"Read it aloud," she said. "It comforts me."
"Read it aloud," she said. "It comforts me."
"Read it aloud," she said. "It comforts me."
I coughed violently and felt myself growing pale. The eyes of Martin were upon me with an expression that seemed waiting to become sardonic. I called inwardly upon the Holy Mother. There seemed to be only a few words and after a second's hesitation I murmured something in my most inarticulate manner, producing somesounds approximately like those I had heard during the service.
Fanny looked up at me, puzzled.
"I do not understand your pronunciation," she said.
I felt ready to sink into the sofa.
"Ah, I am not surprised," put in her brother. "From Mr. Mendoza's name and appearance I should take him to be a Sephardi like the Mendozas of Highbury. They pronounce quite differently from us, Fanny."
I commended him to the grace of the Virgin.
"That is so," I admitted. "And I found it not at all easy to follow your services."
"Are you an English Sephardi or a native Sephardi?" asked Martin.
"A native!" I replied readily. "I was born there." Where "there" was I had no idea.
"Do you know," said Fanny, looking so sweetly into my face, "I should like to see your country. Spain has always seemed to me so romantic, and I dote on Spanish olives."
I was delighted to find I had spoken the truth as to my nativity.
"I shall be charmed to escort you," I said, smiling.
She smiled in response.
"It is easy enough to go anywhere nowadays," said Martin surlily.
"I wish you would go to the devil," I thought. "That would certainly be easy enough."
But it would have been premature to force my own company upon Fanny any longer. I relied upon the presence of death and her brother to hinder Martin's suit from developing beyond the point it had already reached. It remained to be seen whether the damage was irreparable. I went again on the Saturday night, following with interest the service that had seemed a council-meeting.This time it began with singing, in which everybody joined and in which I took part with hearty inarticulateness. But a little experience convinced me that my course was beset with pitfalls, that not Mary Jane aspiring to personify a duchess could glide on thinner ice than I attempting to behave as one of these strange people, with their endless and all-embracing network of religious etiquette. To my joy I discovered that I could pursue my suit without going to synagogue, a place of dire peril, for it seems that the Spaniards are a distinct sect, mightily proud of their blood and their peculiar pronunciation, and the Radowskis, being Poles, did not expect to see me worshipping with themselves, which enabled me to continue my devotions in the Holy Chapel of St. Vincent. It also enabled me to skate over many awkward moments, the Poles being indifferently informed as to the etiquette of their Peninsular cousins. That I should have been twice taken for one of their own race rather surprised me, for my physiognomical relationship to it seemed of the slightest. The dark complexion, the foreign air, doubtless gave me a superficial resemblance, and in the face it is the surface that tells. I read up Spanish history and learnt that many Jews had become Christians during the persecutions of the Holy Inquisition, and that many had escaped the fires of theauto-da-féby feigning conversion, the while secretly performing their strange rites, and handing down to their descendants the traditions of secrecy and of Judaism, these unhappy people being styled Marranos. Perchance I was sprung from some such source, but there was no hint of it in my genealogy so far as known to me; my name Mendoza was a good old Andalusian name, and my ancestors had for generations been good sons of the only true Church. The question has no interest for me now.
For, although like Cæsar I am entitled to say that Icame, saw, and conquered, conquering not only Fanny but my rival, yet am I still a bachelor. I had driven Martin on one side as easily as a steamer bearing down upon a skiff, yet my own lips betrayed me. It was the desire to penetrate the mystery of the restaurant that undid me, for if a woman cannot keep a secret, a man cannot refrain from fathoming one. The rose-gardens of Love were open for my walking when the demon in possession prompted me to speech that silvered the red roses with hoar-frost and ice.
One day I sat holding her dear hand in mine. She permitted me no more complex caresses, being still in black. Such was the sense of duty of this beautiful, warm-blooded Oriental creature, that she was as cold as her father's tombstone, and equally eulogistic of his virtues. She spoke of them now, though I would fain have diverted the talk to hers. Failing that, I seized the opportunity to solve the haunting puzzle.
"Do you know, I fancy I once saw your father," I said, earnestly.
"Indeed!" she observed, with much interest. "Where?"
"In a restaurant not many miles from here. It was before noon."
"In a restaurant?" she repeated. "Hardly very likely. There isn't any restaurant near here he would be likely to go to, and certainly not at the time you mention, when he would be in the city. You must be mistaken."
I shook my head. "I don't think so. I remember his face so well. When I saw his photograph I recognized him at once."
