, dear old Daddy, I'm getting to be a perfect millionaire, I
assure you. Do you see this fiver?  well, I got that for knocking
out that last trashy little song for Fradelli; and it cost me no
more trouble to compose it than to sit down and write the score out
on a sheet of ruled paper. I'm as rich as Croesus--made a hundred
and eighty pounds last year, and expect to make over two hundred
this one. Now, if a man with that perfectly prodigious fortune
can't afford to keep his own father in comfort and affluence, what
an absolute Sybarite and gourmand of a fellow he must be himself.'

'It's a lot of money, certainly, Artie,' said the old  shoemaker,
turning it over thoughtfully: 'two hundred pounds is a lot of money;
but I doubt very much whether it's more than enough to keep you up
to the standard of your own society, up there at Oxford. As John
Stuart Mill says, these things are all comparative to the standard
of comfort of your class. Now, Artie, I believe you have to stint
yourself of things that everybody else about you has at Oxford, to
keep me in luxuries I was never used to.'

'My dear Dad, it's only of the nature of a repayment,' cried Arthur,
earnestly. 'You slaved and sacrificed and denied yourself when I
was a boy to send me to school, without which I would never have
got to Oxford at all; and you taught me music in your spare hours
(when you had any); and I owe everything I have or am or ever will
be to your unceasing and indefatigable kindness. So now you've
got to take repayment whether you will or not, for I insist upon
it. And if you won't come up to Oxford, which perhaps would be an
uncongenial place for you in many ways, I'll tell you what I'll do,
Daddy; I'll look out for a curacy  somewhere in London, and we'll
take a little house together, and I'll furnish it nicely, and there
we shall live, sir, whatever you say, so not another word about
it. And now I want you to listen to the very best thing I've ever
composed, and tell me what you think of it.'

He sat down to the little hired cottage piano that occupied the
corner of the neat small room, and began to run his deft fingers
lightly over the keys. It was the Butterfly fantasia.  The father
sat back in his red easy-chair, listening with all his ears, first
critically, then admiringly, at last  enthusiastically. As Arthur's
closing notes died away softly towards the end, the old shoemaker's
delight could be restrained no longer. 'Artie,' he cried, gloating
over it, 'that's music! That's real music! You're quite right, my
boy; that's far and away the best thing you've ever written.  It's
exquisite--so light, so airy, so unearthlike. But, Artie, there's
more than that in it. There's soul in it; and I know what it means.
You don't deceive your poor old Progenitor in a matter of musical
inspiration, I can tell you. I know where you got that fantasia
from as well as if I'd seen you getting it. You got it out of your
own heart, my boy, out of your own heart. And the thing it says to me
as plain as language is just this--you're in love! You're in love,
Artie, and there's no good denying it. If any man ever wrote that fantasia
without being in love at the time--first love--ecstasy--tremor--tiptoe
of expectation--why, then, I tell you, music hasn't got such a
thing as a tongue or a meaning in it.'

Arthur looked at him gently and smiled, but said nothing.

'Will you tell me about her, Artie?' asked the old man, caressingly,
laying his hand upon his son's arm.

'Not now, Father; not just now, please. Some other time, perhaps,
but not now. I hardly know about it myself, yet. It may be
something--it may be nothing; but, at any rate, it was peg enough
to hang a fantasia upon. You've surprised my little secret, Father,
and I dare say it's no real secret at all, but just a passing whiff
of fancy. If it ever comes to anything, you shall know first of
all the world about it. Now take out your violin, there's a dear
old Dad, and give me a tune upon it.'

The father took the precious instrument from its carefully covered
case with a sort of loving reverence, and began to play a piece
of Arthur's own composition. From the moment the bow touched the
chords it was easy enough to see whence the son got his musical
instincts. Old George Berkeley was a born musician, and he could
make his violin discourse to him with rare power of execution.
There they sat, playing and talking at intervals, till nearly eight,
when Arthur went out hurriedly to catch the last train to Oxford,
and left the old shoemaker once more to his week's solitude. 'Not
for much longer,' the curate whispered to himself, as he got into
his third-class carriage quickly; 'not for much longer, if I can
help it. A curacy in or near London's the only right thing for me
to look out for!'



CHAPTER VII.

GHOSTLY COUNSEL.


November came, and with it came the Pembroke fellowship examination.
Ernest went in manfully, and tried hard to do his best; for
somehow, in spite of the immorality of fellowships, he had a sort
of floating notion in his head that he would like to get one,
because he was beginning to paint himself a little fancy picture
of a home that was to be, with a little fairy Edie flitting through
it, and brightening it all delightfully with her dainty airy
presence. So he even went so far as to mitigate considerably the
native truculence of his political economy paper, after Edie's
advice--not, of course, by making any suggestion of opinions he did
not hold, but by suppressing the too-prominent expression of those
he actually believed in. Max Schurz's name was not once mentioned
throughout the whole ten or twelve pages of closely written foolscap;
'Gold and the Proletariate' was utterly ignored; and in place of
the strong meat served out for men by the apostles of socialism in
the Marylebone dancing-saloon, Ernest dished up for his examiner's
edification  merely such watery milk for babes as he had extracted
from the eminently orthodox economical pages of Fawcett, Mill, and
Thorold Rogers. He went back to his rooms, satisfied that he had
done himself full justice, and anxiously waited for the result to
be duly announced on the Saturday morning.

