“Ah, you did go? That was quite right—jolly right.”
“I went because she very kindly wrote me to come.”
“Ah, she wrote to you to come?” The Captain fixed him a moment with his curious colourless eyes. “Do you know you’re a devilish privileged mortal?”
“Certainly I know it.” Hyacinth blushed and felt foolish; the barmaid, who had heard this oddcouple talking of a princess, was staring at him too with her elbows on the counter.
“Do you know there are people who’d give their heads that she should write them to come?”
“I’ve no doubt of it whatever!”—and he took refuge in a laugh that sounded less natural than he would have liked, and wondered if his interlocutor weren’t precisely one of these people. In this case the barmaid might well stare; for deeply convinced as our young man might be that he was the son of Lord Frederick Purvis, there was really no end to the oddity of his being preferred—and by a princess—to Captain Sholto. If anything could have re-enforced at that moment his sense of this anomaly it would have been the indescribably gentlemanly way, implying all sorts of common initiations, in which his companion went on.
“Ah well, I see you know how to take it! And if you’re in correspondence with her why do you say you can hear from her only through me? My dear fellow, I’m not in correspondence with her. You might think I’d naturally be, but I’m not.” He subjoined as Hyacinth had laughed again in a manner that might have passed for ambiguous: “So much the worse for me—is that what you mean?” Hyacinth replied that he himself had had the honour of hearing from the Princess but once, and mentioned her having told him how her letter-writing came on only in fits, when it was sometimes very profuse: there were months together that she didn’t touch a pen. “Oh, I can imagine what she told you!” the Captain knowingly returned. “Look out for the next fit! She’s visiting about, you know—at a lot of great houses. It’s a great thing to be somewhere with her—an immense comedy.” He remarked that he had heard, now he remembered, that she either had taken or was thinking of takinga place in the country for a few months, and he added that if Hyacinth didn’t propose to finish his brandy and soda they might as well turn out. Hyacinth’s thirst had been very superficial, and as they turned out the Captain observed by way of explanation of his having been found in a public-house (it was the only attempt of this kind he made) that any friend of his would always know him by his love of rum out-of-the-way nooks. “You must have noticed that,” he said—“my taste for exploration. If I hadn’t explored I never should have known you, should I? That was rather a nice little girl in there; did you twig her good bust? It’s a pity they always have such beastly hands.” Hyacinth had instinctively made a motion to go southward, but Sholto, passing a hand into his arm, led him the other way. The house they had quitted was near a corner, which they rounded, the Captain pushing forward as if there were some reason for haste. His haste was checked, however, by a prompt encounter with a young woman who, coming in the opposite direction, turned the angle as briskly as themselves. At this moment he gave his friend a great jerk, but not before Hyacinth had caught a glimpse of the young woman’s face—it seemed to flash upon him out of the dusk—and given quick voice to his surprise.
“Hullo, Millicent!” This was the simple cry that escaped from his lips while the Captain, still going on, but threw off, “What’s the matter? Who’s your pretty friend?” Hyacinth declined to go on and repeated Miss Henning’s baptismal name so loudly that the young woman, who had passed them without looking back, was obliged to stop. Then he saw he was not mistaken, though Millicent gave no audible response. She stood looking at him with her head very high, and he approached her, disengaging himself from Sholto, who, however, hung backonly an instant before joining them. Hyacinth’s heart had suddenly begun to beat very fast; there was a sharp shock in the girl’s turning up just in that place at that moment. Yet when she began to laugh, and with violence, and to ask him why he should look at her as if she were a kicking horse, he recognised that there was nothing so very extraordinary, after all, in a casual meeting between persons who were such frequenters of the London streets. Millicent had never concealed the fact that she “trotted about” on various errands at night; and once when he had said to her that the less a respectable young woman took the evening air alone the better for her respectability she had asked how respectable he thought she pretended to be and had remarked that if he would make her a present of a brougham or even call for her three or four times a week in a cab she would doubtless preserve more of her social purity. She could turn the tables quickly enough and she exclaimed now, professing on her own side great astonishment:
“Whatever are you prowling about here for? You’re after no good, I’ll be bound!”
“Good evening, Miss Henning; what a jolly meeting!” said the Captain, removing his hat with a humorous flourish.
“Oh, how d’ye do?” Millicent returned as if not at once placing him.
“Where were you going so fast? What are you doing?” asked Hyacinth, who had looked from one to the other.
“Well, I never did see such a manner—from one that knocks about likeyou!” cried Miss Henning. “I’m going to see a friend of mine—a lady’s-maid in Curzon Street. Have you anything to say to that?”
“Don’t tell us—don’t tell us!” Sholto interposedafter she had spoken—and she had not, however slightly, hesitated. “I at least disavow the indiscretion. Where may not a charming woman be going when she trips with a light foot through the deepening dusk?”
“I say, what are you talking about?” the girl demanded with dignity of Hyacinth’s companion. She spoke as if with a resentful suspicion that her foot had not really been felt to be light.
“On what errand of mercy, on what secret ministration?” the Captain laughed.
“Secret yourself!” cried Millicent. “Do you two always hunt in couples?”