"How long ago was it?"
"I can tell you exactly," I said. "The date is graven on my heart. It was the twenty-fourth of October."
"This year?"
"This year."
"The twenty-fourth of October!" she repeated musingly. "Only a few weeks before he died. Poor father, peace be upon him! The twenty-fourth of October, did you say?" she added, suddenly.
"What is the matter?" I asked. "You are agitated."
"No, it is nothing. It cannot be," she added, more calmly. "Of course not." She smiled faintly. "I thought——" she paused.
"You thought what?"
"Oh, well, I'll show you I was mistaken." She rose, went to the book-case, drew out a little brown-paper covered volume, and turned over the pages scrutinizingly. Suddenly a change came over the beautiful face; she stood motionless, pale as a statue.
A chill shadow fell across my heart, distracted between tense curiosity and dread of a tragic solution.
"My dear Fanny, what in Heaven's name is it?" I breathed.
"Don't speak of Heaven," said Fanny, in strange, harsh tones, "when you libel the dead thus."
"Libel the dead? How?"
"Why, the twenty-fourth of October wasYom Kippur."
"Well," I said, unimpressed and uncomprehending, "and what of it?"
She stared at me, staggered and clutched at the book-case for support.
"What of it?" she cried, in passionate emotion. "Do you dare to say that you saw my poor father, who was righteousness itself, breaking his fast in a restaurant on the Day of Atonement? Perhaps you will insinuate next that his speedy death was Heaven's punishment on him for his blasphemy!"
In the same instant I saw the truth and my terrible blunder. This fast-day must be of awful solemnity, and Fanny's father must have gone systematically to a surreptitiousbreakfast in that queer, out-of-the-way restaurant. His nervousness, his want of ease, his terror at the sight of me, whom he mistook for a brother-Jew, were all accounted for. Once a year—the discrepancy in the date being explained by the discord between Jewish and Christian chronology—he hied his way furtively to this unholy meal, enjoying it and a reputation for sanctity at the same time. But to expose her father's hypocrisy to the trusting, innocent girl would be hardly the way to advance love-matters. It might be difficult even to repair the mischief I had already done.
"I beg your pardon," I said humbly. "You were right. I was misled by some chance resemblance. If your father was the pious Jew you paint him, it is impossible he could have been the man I saw. Yes, and now I think of it, the eyebrows were bushier and the chin plumper than those of the photograph."
A sigh of satisfaction escaped her lips. Then her face grew rigid again as she turned it upon me, and asked in low tones that cut through me like an icy blast: "Yes, but what wereyoudoing in the restaurant on the Day of Atonement?"
"I—I——?" I stammered.
Her look was terrible.
"I—I—was only having a cup of chocolate," I replied, with a burst of inspiration.
As everybody knows, since the pronunciamento of Pope Paul V., chocolate may be imbibed by good Catholics without breaking the fasts of the Church. But, alas! it seems these fanatical Eastern flagellants allow not even a drop of cold water to pass their lips for over twenty-four hours.
"I am glad you confess it," said Fanny, witheringly. "It shows you have still one redeeming trait. And I am glad you spoke ill of my poor father, for it has led to therevelation of your true character before it was too late. You will, of course, understand, Mr. Mendoza, that our acquaintance is at an end."
"Fanny!" I cried, frantically.
"Spare me a scene, I beg of you," she said, coldly. "You, you the man who pretended to such ardent piety, to such enthusiasm for our holy religion, are an apostate from the faith into which you were born, a blasphemer, an atheist."
I stared at her in dumb horror. I had entangled myself inextricably. How could I now explain that it was her father who was the renegade, not I?
"Good-bye," said Fanny. "Heaven make you a better Jew."
I moved desperately towards her, but she waved me back. "Don't touch me," she cried. "Go, go!"
"But is there no hope for me?" I exclaimed, looking wildly into the cold, statue-like face, that seemed more beautiful than ever, now it was fading from my vision.
"None," she said. Then, in a breaking voice, she murmured, "Neither for you nor for me."
"Ah, you love me still," I cried, striving to embrace her. "You will be my wife."
She struggled away from me. "No, no," she said, with a gesture of horror. "It would be sacrilege to my dead father's memory. Rather would I marry a Christian, yes, even a Catholic, than an apostate Jew like you. Leave me, I pray you; or, must I ring the bell?"
I went—a sadder and a wiser man. But even my wisdom availed me not, for when I repaired to the restaurant to impart it to the proprietor, the last consolation was denied me. He had sold his business and returned to Italy.