Was it that piece of Latin prose, too obviously modelled upon the
Annals of Tacitus, while the senior tutor was a confirmed Ciceronian,
with the Second Philippic constitutionally  on the brain? Was
it the Greek verse, containing one senarius with a long syllable
before the caesura in the fifth foot, as Herbert pointed out to
his brother on the very evening when that hideous oversight--say
rather crime--had been openly perpetrated in plain black and white
on a virgin sheet of innocent paper? Was it some faint ineffaceable
savour of the Schurzian economics, peeping through in spite of all
disguises, like the garlic in an Italian ragout, from under the
sedulous cloak of Ricardo's theory of rent?  Was it some flying
rumour, extra-official, and unconnected with the examination in
any way, to the effect that young Le Breton was a person of very
dubious religious, political, and social orthodoxy? Or was it merely
that fortunate  dispensation of Providence whereby Oxford almost
invariably manages to let her best men slip unobserved through her
fingers, and so insures a decent crop of them to fill up her share
of the passing vacancies in politics, literature, science, and art?
Heaven or the Pembroke examiners alone can answer these abstruse
and difficult questions; but this much at least is certain, that
when Ernest Le Breton went into the Pembroke porter's lodge on the
predestined Saturday, he found another name than his placarded upon
the notice board, and turned back, sick at heart and disappointed,
to his lonely lodgings. There he spent an unhappy hour or two, hewing
down what remained of his little aerial castle off-hand; and then
he went out for a solitary row upon the upper river, endeavouring
to work off his disappointment like a man, with a good hard spell
of muscular labour.

Edie had already returned to Calcombe-Pomeroy, so in the evening
he went to tell his misfortune to Harry Oswald.  Harry was really
sorry to hear it, for Ernest was his best friend in Oxford, and
he had hoped to have him settled close by. 'You'll stop up and
try again for Christ Church in February, won't you, Le Breton?' he
asked.

'No,' said Ernest, shaking his head a little gloomily; 'I don't
think I will. It's clear I'm not up to the Oxford standard for a
fellowship, and I couldn't spend another term in residence without
coming down upon my mother to pay my expenses--a thing she can't
easily afford to do. So I suppose I must fall back for the present
upon the Exmoor tutorship. That'll give me time to look about me,
till I can get something else to do; and after all, it isn't a bit
more immoral than a fellowship, when one comes to look it fairly
in the face. However, I shall go first and ask Herr Max's opinion
upon the matter.'

'I'm going to spend a fortnight in town in the Christmas vac,'
said Oswald, 'and I should like to go with you to Max's again, if
I may.'

Ernest coloured up a little, for he would have liked to invite Oswald
to his mother's house; and yet he felt there were two reasons why
he should not do so; he must himself be dependent this time upon
his mother's hospitality, and he didn't think Lady Le Breton would
be perfectly cordial in her welcome to Harry Oswald.

In the end, however, it was arranged that Harry should engage rooms
at his former lodgings in London, and that Ernest should take him
once more to call upon the old socialist when he went to consult
him on the question of conscience.

'For my part, Ernest,' said Lady Le Breton to her son, the morning
after his return from Oxford, 'I'm not altogether sorry you didn't
get this Pembroke fellowship. It would have kept you among the
same set you are at present mixing in for an indefinite period.
Of course now you'll accept Lady Exmoor's kind proposal. I saw her
about it the same morning  we got Hilda's letter; and she offers
200L. a year, which, of course, is mere pocket money, as your board
and lodging are all found for you, so to speak, and you'll have
nothing to do but to dress and amuse yourself.'

'Well, mother, I shall see about it. I'm going to consult Herr
Schurz upon the subject this morning.'

'Herr Schurz!' said Lady Le Breton, in her bitterest tone of irony.
'It appears to me you make that snuffy old German microscope man
your father confessor. It's very disagreeable to a mother to find
that her sons, instead of taking her advice about what is most
material to their own interests, should invariably go to confer
with communist refugees and ignorant ranters. Ronald, what is your
programme, if you please, for this morning's annoyance?'

Ronald, with the fear of the fifth commandment steadily before
his eyes, took no notice of the last word, and answered calmly,
'You know, mother, this is the regular day for the mission-house
prayer-meeting.'

'The mission-house prayer-meeting! I know nothing of the sort, I
assure you. I don't keep a perfect calendar in my mind of all your
meetings and your religious engagements.  Then I suppose I must go
alone to the Waltons' to see Mr. Walton's water-colours?'

'I'll give up the prayer-meeting, if you wish it,' Ronald answered,
with his unvarying meekness. 'Only, I'm afraid I must walk very
slowly. My cough's rather bad this morning.'

'No, no,' Ernest put in, 'you mustn't dream of going, Ronald;
I couldn't allow you to walk so far on any account.  I'll put off
my engagement with Oswald, who was going with me to Herr Schurz's,
and I'll take you round to the Waltons', mother, whenever you like.'

'Dear me, dear me,' moaned Lady Le Breton, piteously, pretending
to wring her hands in lady-like and mitigated despair; 'I can't
do anything without its being made the opportunity for a scene, it
seems. I shall NOT go to the Waltons'; and I shall leave you both
to follow your own  particular devices to your heart's content. I'm
sorry I proposed anything whatsoever, I'm sure, and I shall take
care never to do such an imprudent thing again.' And her ladyship
walked in her stateliest and most chilly manner out of the freezing
little dining-room.