“All right, we’ll turn round and go with you as far as your friend’s,” Hyacinth said.
“All right,” Millicent replied.
“All right,” the Captain added; and the three took their way together in the direction of Curzon Street. They walked for a few moments in silence, though the Captain whistled, and then Millicent suddenly turned to Hyacinth.
“You haven’t told me whereyouwere going yet, you know.”
“We met in that public-house,” the Captain said, “and were each so ashamed of being found in such a place by the other that we tumbled out together without much thinking what we should do with ourselves.”
“When he’s out with me he pretends he can’t abide them houses,” Miss Henning declared. “I wish I had looked in that one to see who was there.”
“Well, she’s rather nice,” the Captain went on. “She told me her name was Georgiana.”
“I went to get a piece of money changed,” Hyacinth said with the sense of a certain dishonesty in the air and glad he at least could afford to speak the truth.
“To get your grandmother’s nightcap changed! I recommend you to keep your money together—you’ve none too much of it!” Millicent exclaimed.
“Is that the reason you’re playing me false?” Hyacinth flashed out. He had been thinking with still intentness as they walked; at once nursing and strangling a kindled suspicion. He was pale with the idea that he had been bamboozled, yet was able to say to himself that one must allow in life, thank goodness, for the element of coincidence, and that he might easily put himself immensely in the wrong by making a groundless charge. It was only later that he pieced his impressions together and saw them—as it appeared—justify each other; at present, as soon as he had uttered it, he was almost ashamed of his quick retort to Millicent’s taunt. He ought at least to have waited to see what Curzon Street would bring forth.
The girl broke out on him immediately, repeating “False, false?” with high derision and wanting to know whether that was the way to knock a lady about in public. She had stopped short on the edge of a crossing and she went on with a voice so uplifted that he was glad they were in a street apt to be empty at such an hour: “You’re a pretty one to talk about falsity when a woman has only to leer at you out of an opera-box!”
“Don’t say anything abouther,” the young man interposed, trembling.
“And pray why not about ‘her,’ I should like to know? You don’t pretend she’s a decent woman, I suppose?” Millicent’s laughter rang through the quiet neighbourhood.
“My dear fellow, you know youhavebeen to her,” Captain Sholto wonderfully smiled.
Hyacinth turned on him staring and at once provoked and baffled by his ambiguous part in anincident it was doubtless possible to magnify but not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly I’ve been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and pressed me to go, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil are you, anyway, and what do you want of me?” our hero cried—his mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled and worried and escaped him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot everything that had beguiled.
“My dear fellow, whatever I am I’m not an ass,” this gentleman replied with imperturbable good-humour. “I don’t reproach you with anything. I only wanted to put in a word as a peacemaker. My good friends—my good friends,” and he laid a hand in his practised way on Hyacinth’s shoulder while with the other pressed to his heart he bent on the girl a face of gallantry which had something paternal in it: “I’m determined this absurd misunderstanding shall end as lovers’ quarrels ought always to end.”
Hyacinth withdrew himself from the Captain’s touch and said to Millicent: “You’re not really jealous of—of any one. You pretend that only to throw dust in my eyes.”
To this sally Miss Henning returned him an answer which promised to be lively, but the Captain swept it away in the profusion of his protests. He declared them a dear delightful abominable pair; he pronounced it rarely interesting to see how in people of their sort the prime passions lay near the surface; he almost pushed them into each other’s arms and then wound up with proposing that they should all terminate their little differences by proceeding together to the Pavilion music-hall, the nearest place of entertainment in that neighbourhood, leaving the lady’s-maid in Curzon Street to dress her mistress’swig in peace. He has been presented to the reader as an accomplished man, and it will doubtless be felt that the picture is justified by his having eventually placed this idea in so attractive a light that his companions entered a hansom with him and rattled toward the haunt of pleasure, Hyacinth sandwiched, on the edge of the seat, between the others. Two or three times our young man’s ears burned; he felt that if there was an understanding between them they had now, behind him, a rare opportunity for carrying it out. If this understanding flourished at his expense the whole evening constituted for them indeed an opportunity, and that thought rendered his diversion but scantly absorbing, though at the Pavilion the Captain engaged a big private box and ordered ices brought in. Hyacinth cared so little for his little pink pyramid that he suffered Millicent to consume it after she had disposed of her own. It was present to him, however, that if he should make a fool of himself the folly would be of a very gross kind, and this is why he withheld a question repeatedly on his lips—the impulse to demand of his entertainer why the mischief he had hurried him so out of the public-house if he had not been waiting there preconcertedly for Millicent. We know that in Hyacinth’s eyes one of this young lady’s compensatory merits had been that she was not deceitful, and he asked himself if a girl could change that way from one month to the other. This was optimistic, but, all the same, before leaving the Pavilion he decided with one of his highest flights of intelligence that he could quite well see what Lady Aurora had meant by calling Captain Sholto vulgar.