To-morrow I start for Turkestan.
THE ARITHMETIC AND PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE.
"Well, have you seen this Fanny Radowski?" said Lord Silverdale, when he returned the manuscript to the President of the Old Maids' Club.
"Of course. Didn't I tell you I had the story from her own mouth, though I have put it into Mendoza's?"
"Ah, yes, I remember now. It certainly is funny, her refusing a good Catholic on the ground that he was a bad Jew. But then according to the story she doesn't know he's a Catholic?"
"No, it was I who divined the joke of the situation. Lookers-on always see more of the game. I saw at once that if Mendoza were really a Jew, he would never have been such an ass as to make the slip he did; and so from this and several other things she told me about her lover, I constructed deductively the history you have read. She says she first met him at a mourning service in memory of her father, and that it is a custom among her people when they have not enough men to form a religious quorum (the number is the mystical ten) to invite any brother Jew who may be passing to step in, whether he is an acquaintance or not."
"I gathered that from the narrative," said Lord Silverdale. "And so she wishes to be an object lesson in female celibacy, does she?"
"She is most anxious to enlist in the Cause."
"Is she really beautiful, et cetera?"
"She is magnificent."
"Then I should say the very member we are looking for. A Jewess will be an extremely valuable element of the Club, for her race exalts marriage even above happiness, and an old maid is even more despised than among us. The lovely Miss Radowski will be an eloquent protest against the prejudices of her people."
Lillie Dulcimer shook her head quietly. "The racial accident which makes her seem a desirable member to you, makes me regard her as impossible."
"How so?" cried Silverdale in amazement. "You surely are not going to degrade your Club by anti-Semitism."
"Heaven forefend! But a Jewess can never be a whole Old Maid."
"I don't understand."
"Look at it mathematically a moment."
Silverdale made a grimace.
"Consider! A Jewess, orthodox like Miss Radowski, can only be an Old Maid fractionally. An Old Maid must make 'the grand refusal!'—she must refuse mankind at large. Now Miss Radowski, being cut off by her creed from marrying into any but an insignificant percentage of mankind, is proportionately less valuable as an object-lesson; she is unfitted for the functions of Old Maidenhood in their full potentiality. Already by her religion she is condemned to almost total celibacy. She cannot renounce what she never possessed. There are in the world, roughly speaking, eight million Jews among a population of a thousand millions. The force of the example, in other words, her value as an Old Maid, may therefore be represented by .008."
"I am glad you express her as a decimal rather than a vulgar fraction," said Lord Silverdale laughing. "But Imust own your reckoning seems correct. As a mathematical wrangler you are terrible. So I shall not need to try Miss Radowski?"
"No; we cannot entertain her application," said Lillie peremptorily, the thunder-cloud no bigger than a man's hand gathering on her brow at the suspicion that Silverdale did not take her mathematics seriously. Considering that in keeping him at arm's length her motive were merely mathematical (though Lord Silverdale was not aware of this) she was peculiarly sensitive on the point. She changed the subject quickly by asking what poem he had brought her.
"Do not call them poems," he answered.
"It is only between ourselves. There are no critics about."
"Thank you so much. I have brought one suggested by the strange farrago of religions that figured in your last human document. It is a pæan on the growing hospitality of the people towards the gods of other nations. There was a time when free trade in divinities was tabu, each nation protecting, and protected by, its own. Now foreign gods are all the rage."
"THE END OF THE CENTURY" CATHOLIC CREDO.