'It's a great cross, living always with poor mother, Ernest,' said
Ronald, his eyes filling with tears as he spoke; 'but we must try
to bear with her, you know, for after all she leads a very lonely
life herself, because she's so very unsympathetic.' Ernest took
the spare white hand in his and smoothed it compassionately. 'My
dear, dear Ronald,' he said, 'I know it's hard for you. I must try
the best I can to make it a little easier!'

They walked together as far as the mission-house, arm in arm, for
though in some things the two young Le Bretons were wide apart
as the poles, in others they were fundamentally  at one in inmost
spirit; and even Ronald, in spite of his occasional little narrow
sectarianisms, felt the underlying unity of purpose no less than
Ernest. He was one of those enthusiastic ethereal natures which
care little for outer forms or ceremonies, and nothing at all for
churches and organisations,  but love to commune as pure spirit
with pure spirit, living every day a life of ecstatic spirituality,
and never troubling themselves one whit about theological controversy
or established religious constitutions. As long as Ronald Le Breton
could read his Greek Testament every morning, and talk face to
face in their own tongue with the Paul of First Corinthians or the
John of the Epistles, in the solitude of his own bedroom, he was
supremely indifferent about the serious question, of free-will
and fore-knowledge, or about the important question of apostolical
succession, or even about that other burning question of eternal
punishment, which was just then setting his own little sect of
Apostolic Christian Missioners roundly by the ears. These things
seemed to his enthusiastic mind mere fading echoes of an alien
language; all that he himself really cared for in religion was the
constant sense of essential personal communion with that higher
Power which spoke directly to his soul all day long and always; or
the equally constant sense of moral exaltation which he drew from
the reading of the written Word in its own original language. He
had never BECOME an Apostolic Christian; he had grown up to be one,
unconsciously to himself.  'Your son Ronald's religion, my dear
Lady Le Breton,' Archdeacon  Luttrell used often to say, 'is, I
fear, too purely emotional. He cannot be made to feel sufficiently
the necessity for a sound practical grasp of doctrinal Christianity.'
To Ronald himself, he might as well have talked about the necessity
for a sound practical grasp of doctrinal Buddhism. And if Ronald
had really met a devout Buddhist, he would doubtless have found,
after half an hour's conversation, that they were at one in everything
save the petty matter of dialect and vocabulary.

At Oswald's lodging, Ernest found his friend ready and waiting for
him. They went on together to the same street in Marylebone as
before, and mounted the stair till they reached Herr Schurz's gloomy
little work-room on the third floor. The old apostle was seated
at his small table by the half-open window, grinding the edges of
a lens to fit the brass mounting at his side; while his daughter
Uta, a still good-looking, quiet, broad-faced South German woman,
about forty or a little more, sat close by, busily translating a
scientific book into English by alternate reading and  consultation
with her father. Harry saw the title on her page was 'Researches
into the Embryology of the Isopodal  Crustaceans,' and conceived
at once an immense respect for the learning and wisdom of the
communist exile's daughter.  Herr Schurz hardly stopped a moment
from his work--he never allowed his numerous visitors to interfere
in any way with his daily duties--but motioned them both to seats
on the bare bench beside him, and waited to bear the nature of
their particular business. It was an understood thing that no one
came to see the Socialist leader on week days except for a good
and sufficient reason.

The talk at first was general and desultory; but after a little time
Ernest brought conversation round to its proper focus, and placed
his case of conscience fairly before his father confessor. Was it
allowable for a consistent socialist to accept the place of tutor
to the son of a peer and a landowner?

'For my part, Herr Schurz,' Oswald said confidently, 'I don't see
any reason on earth, from the point of view of any political economy
whatsoever, why Ernest shouldn't take the position. The question
isn't how the Exmoors have come by their money, even allowing that
private property in land is in itself utterly indefensible; which
is a proposition I don't myself feel inclined unreservedly to admit,
though I know you and Le Breton do: the real question's this,--since
they've got this money into their hands to distribute, and since
in any case they will have the distribution of it, isn't it better
that some of it should go into Le Breton's pocket than that it
should go into any other person's? That's the way I for my part
look at the matter.'

'What do you say to that, friend Ernest?' asked the old German,
smiling and waiting to see whether Ernest would detect what from
their own standpoint he regarded as the ethical fallacy of Harry
Oswald's argument.

'Well, to tell you the truth, Herr Schurz,' answered Ernest, in his
deliberate, quiet way, 'I don't think I've  envisaged the subject
to myself from quite the same point of view as Oswald has done. I
have rather asked myself whether it was right of a man to accept
a function in which he would really be doing nothing worthy for
humanity in return for his daily board and lodging. It isn't so much
a question who exactly is to get certain sums out of the Exmoors'
pockets, which ought no doubt never to have been in them; it's more
a question whether a man has any right to live off the collective
labour of the world, and do nothing of any good to the world on
his own part by way of repayment.'

'That's it, friend Ernest,' cried the old man, with a pleased nod
of his big grey head; 'the socialistic Iliad in a nutshell! That's
the very root of the question. Don't be deceived by capitalist
sophisms. So long as we go on each of us trying to get as much as
we can individually out of the world, instead of asking what the
world is getting out of us, in return, there will be no revolution
and no millennium.  We must make sure that we're doing some good
ourselves, instead of sponging upon the people perpetually to feed
us for nothing. What's the first gospel given to man at the creation
in your popular cosmogonies? Why, that in the sweat of his face
shall he eat bread, and till the ground from which he was taken.
That's the native gospel of the toiling many, always; your doctrines
of fair exchange, and honest livelihoods, and free contract, and
all the rest of it, are only the artificial gospel of the political
economists, and of the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats into whose
hands they play--the rascals!'