Paul Muniment had fits of silence while the others were talking; but on this occasion he had not opened his lips for half an hour. When he talked Hyacinth listened almost to the retention of breath, and when he said nothing watched him fixedly, listening to the others only through the medium of his candid countenance. At the “Sun and Moon” Muniment paid very little attention to his young friend, doing nothing that should cause it to be perceived they were particular pals; and Hyacinth even divined him at moments bored or irritated by the serious manner in which his small worrying bookbinder couldn’t conceal from the world that he regarded him. He wondered if this were a system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a manifestation of the superior brutality latent in his composition and which, without an intention of direct harshness, was naturally impatient of palaver. There was plenty of palaver at the “Sun and Moon”; there were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much crude fatuity and flat-faced vanity. Then every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying,“Them was my words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to—what I say I stick to”; and others who perpetually inquired of the company, “And what the plague am I to do with seventeen bob—with seventeen bloody bob? What am I to do with them—will ye tell me that?” an interrogation which in truth usually ended by producing a ribald reply. There were still others who remarked to satiety that if it was not done to-day it would have to be done to-morrow, and several who constantly proclaimed their opinion that the only way was to pull up the Park rails again, just to haul ’em straight up. A little shoemaker with red eyes and a greyish face, whose appearance Hyacinth deplored, scarcely ever expressed himself but in the same form of words: “Well, are we in earnest or ain’t we in earnest?—that’s the thingIwant to know.” He was terribly in earnest himself, but this was almost the only way he had of showing it; and he had much in common (though they were always squabbling) with a large red-faced man, of uncertain attributes and stertorous breathing, who was understood to know a good deal about dogs, had fat hands and wore on his forefinger a big silver ring containing some one’s hair—Hyacinth believed it to be that of a terrier snappish in life. He had always the same refrain: “Well now are we just starving or ain’t we just starving? I should like the v’ice of the company on that question.”
When the tone fell as low as this Paul Muniment held his peace save for whistling a little and leaning back with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the table. Hyacinth often supposed him to be on the point of breaking out and letting the company know what he thought of them—he had a perfectly clear vision of what he must think: but Muniment never compromised his popularity to that degree;he judged it—this he once told his young comrade—too valuable a weapon, so that he cultivated the faculty of patience, which had the advantage of showing one more and more that one must do one’s thinking for one’s self. His popularity indeed struck Hyacinth as rather an uncertain amount, and the only mistake he had seen a symptom of on his friend’s part was a tendency to overestimate it. Muniment thought many of their colleagues asinine, but it was Hyacinth’s belief that he himself knew still better how asinine they were; and this inadequate conception supported in some degree on Paul’s part his theory of his influence—an influence that would be stronger than any other on the day he should choose to exert it. Hyacinth only wished that day would come; it wouldn’t be till then, he was sure, that they would all know where they were and that the good they were striving for, blindly, obstructedly, in a kind of eternal dirty intellectual fog, would pass from the stage of crude discussion and mere sore, sharp, tantalising desirableness into that of solid, seated reality. Muniment was listened to unanimously when he spoke and much talked about, usually with a knowing, implicit allusiveness, when he was absent; it was generally admitted he could see further than most. But it was suspected he wanted to see further than was necessary; as one of the most inveterate frequenters of the club remarked one evening, if a man could see as far as he could ’eave a brick this was far enough. There was an idea he had nothing particular to complain of personally, or perhaps that if he had he didn’t complain of it—an attitude which could only contain the germs of a latent disaffection. Hyacinth was aware of being himself exposed to the same imputation; but he couldn’t help it—it would have been impossible to him to keep up his character forsincerity by revealing at the “Sun and Moon” the condition of his wardrobe or by announcing that he hadn’t had a penn’orth of bacon for six months. There were members of the club who were apparently always in the enjoyment of involuntary leisure—narrating the vainest peregrinations in search of a job, the cruellest rebuffs, the most vivid anecdotes of the insolence of office. They made Hyacinth uncomfortably conscious at times that ifheshould be out of work it would be wholly by his own fault; that he held in his hand a fine bread-winning tool on which he might absolutely count. He was also not unadvised, however, that his position in this little band of malcontents (it was small only if measured by the numbers gathered on any one occasion; he liked to think it large in its latent possibilities, its mysterious ramifications and affiliations) was peculiar and distinguished: it would be favourable if he should develop the kind of energy and assurance that would help him to make use of it. He had an intimate conviction—the proof of it was in the air, in the sensible facility of his footing at the “Sun and Moon”—that Eustache Poupin had taken on himself to disseminate the anecdote of his origin, of his mother’s disaster; in consequence of which, as the victim of social infamy, of heinous laws, it was conceded to him that he had a larger account to settle even than most. He wasab ovoa revolutionist, and that balanced against his smart neckties, a certain suspicious security that was perceived in him as to theh(he had had from his earliest years a natural command of it) and the fact that he possessed the sort of hand on which there is always a premium—an accident somehow to be guarded against in a thorough-going system of equality. He never challenged Poupin on the subject, for he owed the Frenchman too much to reproach him with anyofficious step that was meant in kindness; and, moreover, his fellow-labourer at old Crook’s had said to him, as if to anticipate such an impugnment of his discretion: “Remember, my child, that I’m incapable of drawing aside any veil that you may have preferred to drop over your lacerated personality. Your moral dignity will always be safe with me. But remember at the same time that among the disinherited there’s a mystic language which dispenses with proofs—a freemasonry, a reciprocal divination: they understand each other at half a word.” It was at half a word then in Bloomsbury that Hyacinth had been understood; but there was a certain delicacy in him that forbade him to push his advantage, to treat implications of sympathy, none the less definite for being awkward and obscure, as steps in the ladder of success. He had no wish to be a leader because his mother had murdered her lover and died in penal servitude: these circumstances recommended intentness, but they also imposed modesty. When the gathering at the “Sun and Moon” was at its best and its temper seemed really an earnest of what was the basis of all its calculations—that the people was only a sleeping lion, already breathing shorter and beginning to stretch its limbs and stiffen its claws—at these hours, some of them thrilling enough, Hyacinth waited for the voice that should allot him the particular part he was to play. His ambition was to play it with brilliancy, to offer an example—an example even that might survive him—of pure youthful, almost juvenile, consecration. He was conscious of no commission to give the promises, to assume the responsibilities, of a redeemer, and he had no envy of the man on whom this burden should rest. Muniment indeed might carry it, and it was the first article of his faith that to help him to carry it the betterhe himself was ready for any sacrifice. Then it was—on these nights of intenser vibration—that he waited for the sacred sign.