I'm a Christo-Jewish Quaker,Moslem, Atheist and Shaker,Auld Licht Church of England Fakir,Antinomian Baptist, Deist,Gnostic, Neo-Pagan Theist,Presbyterianish Papist,Comtist, Mormon, Darwin-apist,Trappist, High Church Unitarian,Sandemanian Sabbatarian,Plymouth Brother, Walworth Jumper,Southcote South-Place Bible-Thumper,Christadelphian, Platonic,Old Moravian, Masonic,Corybantic Christi-antic,Ethic-Culture-Transatlantic,Anabaptist, Neo-Buddhist,Zoroastrian Talmudist,Laotsean, Theosophic,Table-rapping, Philosophic,Mediæval, Monkish, Mystic,Modern, Mephistophelistic,Hellenistic, Calvinistic,Brahministic, Cabbalistic,Humanistic, Tolstoistic,Rather Robert Elsmeristic,Altruistic, HedonisticAnd Agnostic Manichæan,Worshipping the Galilean.For with equal zeal I followSivah, Allah, Zeus, Apollo,Mumbo Jumbo, Dagon, Brahma,BuddhaaliasGautama,Jahvé, Juggernaut and Juno—Plus some gods that but the few know.Though I reverence the Mishna,I can bend the knee to Vishna;I obey the latest mode inRecognizing Thor and Odin,Just as freely as the Virgin;For the Pope and Mr. Spurgeon,Moses, Paul and Zoroaster,Each to me is seer and master.I consider Heine, Hegel,Schopenhauer, Shelley, Schlegel,Diderot, Savonarola,Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Zola,Whitman, Renan (priest of Paris),Transcendental Prophet Harris,Ibsen, Carlyle, Huxley, PaterEach than all the others greater.And I read the Zend-Avesta,Koran, Bible, Roman Gesta,Ind's Upanischads and SpencerWith affection e'er intenser.For these many appellationsOf the gods of different nations,Ibelieve—from Baal to Sun-god—All at bottom coveronegod.HimI worship—dropping gammon—And his mighty name isMammon.
I'm a Christo-Jewish Quaker,Moslem, Atheist and Shaker,Auld Licht Church of England Fakir,Antinomian Baptist, Deist,Gnostic, Neo-Pagan Theist,Presbyterianish Papist,Comtist, Mormon, Darwin-apist,Trappist, High Church Unitarian,Sandemanian Sabbatarian,Plymouth Brother, Walworth Jumper,Southcote South-Place Bible-Thumper,Christadelphian, Platonic,Old Moravian, Masonic,Corybantic Christi-antic,Ethic-Culture-Transatlantic,Anabaptist, Neo-Buddhist,Zoroastrian Talmudist,Laotsean, Theosophic,Table-rapping, Philosophic,Mediæval, Monkish, Mystic,Modern, Mephistophelistic,Hellenistic, Calvinistic,Brahministic, Cabbalistic,Humanistic, Tolstoistic,Rather Robert Elsmeristic,Altruistic, HedonisticAnd Agnostic Manichæan,Worshipping the Galilean.
For with equal zeal I followSivah, Allah, Zeus, Apollo,Mumbo Jumbo, Dagon, Brahma,BuddhaaliasGautama,Jahvé, Juggernaut and Juno—Plus some gods that but the few know.
Though I reverence the Mishna,I can bend the knee to Vishna;I obey the latest mode inRecognizing Thor and Odin,Just as freely as the Virgin;For the Pope and Mr. Spurgeon,Moses, Paul and Zoroaster,Each to me is seer and master.I consider Heine, Hegel,Schopenhauer, Shelley, Schlegel,Diderot, Savonarola,Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Zola,Whitman, Renan (priest of Paris),Transcendental Prophet Harris,Ibsen, Carlyle, Huxley, PaterEach than all the others greater.And I read the Zend-Avesta,Koran, Bible, Roman Gesta,Ind's Upanischads and SpencerWith affection e'er intenser.For these many appellationsOf the gods of different nations,Ibelieve—from Baal to Sun-god—All at bottom coveronegod.HimI worship—dropping gammon—And his mighty name isMammon.
"You are very hard upon the century—or rather upon the end of it," said Lillie.
"The century is dying unshriven," said the satirist solemnly. "Its conscience must be stirred. Truly, was there ever an age which had so much light and so little sweetness? In the reckless fight for gold Society has become a mutual swindling association. Cupidity has ousted Cupid, and everything is bought and sold."
"Except your poems, Lord Silverdale," laughed Lillie.
It was tit for the tat of his raillery of her mathematics.
Before his lordship had time to make the clever retort the thought of next day, Turple the magnificent brought in a card.
"Miss Winifred Woodpecker?" said Lillie queryingly. "I suppose it's another candidate. Show her in."
Miss Woodpecker was a tall stately girl, of the kind that pass for lilies in the flowery language of the novelists.
"Have I the pleasure of speaking to Miss Dulcimer?"
"Yes, I am Miss Dulcimer," said Lillie.
"And where is the Old Maids' Club?" further inquired Miss Woodpecker, looking around curiously.
"Here," replied Lillie, indicating the epigrammatic antimacassars with a sweeping gesture. "No, don't go, Lord Silverdale. Miss Woodpecker, this is my friend Lord Silverdale. He knows all about the Club, so you needn't mind speaking before him."
"Well, you know, I read the leader in theHurrygraphabout your Club this morning."