'Then you think I oughtn't to take the post?' asked Ernest, a little
ruefully.

'I don't say that, Le Breton--I don't say that,' said Herr Schurz,
more quietly than before, still grinding away at his lens. 'The
question's a broad one, and it has many aspects.  The best work
a man can do is undoubtedly the most useful work--the work that
conduces most to the general happiness.  But we of the proletariate
can't take our choice always: as your English proverb plainly puts
it, with your true English bluntness, "beggars mustn't be choosers."
We must, each in his place, do the work that's set before us by the
privileged classes. It's impossible for us to go nicely discriminating
between work that's useful for the community, work that's merely
harmless, and work that's positively detrimental.  How can we insure
it? A man's a printer, say. There's a generally useful trade, in
which, on the whole, he labours for the good and enlightenment of
the world--for he may print scientific books, good books, useful
books; and most printing, on the average, is useful. But how's he
to know what sort of thing he's printing? He may be printing "Gold
and the Proletariate," or he may be printing obscurantist and
retrogressive treatises by the enemies of humanity. Look at my own
trade, again. You'd say at first sight, Mr. Oswald, that to make
microscopes must be a good thing in the end for the world at large:
and so it is, no doubt; but half of them--ay, more than half of
them--are thrown away: mere wasted labour, a good workman's time
and skill lavished needlessly on some foolish rich man's caprices
and amusement. Often enough, now, I make a good instrument--an
instrument, with all its fittings, worth fifty or a hundred pounds.
That takes a long time to make, and I'm a skilled workman; and
the instrument may fall into the hands of a scientific man who'll
use it in discovery, in verification, in promoting knowledge, in
lessening disease and mitigating human suffering. That's the good
side of my trade. But, mark you, now,' and the old man wiped his
forehead rapidly with his sleeve, 'it has its bad side too. As often
as not, I know, some rich man will buy that machine, that cost me
so much time and trouble to make, and will buy a few dozen stock
slides with it, and will bring it out once in a moon to show his
children or a few idle visitors the scales on a butterfly's wing,
or the hairs on the leg of a common flea. Uta sets those things
up by the thousand for the dealers to sell to indolent dilettanti.
The appetite of the world at large for the common flea is simply
insatiable. And it's for that, perhaps, that I'm spoiling my
eyesight now, grinding and grinding and grinding at this very lens,
and fitting the thing to an accurate fraction of a  millimetre, as
we always fit these things--we who are careful and honest workmen--to
show an idle man's friends the hairs on a flea's fore-leg. If that
isn't enough to make a man ashamed of our present wasteful and
chaotic organisation, I should think he must be a survival from
the preglacial epoch--as, indeed, most of us actually are!'

'But, after all, Herr Schurz,' said Harry, expostulating, 'you get
paid for your labour, and the rich man is doing better by encouraging
your skill than by encouraging the less useful skill of other
workmen.'

'Ah, yes,' cried Herr Schurz, warmly, 'that's the doctrine  of the
one-eyed economists; that's the capitalist way of looking at it;
but it isn't our way--it isn't ours. Is it nothing, think you,
that all that toil of mine--of a sensible man's--goes to waste,
to gratify the senseless passing whim of a wealthy nobody? Is it
nothing that he uselessly monopolises the valuable product of my
labour, which in other and abler hands might be bringing forth good
fruit for the bettering and furthering  of universal humanity? I
tell you, Mr. Oswald, half the best books, half the best apparatus,
half the best appliances in all Europe, are locked up idle in
rich men's cabinets, effecting  no good, begetting no discoveries,
bringing forth no interest,  doing nothing but foster the anti-social
pride of their wealthy possessors. But that isn't what friend
Ernest wants to ask me about to-day. He wants to know about his own
course in a difficult case; and instead of answering him, here am
I, maundering away, like an old man that I am, into the generalised
platitudes of "Gold and the Proletariate." Well, Le Breton, what
I should say in your particular instance is this. A man with the
fear of right before his eyes may, under existing circumstances,
lawfully accept any work that will keep him alive, provided he sees
no better and more useful work equally open to him. He may take
the job the capitalists impose, if he can get nothing worthier to
do  elsewhere. Now, if you don't teach this young Tregellis, what
alternative have you? Why, to become a master in a school--Eton,
perhaps, or Rugby, or Marlborough--and teach other equally useless
members of prospective aristocratic society. That being so, I think
you ought to do what's best for yourself and your family for the
present--for the present--till the time of deliverance comes. You
see, there is one member of your family to whom the matter is of
immediate importance.'

'Ronald,' said Ernest, interrupting him.

'Yes, Ronald. A good boy; a socialist, too, though he doesn't know
it--one of us, born of us, and only apart from us in bare externals.
Well, would it be most comfortable for poor Ronald that you should
go to these Exmoor people, or that you should take a mastership,
get rooms somewhere, and let him live with you? He's not very happy
with your mother, you say. Wouldn't he be happier with you? What
think you? Charity begins at home, you know: a good proverb--a
good, sound, sensible, narrow-minded, practical English proverb!'