They came oftener this second winter, for the season was terribly hard; and as in that lower world one walked with one’s ear nearer the ground the deep perpetual groan of London misery seemed to swell and swell and form the whole undertone of life. The filthy air reached the place in the damp coats of silent men and hung there till it was brewed to a nauseous warmth, and ugly serious faces squared themselves through it, and strong-smelling pipes contributed their element in a fierce dogged manner which appeared to say that it now had to stand for everything—for bread and meat and beer, for shoes and blankets and the poor things at the pawnbroker’s and the smokeless chimney at home. Hyacinth’s colleagues affected him as wiser then, as more richly permeated with intentions boding ill to the satisfied classes; and though the note of popularity was still most effectively struck by the man who could demand oftenest, unpractically, “What the hell am I to do with half a quid?” it was brought home to our hero on more than one occasion that revolution was ripe at last. This was especially the case on the evening I began by referring to, when Eustache Poupin squeezed in and announced, as if it were a great piece of news, that in the east of London that night there were forty thousand men out of work. He looked round the circle with his dilated foreign eye as he took his place: he seemed to address the company individually as well as collectively and to make each man responsible for hearing him. He owed his position at the “Sun and Moon” to the brilliancy with which he represented the political exile, the magnanimous immaculate citizen wrenched out of bed at dead of night, torn from his hearthstone,his loved ones and his profession and hurried across the frontier with only the coat on his back. Poupin had performed in this character now for many years, but had never lost the bloom of the outraged proscript, and the passionate pictures he had often drawn of the bitterness of exile were moving even to those who knew with what success he had set up his household gods in Lisson Grove. He was recognised as suffering everything for his opinions; and his hearers in Bloomsbury, who even in their most infuriated hours felt as Britons, appeared never to have made the subtle reflexion, though they made many others, that there was a want of tact in his calling on them to sympathise with him for being one of themselves. He imposed himself by the eloquence of his assumption that if one were not in the beautiful supreme France one was nowhere worth speaking of, and ended by producing an impression that that country had a quite supernatural charm. Muniment had once said to Hyacinth that he was sure Poupin would be very sorry to be enabled to go home again (as he really might from one week to the other, the Republic being so indulgent and the amnesty to the Communards constantly extended) for over there he couldn’t be a refugee; and however this might be he certainly flourished a good deal in London on the basis of this very fact that he so suffered from it.
“Why do you tell us that as if it was so very striking? Don’t we know it and haven’t we known it always? But you’re right; we behave as if we knew nothing at all,” said Mr. Schinkel, the German cabinet-maker who had originally introduced Captain Sholto to the “Sun and Moon.” He had a long, unhealthy, benevolent face and greasy hair, and constantly wore an untidy bandage round his neck, as if for a local ailment. “You remind us—that’svery well; but we shall forget it in half an hour. We’re not serious.”
“Pardon, pardon; for myself I don’t admit that!” Poupin replied, striking the table with his finger-tips several times, very fast. “If I’m not serious I’m nothing.”
“Oh no, you’re something,” said the German, smoking his monumental pipe with a contemplative air. “We’re all something, but I’m not sure it’s anything very useful.”
“Well, things would be worse without us. I’d jolly rather be in here, inthiskind of muck, than outside,” remarked the fat man who understood dogs.
“Certainly, it’s very pleasant, especially if you’ve your beer; but not so pleasant over there at the Docks, where fifty thousand people starve. It’s a very unpleasant night,” the cabinet-maker went on.
“How can it be worse?” Eustache Poupin asked while he looked at the German as to make him responsible for the fat man’s reflexion. “It’s so bad that the imagination recoils, refuses—!”
“Oh, we don’t care for the imagination!” the fat man declared. “We want a compact body in marching order.”
“What do you call a compact body?” the little grey-faced shoemaker demanded. “I daresay you don’t mean your kind of body.”
“Well, I know what I mean,” said the fat man severely.
“That’s a grand thing. Perhaps one of these days you’ll tell us.”