"Oh, is there a leader?" said Lillie feverishly. "Have you seen it, Lord Silverdale?"
"I am not sure. At first I fancied it referred to the Club, but there was such a lot about Ptolemy, Rosa Bonheur's animals and the Suez Canal that I can hardly venture to say what the leader itself was about. And so, Miss Woodpecker, you have thought about joining our institution for elevating female celibacy into a fine art?"
"I wish to join at once. Is there any entrance fee?"
"Thereis—experience. Have you had a desirable proposal of marriage?"
"Eminently desirable."
"And still you do not intend to marry?"
"Not while I live."
"Ah, that is all the guarantee we want," said Lord Silverdale smiling. "Afterwards—in heaven—there is no marrying, nor giving in marriage."
"That is what makes it heaven," added Lillie. "But tell us your story."
"It was in this way. I was staying at a boarding-house in Brighton with a female cousin, and a handsome young man in the house fell in love with me and we were engaged. Then my mother came down. Immediately afterwards my lover disappeared. He left a note for me containing nothing but the following verses."
She handed a double tear-stained sheet of letter-paper to the President, who read aloud as follows:
A VISION OF THE FUTURE.
"Well is it for man that he knoweth not what the future will bring forth."
She had a sweetly spiritual face,Touched with a noble, stately grace,Poetic heritage of race.Her form was graceful, slim and sweet,Her frock was exquisitely neat,With airy tread she paced the street.She seemed some fantasy of dream,A flash of loveliness supreme,A poet's visionary gleam.And yet she was of mortal birth,A lovely child of lovely earth,For kisses made and joy and mirth.Sweet whirling thoughts my bosom throng,To link her life with mine I long,And shrine her in immortal song.I steal another glance—and lo!Dread shudders through my being flow,My veins are filled with liquid snow.Another form beside her walks,Of servants and expenses talks,Her nose is not unlike a hawk's.Her face is plump, her figure fat,She's prose embodied, stout gone flat,—A comfortable Persian cat.Her life is full of petty fuss,She wobbles like an omnibus,And yet it was not always thus.Alas for perishable grace!How unmistakably I traceThe daughter's in the mother's face.Beneath the beak I see the nose,The poetry beneath the prose,The figure 'neath the adipose.And so I sadly turn away:HowcanI love a clod of clay,Doomed to grow earthlier day by day?Vain, vain the hope from Fate to flee,What special Providence for me?I know that what hath been will be.
She had a sweetly spiritual face,Touched with a noble, stately grace,Poetic heritage of race.
Her form was graceful, slim and sweet,Her frock was exquisitely neat,With airy tread she paced the street.
She seemed some fantasy of dream,A flash of loveliness supreme,A poet's visionary gleam.
And yet she was of mortal birth,A lovely child of lovely earth,For kisses made and joy and mirth.
Sweet whirling thoughts my bosom throng,To link her life with mine I long,And shrine her in immortal song.
I steal another glance—and lo!Dread shudders through my being flow,My veins are filled with liquid snow.
Another form beside her walks,Of servants and expenses talks,Her nose is not unlike a hawk's.
Her face is plump, her figure fat,She's prose embodied, stout gone flat,—A comfortable Persian cat.
Her life is full of petty fuss,She wobbles like an omnibus,And yet it was not always thus.
Alas for perishable grace!How unmistakably I traceThe daughter's in the mother's face.
Beneath the beak I see the nose,The poetry beneath the prose,The figure 'neath the adipose.
And so I sadly turn away:HowcanI love a clod of clay,Doomed to grow earthlier day by day?
Vain, vain the hope from Fate to flee,What special Providence for me?I know that what hath been will be.
The Present and the Future.
The Present and the Future.
The Present and the Future.
Lillie and Silverdale looked at each other.
"Well, but," said Lillie at last, "according to this he refused you, not you him. Our rules——"
"You mistake me," interrupted Winifred Woodpecker. "When the first fit of anguish was over, I saw my Frank was right, and I have refused all the offers I have had since—five in all. It would not be fair to a lover to chain him to a beauty so transient. In ten or twenty years from now I shall go the way of all flesh. Under such circumstances is not marriage a contract entered into under false pretences? There is no chance of the law of this country allowing a time-limit to be placed in the contract; celibacy is the only honest policy for a woman."
Involuntarily Lillie's hand seized the candidate's and gripped it sympathetically. She divined a sister soul.
"You teach me a new point of view," she said, "a finer shade of ethical feeling."