'I've thought of that,' Ernest said, 'and I'll ask him about it.
Whichever he prefers, then, I'd better decide upon, had I?'

'Do so,' Herr Max answered, with a nod. 'Other things equal, our
first duty is to those nearest to us.'

What Herr Max said was law to his disciples, and Ernest went his
way contented.

'Mr. Oswald seems a very nice young man,' Uta Schurz said, looking
up from the microscope slides she had begun to mount at the moment
her regular translating work was  interrupted by their sudden entry.
She had been taking quiet glances at Harry all the while, in her
unobtrusive fashion; for Uta had learned always to be personally
unobtrusive--'the prophet's donkey,' those irreverent French exiles
used to call her--and she had come to the conclusion that he was
a decidedly handsome and manly fellow.

'Which do you like best, Uta--Oswald or Le Breton?' asked her
father.

'Personally,' Uta answered, 'I should prefer Mr. Oswald.  To live
always with Mr. Le Breton would be like living with an abstraction.
No woman would ever care for him; she might just as well marry
Spinoza's Ethics or the Ten Commandments. He's a perfect model of
a socialist, and nothing else. Mr. Oswald has some human nature in
him as well.'

'There are two kinds of socialists,' said Herr Max, bending  once
more over his glasses; 'the one kind is always thinking most of
its rights; the other kind is always  thinking most of its duties.
Oswald belongs to the first, Le Breton to the second. I've often
observed it so among men of their two sorts. The best socialists
never come from the bourgeoisie, nor even from the proletariate;
they come from among the voluntarily déclassés aristocrats. Your
workman or your bourgeois who has risen, and who interests himself
in social or political questions, is always thinking, "Why shouldn't
I have as many rights and privileges as these other people have?"
The aristocrat who descends is always thinking,  "Why shouldn't
these other people have as many rights and privileges as I have?"
The one type begets aggressive self-assertion, the other type
begets a certain gentle spirit of self-effacement. You don't often
find men of the aristocratic class with any ethical element in
them--their hereditary  antecedents, their breeding, their environment,
are all hostile to it; but when you do find them, mark my words,
Uta, they make the truest and most earnest friends of the popular
cause of any. Their sympathy and interest in it is all unselfish.'

'And yet,' Uta answered firmly, 'I still prefer Mr. Oswald.  And
if you care for my opinion, I should say that the aristocrat does
all the dreaming, but the bourgeois does all the fighting; and
that's the most important thing practically, after all.'

An hour later, Ernest was talking his future plans over with his
brother Ronald. Would it be best for Ronald that he should take
a mastership, and both should live together, or that he should go
for the present to the Exmoors', and leave the question of Ronald's
home arrangements still unsettled?

'It's so good of you to think of me in the matter, Ernest,' Ronald
said, pressing his hand gently; 'but I don't think I ought to
go away from mother before I'm twenty-one. To tell you the truth,
Ernest, I hardly flatter myself she'd be really sorry to get rid
of me; I'm afraid I'm a dreadful thorn in her side at present; she
doesn't understand my ways, and perhaps I don't sympathise enough
with hers; but still, if I were to propose to go, I feel sure
she'd be very much annoyed,  and treat it as a serious act of
insubordination on my part. While I'm a minor, at least, I ought
to remain with her; the Apostle tells us to obey our parents, in
the Lord; and as long as she requires nothing from me that doesn't
involve a dereliction of principle I think I must bear with it,
though I acknowledge it's a cross, a heavy cross. Thank you so much
for thinking of it, dearest Ernest.' And his eyes filled once more
with tears as he spoke.

So it was finally arranged that for the present at least Ernest
should accept Lady Exmoor's offer, and that as soon as Ronald
was twenty-one he should look about for a suitable mastership, in
order for the two brothers to go immediately into rooms together.
Lady Le Breton was surprised at the decision; but as it was in her
favour, she wisely abstained from gratifying her natural desire to
make some more  uncomplimentary references to the snuffy old German
socialist.  Sufficient unto the day was the triumph thereof; and she
had no doubt in her own mind that if once Ernest could be induced
to live for a while in really good society the well-known charms
and graces of that society must finally tame his rugged breast,
and wean him away from his unaccountable  devotion to those horrid
continental communists.



CHAPTER VIII.

IN THE CAMP OF THE PHILISTINES.


Dunbude Castle, Lord Exmoor's family seat, stands on the last spurs
of the great North Devon uplands, overlooking the steep glen of a
little boulder-encumbered stream, and commanding a distant view of
the Severn Sea and the dim outlines of the blue Welsh hills beyond
it. Behind the house, a castle only by courtesy (on the same
principle as that by which every bishop lives in a palace), rises
the jagged summit of the Cleave, a great weather-worn granite hill,
sculptured on top by wind and rain into those fantastic lichen-covered
pillars and tora and logans in which antiquarian  fancy used so long
to find the visible monuments of Druidical worship. All around, a
wide brown waste of heather undulates and tosses wildly to the sky;
and on the summit of the rolling moor where it rises and swells in
one of its many rounded bosses, the antlered heads and shoulders
of the red deer may often be seen etched in bold relief against
the clear sky-line to the west, on sunny autumn evenings. But the
castle itself and the surrounding grounds are not planned to harmonise
with the rough moorland English scenery into whose midst they were
unceremoniously pitchforked by the second earl. That distinguished
man of taste, a light of the artistic world in his own day,
had brought back from his Grand Tour his own ideal of a strictly
classical domestic building, formed by impartially compounding  a
Palladian palace, a Doric temple, and a square redbrick English
manor-house. After pulling down the original fourteenth-century
castle, he had induced an eminent architect of the time to conspire
with him in giving solid and permanent reality to this his awful
imagining; and when he had completed it all, from portico to attic,
he had extorted even the critical praise of Horace Walpole, who
described it in one of his letters as a 'singular triumph of classical
taste and architectural ingenuity.' It still remains unrivalled in
its kind, the ugliest great country-seat in the county of Devon--some
respectable authorities even say in the whole of England.