“You’ll see it for yourself perhaps, before that day comes,” the gentleman with the silver ring rejoined. “Perhaps when you do you’ll remember.”
“Well, you know, Schinkel says we don’t,” said the shoemaker, nodding at the cloud-compelling German.
“I don’t care a bloody rap what no man says!” the dog-fancier exclaimed, gazing straight before him.
“They say it’s a bad year—the blockheads in the newspapers,” Mr. Schinkel went on, addressing himself to the company at large. “They say that on purpose—to convey the impression that there are such things as good years. I ask the company, has any gentleman present ever happened to notice that article? The good year’s yet to come: it might begin to-night, if we like: it all depends on our being able to be serious for a few hours. But that’s too much to expect. Mr. Muniment’s very serious; he looks as if he was waiting for the signal, but he doesn’t speak—he never speaks if I want particularly to hear him. He only deliberates very deeply—oh I’m sure. But it’s almost as bad to think without speaking as to speak without thinking.”
Hyacinth always admired the cool, easy way in which Muniment comported himself when the attention of the public was directed at him. These manifestations of curiosity or of hostility would have put him out immensely himself. When a lot of people, especially the kind of people collected at the “Sun and Moon,” looked at him or listened to him all at once, he always blushed and stammered, feeling that if he couldn’t have a million of spectators (which would have been inspiring) he should prefer to have but two or three; there was something rather awful in twenty.
Muniment smiled an instant good-humouredly; then after a moment’s hesitation, looking across at the German and the German only, as if his remark were worth noticing but it didn’t matter if the others didn’t understand the reply, he said simply: “Hoffendahl’s in London.”
“Hoffendahl?Gott in Himmel!” the cabinet-maker exclaimed, taking the pipe out of his mouth.And the two men exchanged a longish glance. Then Mr. Schinkel remarked: “That surprises me,sehr. Are you very sure?”
Muniment continued for a little to look at him. “If I keep quiet half an hour, with so many valuable suggestions flying all round me, you think I say too little. Then if I open my head to give out three words you appear to think I say too much.”
“Ah no, on the contrary—I want you to say three more. If you tell me you’ve seen him I shall be perfectly satisfied.”
“Upon my word I should hope so! Do you think he’s the kind of bloke a fellow says he has seen?”
“Yes, when he hasn’t!” said Eustache Poupin, who had been listening. Every one was listening now.
“It depends on the fellow he says it to. Not even here?” the German asked.
“Oh here!” Paul Muniment exclaimed in a peculiar tone while he resumed his muffled whistle again.
“Take care—take care; you’ll make me think you haven’t!” cried Poupin with his excited expression.
“That’s just what I want,” said Muniment.
“Nun, I understand,” the cabinet-maker remarked, restoring his pipe to his lips after an interval almost as momentous as the stoppage of a steamer in mid-ocean.
“’Ere, ’ere?” repeated the small shoemaker indignantly. “I daresay it’s as good as the place he came from. He might look in and see what he thinks of it.”
“That’s a place you might tell us a little about now,” the fat man suggested as if he had been waiting for his chance.
Before the shoemaker had time to notice this challenge some one inquired with a hoarse petulancewho the bloody blazes they were talking about; and Mr. Schinkel took upon himself to reply that they were talking about a man who hadn’t done what he had done by simply exchanging abstract ideas, however valuable, with his friends in a respectable pot-house.
“What the devil has he done then?” some one else demanded; and Muniment replied quietly that he had spent twelve years in a Prussian prison and was consequently still an object of a good deal of interest to the police.
“Well, if you call that very useful I must say I prefer a pot-house!” cried the shoemaker, appealing to all the company and looking, as it appeared to Hyacinth, particularly hideous.
“Doch, doch, it’s useful,” the German remarked philosophically among his yellow clouds.
“Do you mean to say you’re not prepared for that yourself?” Muniment asked of the shoemaker.
“Prepared for that? I thought we were going to smash that sort of shop altogether; I thought that was the main part of the job.”
“They’ll smash best who’ve been inside,” the German said; “unless they’ve only gone bad, like fish too long caught. But Hoffendahl’s all there yet.”
“Ah no; no smashing, no smashing of any valuable property,” Muniment went on. “There are no wrong places—there are only wrong uses for them. We want to keep them standing and even to put up a few more; but the difference will be that we shall put the correct sort into them.”
“I take your idea—that Griffin’s one of the correct sort,” the fat man remarked, indicating the shoemaker.
“I thought we was going to ’ave their ’eads—all that bloomin’ lot!” Mr. Griffin protested; while Eustache Poupin began to enlighten the companyas to the great Hoffendahl, one of the purest martyrs of their cause, a man who had been through everything—who had been scarred and branded, tortured, almost flayed, and had never given his would-be butchers the names they wanted. Was it possible they didn’t remember that great combined assault, early in the sixties, which took place in four Continental cities at once and which in spite of every effort to smother it up—there had been editors and journalists transported even for hinting at it—had done more for the social question than anything before or since? “Through ’im being served in the manner you describe?” some one asked with plainness; to which Poupin replied that it was one of those failures that are more glorious than any success. Muniment said that the affair had been only a flash in the pan, but that the great value of it was this—that whereas some forty persons (and of both sexes) had been engaged in it, only one had been seized and had suffered. It had been Hoffendahl himself who was collared. Certainly he had suffered much, he had suffered for every one; but from that point of view—that of the economy of material—the thing had been a rare success.