Silverdale groaned inwardly; he saw a new weapon going into the anti-hymeneal armory, and the Old Maids' Club on the point of being strengthened by the accession of its first member.
"The law will have to accommodate itself to these finer shades," pursued Lillie energetically. "It is a rusty machine out of harmony with the age. Science has discovered that the entire physical organism is renewed every seven years, and yet the law calmly goes on assuming that the new man and the new woman are still bound by the contract of their predecessors and still possess the good-will of the original partnership. It seems to me if the short lease principle demanded by physiology is not to be conceded, there should at any rate be provincial and American rights in marriage as well as London rights. In the metropolis the matrimonial contract should hold good with A, in the country with B, neither party infringingthe other's privileges, in accordance with theatrical analogy."
"That is a literal latitudinarianism in morals you will never get the world to agree to," laughed Lord Silverdale. "At least not in theory; we cannot formally sanction theatrical practice."
"Do not laugh," said Lillie. "Law must be brought more in touch with life."
"Isn't it rathervice versâ? Life must be brought more in touch with law. However, if Miss Woodpecker feels these fine ethical shades, won't she be ineligible?"
"How so?" said the President in indignant surprise.
"By our second rule every candidate must be beautiful and undertake to continue so."
Poor little Lillie drooped her head.
And now it befalls to reveal to the world the jealously-guarded secret of the English Shakespeare, for how else can the tale be told of how the Old Maids' Club was within an ace of robbing him of his bride?
"THE ENGLISH SHAKESPEARE."
By a thorough knowledge of the natural laws which govern the operations of human nature and by a careful application of the fine properties of well-selected men, and a judicious use of every available instrument of log-rolling, the Mutual Depreciation Society gradually built up a constitution strong enough to defy every tendency to disintegration. Hundreds of subtle malcontents floated round, ready to attack wherever there was a weak point, but foiled by ignorance of the Society's existence, and the members escaped many a fatal shaft by keeping themselves entirely to themselves. The idea of the Mutual Depreciation Society was that every member should say what he thought of the others. The founders, who all took equal shares in it, were
Tom Brown,Dick Jones,Harry Robinson.
Tom Brown,Dick Jones,Harry Robinson.
Their object in founding the Mutual Depreciation Society was of course to achieve literary success, but they soon perceived that their phalanx was too small for this, and as they had no power to add to their number except by inviting strangers from without, they took steps to induce three other gentlemen to solicit the privileges of membership. The second batch comprised,
Taffy Owen,Andrew Mackay,Patrick Boyle.
Taffy Owen,Andrew Mackay,Patrick Boyle.
Tom Brown, the Supreme Thinker.
Tom Brown, the Supreme Thinker.
Tom Brown, the Supreme Thinker.
These six gentlemen being all blessed with youth, health and incompetence, resolved to capture the town. Their tactics were very simple, though their first operations were hampered by their ignorance of one another's. Thus, it was some time before it was discovered that Andrew Mackay, who had been deployed to seize theSaturday Slasher, had no real acquaintance with the editor's fencing-master, while Dick Jones, who had undertaken to bombard theAcadæum, had started under the impression that the eminent critic to whom he had dedicated his poems (by permission) was still connected with the staff. But these difficulties were eliminated as soon as the Society got into working order. Everything comes to him who will not wait, and almost before they had time to wink our six gentlemen had secured the makings of an Influence. Each had loyally done his best for himself and the rest, and the first spoils of the campaign, as announced amid applause by the Secretary at the monthly dinner, were
Two Morning Papers,Two Evening Papers,Two Weekly Papers.
Two Morning Papers,Two Evening Papers,Two Weekly Papers.
They were not the most influential, nor even the best circulated, still it was not a bad beginning, though of course only a nucleus. By putting out tentacles in every direction, by undertaking to write even on subjects with which they were acquainted, they gradually secured a more or less tenacious connection with the majority of the better journals and magazines. On taking stock they found that the account stood thus:
Three Morning Papers,Four Evening Papers,Eleven Weekly Papers,Thirteen London Letters,Seven Dramatic Columns,Six Monthly Magazines,Thirteen Influences on Advertisements,Nine Friendships with Eminent Editors,Seventeen ditto with Eminent Sub-editors,Six ditto with Lady Journalists,Fifty-three Loans (at two-and-six each) to Pressmen,One hundred and nine Mentions of Editor's Womenkind at Fashionable Receptions.