In front of the house an Italian garden, with balustrades of very
doubtful marble, leads down by successive terraces and broad flights
of steps to an artificial octagonal pool, formed by carefully
destroying the whole natural beauty of the wild and rocky little
English glen beneath. To feed it by fitting a conduit, the moss-grown
boulders that strew the bed of the torrent above and below have
been carefully removed,  and the unwilling stream, as it runs into
the pool, has been coerced into a long straight channel, bordered
on either side by bedded turf, and planed off at measured intervals
so as to produce a series of eminently regular and classical
cascades. Even Lord Exmoor himself, who was a hunting man, without
any pretence to that stupid rubbish about taste, did not care for
the hopeless exterior of Dunbude Castle: he frankly admitted that
the place was altogether too doosid artificial for the line of
country. If they'd only left it alone, he said, in its own native
condition, it would have been really pretty; but as they'd doctored
it and spoilt it, why, there was nothing on earth to be done but
just put up with it and whistle over it. What with the hounds, and
the mortgages, and the settlements, and the red deer, and Goodwood,
the estate couldn't possibly afford any money for making alterations
down in the gardens.

The dog-cart was in waiting at the station to carry Ernest up to
the castle; and as he reached the front door, Lady Hilda Tregellis
strolled up the broad flight of steps from the garden to meet him.
Lady Hilda was tall and decidedly handsome, as Ernest had rightly
told Edie, but not pretty, and she was also just twenty. There was
a free, careless, bold look in her face, that showed her at once
a girl of spirit; indeed, if she had not been born a Tregellis, it
was quite clear that she would have been predestined to turn out
a strong-minded woman. There was nothing particularly delicate in
Lady Hilda's features; they were well-modelled, but neither regular
nor cold, nor with that peculiar stamp of artificial breeding which
is so often found in the faces of English ladies. On the contrary,
she looked like a perfectly self-confident handsome actress, too
self-confident to be self-conscious, and accustomed to admiration
wherever she turned. As Ernest jumped down from the dog-cart she
advanced quickly to shake hands with him, and look him over critically
from head to foot like a schoolboy taking stock of a new fellow.

'I'm so glad you've come, Mr. Le Breton,' she said, with an open
smile upon her frank face. 'I was dreadfully afraid you wouldn't
care for our proposition. Dunbude's the dullest hole in England,
and we want somebody here to brighten it up, sadly. Did you ever
see such an ugly monstrosity before, anywhere?'

'The country about's lovely,' Ernest answered, 'but the house itself
is certainly rather ugly.'

'Ugly! It's hideous. And it's as dull as it's big,' said Hilda
vehemently. 'You can't think what a time we have of it here half
the year! I'm always longing for the season to come. Papa fills
the house here with hunting men and shooting men--people without
two ideas in their heads, you know, just like himself; and even THEY
go out all day, and leave us women from morning till night to the
society of their wives and daughters, who are exactly like them.
Mr. Walsh--that's Lynmouth's last tutor--he was a perfect stick,
a Cambridge man; Cambridge men always ARE sticks, I believe; you're
Oxford, of course, aren't you? I thought so.  Still, even Mr. Walsh
was a little society, for I assure you, if it hadn't been for him,
I should never have seen anybody, to talk to, from year's end to
year's end. So when Mr. Walsh was going to leave us, I said to
mamma, "Why not ask one of the Mr. Le Bretons?" I wanted to have
somebody  sensible here, and so I got her to let me write to your
brother Ronald about the tutorship. Did he send you the letter? I
hope you didn't think it was mine. Mamma dictated it, for I don't
write such formal letters as that on my own account, I can tell
you. I hate conventionality of any sort. At Dunbude we're all
conventional, except me; but I won't be. Come up into the billiard-room,
here, and sit down awhile; William will see about your portmanteau
and things. Papa's out, of course, and so's Lynmouth; and mamma's
somewhere or other, I don't know where; and so there's nobody in
particular at home for you to report  yourself to. You may as well
come in here while I ring for them to get you some lunch ready.
Nobody ever gets anything  ready beforehand in this house. We
lunched ourselves an hour ago.'

Ernest smiled at her volubility, and followed her quickly into the
big bare billiard-room. He walked over to the fire and began to
warm himself, while Hilda took down a cue and made stray shots in
extraordinary angles at impossible cannons, all the time, as she
went on talking to him. 'Was it very cold on the way down?' she
asked.

'Yes, fairly. I'm not sorry to see the fire again. Why, you're
quite an accomplished player.'