“Do you know what I call the others? I call ’em bloody sneaks!” the fat man cried; and Eustache Poupin, turning to Muniment, expressed the hope that he didn’t really approve of such a solution—didn’t consider that an economy of heroism was an advantage to any cause. He himself esteemed Hoffendahl’s attempt because it had shaken, more than anything—except of course the Commune—had shaken it since the French Revolution, the rotten fabric of the actual social order, and because that very fact of the impunity, the invisibility of the persons concerned in it had given the predatory classes, had given all Europe, a shudder that hadnot yet subsided; but for his part, he must regret that some of the associates of the devoted victim had not come forward and insisted on sharing with him his tortures and his captivity.
“Ç’aurait été d’un bel exemple!” said the Frenchman with an impressive moderation of statement which made even those who couldn’t understand him see he was saying something fine; while the cabinet-maker observed that in Hoffendahl’s place any of them would have stood out just the same. He didn’t care if they set it down to self-love (Mr. Schinkel called it “loaf”) but he might say that he himself would have done so if he had been trusted and had been bagged.
“I want to have it all drawn up clear first; then I’ll go in,” said the fat man, who seemed to think it was expected of him to be reassuring.
“Well, who the dickens is to draw it up, eh? That’s what we happen to be talking about,” returned his antagonist the shoemaker.
“A fine example, old man? Is that your idea of a fine example?” Muniment, with his amused face, asked of Poupin. “A fine example of asininity! Are there capable people, in such plenty, about the place?”
“Capable of greatness of soul, I grant you not.”
“Your greatness of soul is usually greatness of blundering. A man’s foremost duty is not to get collared. If you want to show you’re capable, that’s the way.”
At this Hyacinth suddenly felt himself moved to speak. “But some one must be caught always, must he not? Hasn’t some one always been?”
“Oh, I daresay you’ll be if you like it!” Muniment replied without looking at him. “If they succeed in potting you, do as Hoffendahl did, and do it as a matter of course; but if they don’t, makeit your supreme duty, make it your religion, to lie close and keep yourself for another go. The world’s full of unclean beasts whom I shall be glad to see shovelled away by the thousand; but when it’s a question of honest men and men of courage I protest against the idea that two should be sacrificed where one will serve.”
“Trop d’arithmétique—trop d’arithmétique!—That’s fearfully English!” Poupin cried.
“No doubt, no doubt; what else should it be? You shall never share my fate if I have a fate and I can prevent it!” Muniment laughed.
Poupin stared at him and his coarse mirth, as if he thought the English frivolous as well as calculating; then he rejoined: “If I suffer I trust it may be for suffering humanity, but I trust it may also be for France.”
“Oh, I hope you ain’t going to suffer any more for France,” said Mr. Griffin. “Hasn’t it done that insatiable old country of yours some good by this time, all you’ve had to put up with?”
“Well, I want to know what Hoffendahl has come over for; it’s very kind of him, I’m sure. What’s he going to do forus?—that’s whatIwant to know,” brought out in a loud argumentative tone a personage at the end of the table most distant from Muniment’s place. His name was Delancey and he gave himself out as holding a position in a manufactory of soda-water; but Hyacinth had a secret belief that he was really a hairdresser—a belief connected with a high lustrous curl or crest which he wore on the summit of his large head, as well as with the manner in which he thrust over his ear, as if it were a barber’s comb, the pencil addressed to his careful note-taking on the discussions conducted at the “Sun and Moon.” His opinions were distinct and frequently expressed; he had a watery (Muniment had once called it a soda-watery)eye and a personal aversion to a lord. He desired to change everything except religion, of which he approved.
Muniment answered that he was unable to say as yet what the German revolutionist had come to England for, but that he hoped to be able to give some information on the matter the next time they should meet. It was very certain Hoffendahl hadn’t come for nothing, and he would undertake to declare that they would all feel within a short time that he had given a lift to the cause they had at heart. He had had a great experience, which they might very well find it useful to appeal to. If there was a way for them then and there he would be sure to know the way. “I quite agree with the majority of you—as I take it to be,” Muniment went on in his fresh, cheerful, reasonable manner—“I quite agree with you that the time has come to settle upon it and to follow it. I quite agree with you that the actual state of things is”—he paused a moment and then went on in the same pleasant tone—“is infamous and hellish.”