Three Morning Papers,Four Evening Papers,Eleven Weekly Papers,Thirteen London Letters,Seven Dramatic Columns,Six Monthly Magazines,Thirteen Influences on Advertisements,Nine Friendships with Eminent Editors,Seventeen ditto with Eminent Sub-editors,Six ditto with Lady Journalists,Fifty-three Loans (at two-and-six each) to Pressmen,One hundred and nine Mentions of Editor's Womenkind at Fashionable Receptions.
It showed what could be achieved by six men, working together shoulder to shoulder for the highest aims in a spirit of mutual good-will and brotherhood. They were undoubtedly greatly helped by having all been to Oxford or Cambridge, but still much was the legitimate result of their own manœuvres.
By the time the secret campaign had reached this stage, many well-meaning, unsuspecting men, not included in the above inventory, had been pressed into the service of the Society, with the members of which they were connected by the thousand and one ties which spring up naturally in the intercourse of the world, so that there was hardly any journal in the three kingdoms on which the Society could not, by some hook or the other, fasten a paragraph, if we except such publications as theNewgate CalendarandLloyds' Shipping List, which record history rather than make it.
Indeed, the success of the Society in this department was such as to suggest the advisability of having themselves formally incorporated under the Companies' Acts for the manufacture and distribution of paragraphs, for which they had unequalled facilities, and had obtained valuable concessions, and it was only the publicity required by law which debarred them from enlarging their home trade to a profitable industry for the benefit of non-members. For, by the peculiar nature of the machinery, it could only be worked if people were unaware of itsexistence. They resolved, however, that when they had made their pile, they would start the newspaper of the future, which any philosopher with an eye to the trend of things can see will be a journal written by advertisers for gentlemen, and will contain nothing calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of the young person except cosmetics.
Contemporaneously with the execution of one side of the Plan of Campaign, the Society was working the supplementary side. Day and night, week-days and Sundays, in season and out, these six gentlemen praised themselves and one another, or got themselves and one another praised by non-members. There are many ways in which you can praise an author, from blame downwards. There is the puff categorical and the puff allusive, the lie direct and the eulogy insinuative, the downright abuse and the subtle innuendo, the exaltation of your man or the depression of his rival. The attacking method of log-rolling must not be confounded with depreciation. In their outside campaign, the members used every variety of puff, but depreciation was strictly reserved for their private gatherings. For this was the wisdom of the Club, and herein lay its immense superiority over every other log-rolling club, that whereas in those childish cliques every man is expected to admire every other, or to say so, in the Mutual Depreciation Society the obligation was all the other way. Every man was bound by the rules to sneer at the work of his fellow-members and, if he should happen to admire any of it, at least to have the grace to keep his feelings to himself. In practice, however, the latter contingency never arose, and each was able honestly to express all he thought, for it is impossible for men to work together for a common object without discovering that they do not deserve to get it. Needless to point out how this sagacious provision strengthened them in their campaign, for not having to keep up the tension of mutualadmiration, and being able to relax and breathe (and express themselves) freely at their monthly symposia, as well as to slang one another in the street, they were able to write one another up with a clear conscience. It is well to found on human nature. Every other basis proves shifting sand. The success of the Mutual Depreciation Society justified their belief in human nature.
Not only did they depreciate one another, but they made reparation to the non-members they were always trying to write down during business hours, by eulogizing them in the most generous manner in those blessed hours of leisure when knife answers fork and soul speaks to soul. At such times even popular authors were allowed to have a little merit.
It was at one of these periods of soul-expansion, when the most petty-souled feels inclined to loosen the last two buttons of his waistcoat, that the idea of the English Shakespeare was first mooted. But we are anticipating, which is imprudent, as anticipations are seldom realized.
One of the worst features of prosperity is that it is cloying, and when the first gloss of novelty and adventure had worn off, the free lances of the Mutual Depreciation Society began to bore one another. You can get tired even of hearing your own dispraises; and the members were compelled to spice their mutual adverse criticism in the highest manner, so as to compensate for its staleness. The jaded appetite must needs be pampered if it is to experience anything of that relish which a natural healthy hunger for adverse criticism can command so easily.
This was the sort of thing that went on at the dinners:
"I say, Tom," said Andrew Mackay, "what in Heaven's name made you publish your waste-paper basket under the name of 'Stray Thoughts?' For utter and incomprehensible idiocy they are only surpassed by Dick's last volume of poems. I shouldn't have thought such thingscould come even out of a lunatic asylum, certainly not without a keeper. Really you fellows ought to consider me a little——"
"We do. We consider you as little as they make them," they interrupted simultaneously.