'There's nothing else to do at Dunbude, that's why. I practise
about half my lifetime. So I wrote to your brother Ronald, as I
was telling you, from mamma's dictation; and when I heard you were
really coming, I was quite delighted about it. Do you remember, I
met you twice last year, once at the Dolburys', and once somewhere
else; and I thought you'd be a very good sort of person for Dunbude,
you know, and about as much use to Lynmouth as anybody could be,
which isn't saying much, of course, for he's a dreadful pickle.
I insisted on putting in my letter that he was a dreadful pickle
(that's a good stroke off the red; just enough side on), though
mamma didn't want me to; because I thought you ought to know about
it beforehand. But you remember him at Marlborough, of course; he
was only a little fellow then, but still a pickle. He always was and
he always will be. He's out shooting, now, with papa; and you'll
never get him to settle down to anything, as long as there's a
snipe or a plover banging about on the moor  anywhere. He's quite
incorrigible. Do you play at all? Won't you take a cue till your
lunch's ready?'

'No, I don't play,' Ernest answered, half hesitating, 'or at least
very little.'

'Oh, then you'll learn here, because you'll find nothing else to
do. Do you shoot?'

'Oh no, never. I don't think it right.'

'Ah, yes, I remember. How delightful! Lady Le Breton told me all
about it. You've got notions, haven't you? You're a Nihilist or
a Fenian or something of that sort, and you don't shoot anything
but czars and grand dukes, do you? I believe you want to cut all
our heads off and have a red republic. Well, I'm sure that's very
refreshing;  for down here we're all as dull as sticks together;
Tories, every one of us to a man; perfect unanimity; no differences
of opinion; all as conventional and proper as the vicar's sermons.
Now, to have somebody who wants to cut your head off, in the house,
is really delightful. I love originality. Not that I've ever seen
anybody original in all my life, for I haven't, but I'm sure it
would be delightful if I did. One reads about original people in
novels, you know, Dickens and that sort of thing; and I often think
I should like to meet some of them (good stroke again; legs, legs,
legs, if you please--no, it hasn't legs enough); but here, or for
the matter of that, in town either, we never see anybody but the same
eternal round of Algies, and Monties, and Berties, and Hughs--all
very nice young men, no doubt; exceedingly proper, nothing against
them; good shots, capital partners, excellent families, everything on
earth that anybody could desire, except a single atom of personal
originality. I assure you, if they were all shaken up in a bag
together and well mixed, in evening clothes (so as not to tell them
apart by the tweeds, you know), their own mothers wouldn't be able
to separate them afterwards. But if you don't shoot and don't play
billiards, I'm sure I don't know what you'll ever find to do with
yourself here at Dunbude.'

'Don't you think,' Ernest said quietly, taking down a cue, 'one
ought to have something better to do with one's time than shooting
and playing billiards? In a world where so many labouring people
are toiling and slaving in poverty and misery on our behalf, don't
you think we should be trying to do something or other in return
for universal humanity, to whom we owe so much for our board and
lodging and clothing and amusement?'

'Well, now, that's just what I mean,' said Hilda ecstatically,  with
a neat shot off the cushion against the red and into the middle
pocket; 'that's such a delightfully original way of looking at
things, you see. We all of us here talk always about the partridges,
and the red deer, and the turnips,  and the Church, and dear Lady
This, and that odious Lady That, and the growing insolence of the
farmers, and the shocking insubordination of the lower classes, and
the difficulty of getting really good servants, and the dreadful
way those horrid Irish are shooting their kind-hearted  indulgent
landlords; or else we talk--the women especially--about how awfully
bored we are. Lawn-tennis, you know, and dinners, and what a bad
match Ethel Thingumbob has made. But you talk another kind of slang;
I dare say it doesn't mean much; you know you're not working at
anything  very much more serious than we are; still it's a novelty.
When we go to a coursing meeting, we're all on the hounds; but
you're on the hare, and that's so delightfully original.  I haven't
the least doubt that if we were to talk about the Irish, you'd say
you thought they ought to shoot their  landlords. I remember you
shocked mamma by saying something like it at the Dolburys'. Now, of
course, it doesn't matter to me a bit which is right; you say the
poor tenants are starving, and papa says the poor landlords can't
get in their rents, and actually have to give up their hounds, poor
fellows; and I don't know which of you is the most to be believed;
only, what papa says is just the same thing that everybody says,
and what you say has a certain charming freshness and variety
about it. It's so funny to be told that one ought really to take
the tenants into consideration. Exactly like your brother Ronald's
notions about servants!'

'Your lunch is ready in the dining-room, sir,' said a voice at the
door.

'Come back here when you've finished, Mr. Le Breton,' Hilda called
after him. 'I'll teach you how to make that cannon you missed
just now. If you mean to exist at Dunbude at all, it's absolutely
necessary for you to learn billiards.'

Ernest turned in to lunch with an uncomfortable misgiving  on his
mind already that Dunbude was not exactly the right place for such
a man as he to live in.

During the afternoon he saw nothing more of the family, save Lady
Hilda; and it was not till the party assembled in the drawing-room
before dinner that he met Lord and Lady Exmoor and his future pupil.
Lynmouth had grown into a tall, handsome, manly-looking boy since
Ernest last saw him; but he certainly looked exactly what Hilda
had called him--a pickle. A few minutes' introductory conversation
sufficed to show Ernest that whatever mind he possessed was wholly
given over to horses, dogs, and partridges, and that the post of
tutor at Dunbude Castle was not likely to prove a bed of roses.