These remarks were received with a differing demonstration: some of the company declaring that if the Dutchman cared to come round and smoke a pipe they’d be glad to see him—perhaps he’d show where the thumbscrews had been put on; others being strongly of the opinion that they didn’t want any more advice—they had already had advice enough to turn a donkey’s stomach. What they wanted was to put forth their might without any more palaver; to do for something or for some one; to go out somewhere and smash something on the spot—why not?—smash it that very night. While they sat still and talked there were about half a million of people in London that didn’t know where the hell the morrow’s meal was to come from; whatthey wanted to do, unless they were just a collection of pettifogging old women, was to show them where to get it, to take it to them with heaped-up hands. Hyacinth listened, with a divided attention, to interlaced iterations, while the talk blew hot and cold; there was a genuine emotion, a quick pulse of high fever, to-night in the rear of the “Sun and Moon,” and he felt the contagion of excited purpose. But he was following a train of his own; he was wondering what Muniment had in reserve (for certainly Paul but played with the company), and his imagination, quickened by the sense of impending relations with the heroic Hoffendahl and the discussion as to the alternative duty of escaping or of facing one’s fate, had launched itself into possible perils—into the idea of how he might in a given case settle for himself that question of paying for the lot. The loud, contradictory, vain, unpractical babble went on about him, but he was definitely conscious only that the project of breaking into the bakers’ shops was well before the assembly and was receiving a vigorous treatment, and that there was likewise a good deal of reference to the butchers and grocers and even to the fishmongers. He was in a state of inward exaltation, possessed by an intense desire to stand face to face with the sublime Hoffendahl, to hear his voice and touch his mutilated hand. He was ready for anything: he knew he was himself safe to breakfast and dine, if poorly still sufficiently, and that his colleagues were perhaps even more crude and clumsy than usual; but a breath of popular passion had warmed his cheek and his heart, and he seemed to see, immensely magnified, the monstrosity of the great ulcers and sores of London—the sick, eternal misery crying out of the darkness in vain, confronted with granaries and treasure-houses and places of delight where shameless satiety kept guard.In such a mood as this he felt there was no need to consider, to reason: the facts themselves were as imperative as the cry of the drowning, since while pedantry gained time didn’t starvation and anguish gain it too? He knew Muniment disapproved of delay, that he held the day had come for a forcible rectification of horrible inequalities. In the last conversation they had had together his judicious friend had given him a more definite warrant than ever before for numbering him in the party of immediate action, though indeed he remarked on this occasion, once more, that that particular formula the little bookbinder appeared to have taken such a fancy to was mere gibberish. He hated this sort of pretentious label; it was fit only for politicians and amateurs. None the less he had been as plain as possible on the point that their game must be now to frighten society, and frighten it effectually; to make it believe that the swindled classes were at last fairly in league—had really grasped the idea that, closely combined, they would be irresistible. They were not in league and they hadn’t in their totality grasped any idea at all—Muniment was not slow to make that equally plain. All the same society was scareable, and every great scare was a gain for the people. If Hyacinth had needed warrant to-night for a faith transcending logic he would have found it in his recall of this quiet profession; but his friend’s words came back to him mainly to make him wonder what that friend had in his head just now. He took no part in any vociferation; he had called Schinkel to come round and sit beside him, and the two appeared to confer together in honest ease while the brown atmosphere grew denser, the passing to and fro of firebrands more lively and the flush of faces more portentous. What Hyacinth would have liked to know most of all was whyMuniment had not mentioned to him first that Hoffendahl was in London and that he had seen him; for hehadseen him, though he had dodged Schinkel’s question—of that Hyacinth instantly felt sure. He would ask for more information later; and meanwhile he wished, without resentment, but with a patient conscious ache, that Muniment would treat him with a little more confidence. If there were a secret in regard to Hoffendahl—and there evidently was: Muniment, quite rightly, though he had dropped the announcement of his arrival for a certain effect, had no notion of sharing the rest of what he knew with that raw roomful—if there were something to be silent and devoted about Hyacinth ardently hoped that to him in particular would a chance be given to show how he could practise this superiority. He felt hot and nervous; he got up suddenly and, through the dark tortuous greasy passage communicating with the outer world, went forth into the street. The air was foul and sleety but refreshed him, and he stood in front of the public-house and smoked another pipe. Bedraggled figures passed in and out and a damp tattered wretched man with a spongy purple face, who had been thrust suddenly across the threshold, stood and whimpered in the brutal blaze of the row of lamps. The puddles glittered roundabout and the silent vista of the street, bordered with low black houses, stretched away in the wintry drizzle to right and left, losing itself in the huge tragic city where unmeasured misery lurked beneath the dirty night, ominously, monstrously still, only howling, for its pain, in the heated human cockpit behind him. Ah what could he do? What opportunity would rise? The blundering divided counsels he had been listening to but made the helplessness of every one concerned more abject. If he had a definite wish while he stood there it wasthat that exalted deluded company should pour itself forth with Muniment at its head and surge through the sleeping world and gather the myriad miserable out of their slums and burrows, should roll into the selfish squares and lift a tremendous hungry voice and awaken the gorged indifferent to a terror that would bring them down. He lingered a quarter of an hour, but this grand treat gave no sign of coming off, and he finally returned to the noisy club-room in a state of tormented wonder as to what better idea than this very bad one (which seemed to our young man to have at the least the merit that it was an idea) Muniment could be revolving in that too-comprehensive brain of his.