"It isn't fair to throw all the work on me," he went on. "How can I go on saying that Tom Brown is the supreme thinker of the time, the deepest intellect since Hegel, with a gift of style that rivals Berkeley's, if you go on turning out twaddle that a copy-book would boggle at? How can I keep repeating that for sure and consummate art, for unfailing certainty of insight, for unerring visualization, for objective subjectivity and for subjective objectivity, for Swinburnian sweep of music and Shakespearean depth of suggestiveness, Dick Jones can give forty in a hundred (spot stroke barred) to all other contemporary poets, if you continue to spue out rhymes as false as your teeth, rhythms as musical as your voice when you read them, and words that would drive a drawing-room composer mad with envy to set them? I maintain, it is not sticking to the bargain to expose me to the danger of being found out. You ought at least to have the decency to wrap up your fatuousness in longer words or more abstruse themes. You're both so beastly intelligible that a child can understand you're asses."
"Tut, tut, Andrew," said Taffy Owen, "it's all very well of you to talk who've only got to do the criticism. And I think it's deuced ungrateful of you after we've written you up into the position of leading English critic to want us to give you straw for your bricks! Do we ever complain when you call us cataclysmic, creative, esemplastic, or even epicene? We know it's rot, but we put up with it. When you said that Robinson's last novel had all the glow and genius of Dickens without his humor, all the ripe wisdom of Thackeray without his social knowingness,all the imaginativeness of Shakespeare without his definiteness of characterization, we all saw at once that you were incautiously allowing the donkey's ears to protrude too obviously from beneath the lion's skin. But did anyone grumble? Did Robinson, though the edition was sold out the day after? Did I, though you had just called me a modern Buddhist with the soul of an ancient Greek and the radiant fragrance of a Cingalese tea-planter? I know these phrases take the public and I try to be patient."
"Owen is right," Harry Robinson put in emphatically. "When you said I was a cross between a Scandinavian skald and a Dutch painter, I bore my cross in silence."
"Yes, but what else can a fellow say, when you give the public such heterogeneous and formless balderdash that there is nothing for it but to pretend it's a new style, an epoch-making work, the foundation of a new era in literary art? Really I think you others have out and away the best of it. It's much easier to write bad books than to eulogize their merits in an adequately plausible manner. I think it's playing it too low upon a chap, the way you fellows are going on. It's taking a mean advantage of my position."
"And who put you into that position, I should like to know?" yelled Dick Jones, becoming poetically excited. "Didn't we lift you up into it on the point of our pens?"
"Fortunately they were not very pointed," ejaculated the great critic, wriggling uncomfortably at the suggestion. "I don't deny that, of course. All I say is, you're giving me away now."
"You give yourself away," shrieked Owen vehemently, "with a pound of that Cingalese tea. How is it Boyle managed to crack up our plays without being driven to any of this new-fangled nonsense?"
"Plays!" said Patrick, looking up moodily. "Anythingis good enough for plays. You see I can always fall back on the acting and crack up that. I had to do that with Owen's thing at theLymarket. My notice read like a gushing account of the play, in reality it was all devoted to the players. The trick of it is not easy. Those who can read between the lines could see that there were only three of them about the piece itself, and yet the outside public would never dream I was shirking the expression of an opinion about the merits of the play or the pinning myself to any definite statement. The only time, Owen, I dare say, that your plays are literature is when they are a frost, for that both explains the failure and justifies you. But, an you love me, Taffy, or if you have any care for my reputation, do not, I beg of you, be enticed into the new folly of printing your plays."
"But things have come to that stage Imustdo it," said Owen, "or incur the suspicion of illiterateness."
"No, no!" pleaded Patrick in horror. "Sooner than that I will damn all the other printed playsen bloc, and say that the real literary playwrights, conscious of their position, are too dignified to resort to this cheap method of self-assertion."
"But you will not carry out your threat? Remember how dangerously near you came to exposing me over yourNaquette."
The Club laughed. Everyone knew the incident, for it was Patrick's stock grievance against the dramatist. Patrick being out of town, had written his eulogy of this play of Owen's from his inner consciousness. On the fourth night in deference to Owen's persuasions he had gone to seeNaquette.
After the tragedy, Owen found him seated moodily in the stalls, long after the audience had filed out.
"Knocked you, old man, this time, eh?" queried Owen laughing complacently.