'Seen the paper, Connemara?' Lord Exmoor asked of one of his
guests, as they sat down to dinner. 'I haven't had a moment myself
to snatch a look at the "Times" yet this evening; I'm really too
busy almost even to read the daily papers. Anything fresh from
Ireland?'

'Haven't seen it either,' Lord Connemara answered, glancing towards
Lady Hilda. 'Perhaps somebody else has looked at the papers'?'

Nobody answered, so Ernest ventured to remark that the Irish news
was rather worse again. Two bailiffs had been murdered near Castlebar.

'That's bad,' Lord Exmoor said, turning towards Ernest.  'I'm afraid
there's a deal of distress in the West.'

'A great deal,' Ernest answered; 'positive starvation, I believe,
in some parts of County Galway.'

'Well, not quite so bad as that,' Lord Exmoor replied, a little
startled. 'I don't think any of the landlords are actually starving
yet, though I've no doubt many of them are put to very great straits
indeed by their inability to get in their rents.'

Ernest couldn't forbear gently smiling to himself at the misapprehension.
'Oh, I didn't mean the landlords,' he said quickly: 'I meant among
the poor people.' As he spoke he was aware that Lady Hilda's eyes
were fixed keenly upon him, and that she was immensely delighted
at the temerity and originality displayed in the notion of his
publicly taking Irish tenants into consideration at her father's
table.

'Ah, the poor people,' Lord Exmoor answered with a slight sigh of
relief, as who should say that THEIR condition didn't much matter
to a philosophic mind. 'Yes, to be sure; I've no doubt some of
them are very badly off, poor souls. But then they're such an idle
improvident lot. Why don't they emigrate now, I should like to
know?'

Ernest reflected silently that the inmates of Dunbude Castle did
not exactly set them a model of patient industry; and that Lady
Hilda's numerous allusions during the afternoon  to the fact that
the Dunbude estates were 'mortgaged  up to the eyelids' (a condition
of affairs to which she always alluded as though it were rather a
subject of pride and congratulation than otherwise) did not speak
very highly for their provident economy either. But even Ernest Le
Breton had a solitary grain of worldly wisdom laid up  somewhere
in a corner of his brain, and he didn't think it  advisable to give
them the benefit of his own views upon the subject.

'There's a great deal of rubbish talked in England about Irish
affairs, you know, Exmoor,' said Lord Connemara confidently. 'People
never understand Ireland, I'm sure, until they've actually lived
there. Would you believe it now, the correspondent of one of the
London papers was quite indignant the other day because my agent
had to evict a man for three years' rent at Ballynamara, and the
man unfortunately went and died a week later on the public roadside.
We produced medical evidence to show that he had suffered for years
from heart disease, and would have died in any case, wherever he
had been; but the editor fellow wanted to make political capital
out of it, and kicked up quite a fuss about my agent's shocking
inhumanity.  As if we could possibly help ourselves in the matter!
People must get their rents in somehow, mustn't they?'

'People must get their rents in somehow, of course,' Lord Exmoor
assented, sympathetically; 'and I know all you men who are unlucky
enough to own property in Ireland have a lot of trouble about it
nowadays. Upon my word, what with Fenians, and what with Nihilists,
and what with Communards, I really don't know what the world is
coming to.'

'Most unchristian conduct, I call it,' said Lady Exmoor, who went
in for being mildly and decorously religious. 'I really can't
understand how people can believe such wicked doctrines as these
communistic notions that are coming over people in these latter
days.'

'No better than downright robbery,' Lord Connemara answered.
'Shaking the very foundations of society, I think it. All done so
recklessly, too, without any care or any consideration.'

Ernest thought of old Max Schurz, with his lifelong economical
studies, and wondered when Lord Connemara had found time to turn
his own attention from foxes and fishing to economical problems;
but, by a perfect miracle, he said nothing.

'You wouldn't believe the straits we're put to, Lady Exmoor,' the
Irish Earl went on, 'through this horrid no-rent business. Absolute
poverty, I assure you--absolute downright poverty. I've had to
sell the Maid of Garunda this week, you know, and three others of
the best horses in my stable, just to raise money for immediate
necessities.  Wanted to buy a most interesting missal, quite
unique in its way, offered me by Menotti and Cicolari, dirt cheap,
for three thousand guineas. It's quite a gem of late miniaturist
art--vellum folio, with borders and head-pieces by Giulio Clovio.
A marvellous bargain!'

'Giulio Clovio,' said Lord Exmoor, doubtfully. 'Who was he? Never
heard of him in my life before.'

'Never heard of Giulio Clovio!' cried Lord Connemara, seizing the
opportunity with well-affected surprise. 'You really astonish me.
He was a Croatian, I believe, or an Illyrian--I forget which--and
he studied at Rome under Giulio Romano. Wonderful draughtsman in
the nude, and fine colourist; took hints from Raphael and Michael
Angelo.' So much he had picked up from Menotti and Cicolari, and,
being a distinguished connoisseur, had made a mental note of the
facts at once, for future reproduction upon a fitting occasion.
'Well, this missal was executed for Cardinal Farnese, as a companion
volume to the famous Vita Christi in the Towneley collection. You
know it, of course, Lady Exmoor?'

'Of course,' Lady Exmoor answered faintly, with a devout hope that
Lord Connemara wouldn't question her any further upon the subject;
in which case she thought it would probably be the safest guess to
say that she had seen it at the British

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