As he re-entered the place he saw the meeting was breaking up in disorder, or at all events in confusion, and that certainly no organised attempt at the rescue of any number of victims would take place that night. All the men were on their feet and were turning away amid a shuffle of benches and chairs, a hunch of shabby shoulders, a frugal abatement of flaring gas and a varied vivacity of disgust and resignation. The moment after Hyacinth came in Mr. Delancey, the supposititious hairdresser, jumped upon a chair at the far end of the room and shrieked out an accusation which made every one stop and stare at him.
“Well, I want you all to know what strikes me before we part company. There isn’t a man in the blessed lot of you that isn’t afraid of his bloody skin—afraid, afraid, afraid! I’ll go anywhere with any one, but there isn’t another, by G—, by what I can make out! There isn’t a mother’s son of you that’ll risk his precious bones!”
This little oration affected Hyacinth like a quick blow in the face: it seemed to leap at him personally, as if a three-legged stool or some hideous hob-nailedboot had been shied at him. The room surged round, heaving up and down, while he was conscious of a loud explosion of laughter and scorn, of cries of “Order, order!” of some clear word of Muniment’s, “I say, Delancey, just step down”; of Eustache Poupin shouting out, “Vous insultez le peuple—vous insultez le peuple!” of other retorts not remarkable for refinement. The next moment he found he had himself sprung up on a chair opposite the barber and that at the sight of so prompt a display the commotion had suddenly turned to almost amused suspense. It was the first time he had asked the ear of the company, which was given on the spot. He was sure he looked very white—it was even possible they could see him tremble. He could only hope this didn’t make him ridiculous when he said: “I don’t think it’s right of him to say that. There are others besides him. At all events I want to speak for myself: it may do some good; I can’t help it. I’m not afraid; I’m very sure I’m not. I’m ready to do anything that will do any good; anything, anything—I don’t care a damned rap. In such a cause I should like the idea of danger. I don’t consider my bones precious in the least, compared with some other things. If one’s sure one isn’t afraid, and one’s accused, why shouldn’t one say so?”
It appeared to him he was talking a long time and when it was over he scarcely knew what happened. He felt himself in a moment down almost under the feet of the other men; stamped upon with intentions of applause, of familiarity; laughed over and jeered over, hustled and poked in the ribs. He felt himself also pressed to the bosom of Eustache Poupin, who apparently was sobbing, while he heard some one say, “Did ye hear the little bloody beggar, as bold as a lion?” A trial of personal prowess between him and Mr. Delancey was proposed, but somehow itdidn’t take place, and at the end of five minutes the club-room had emptied itself, yet clearly not to be reconstituted outside in a revolutionary procession. Paul Muniment had taken hold of him and said, “I’ll trouble you to stay, you small desperado: I’ll be blowed if I ever expected to seeyouon the stump!” Muniment remained and M. Poupin and Mr. Schinkel lingered, donning overcoats, beneath a dim surviving gas-burner in the unventilated medium in which at each renewed gathering the Bloomsbury club seemed to recognise itself.
“Upon my life I believe you’re game,” said Muniment, looking down at him with a serious face.
“Of course you think it’s swagger, ‘self-loaf’ as Schinkel says. But it isn’t.” Then Hyacinth asked: “In God’s name why don’t we do something?”
“Ah my child, to whom do you say it?” Eustache Poupin exclaimed, folding his arms despairingly.
“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” said Muniment.
“All the lot of us. There are plenty of them ready.”
“Ready for what? There’s nothing to be done here.”
Hyacinth stared. “Then why the deuce do you come?”
“I daresay I shan’t come much more. It’s a place in which you’ve always seen too much.”
“I wonder if I’ve seen too much in you,” Hyacinth risked, gazing at his friend.
“Don’t say that—he’s going to introduce us to Hoffendahl!” Schinkel exclaimed, putting away his pipe in a receptacle almost as large as a fiddle-case.
“Should you like to see the right man, Robinson, that is the real thing?” Muniment asked with the same rare grave sound.
“The real thing?” Hyacinth looked from one of his companions to the other.
“You’ve never seen it yet—though you think you have.”
“And why haven’t you shown it me before?”
“Because I had never seen you on the stump.” This was more lightly said.
“Bother the stump! I was trusting you.”
“Exactly so. That gave me time.”
“Don’t come unless your mind’s made up,mon petit,” said Poupin.
“Are you going now—and to see Hoffendahl? Ishethe right man?” Hyacinth cried.
“Don’t shout it all over the place. He wants a perfect little gentleman, and if you’re not one—!” Muniment went on.
“Is it true? Are we all going?” Hyacinth eagerly went on.
“Yes, these two are in it. They’re not very wise, but they’re decent,” said Muniment, looking at Poupin and Schinkel.
“Areyouthe real thing, Muniment?” asked Hyacinth, catching this look.
Muniment dropped his eyes on him. “Yes, you’re the lamb of sacrifice he wants. It’s at the other end of London. We must have a growler.”
“Be calm, my child;me voici!” And Poupin led their young friend out.
They all walked away from the “Sun and Moon,” and it was not for some five minutes that they encountered the four-wheeled cab which so deepened and dignified their purpose. After they were seated in it Hyacinth learned that the “right man” was in London but for three days, was liable to hurry away on the morrow, and was accustomed to receive visits at all kinds of queer hours. It was getting to be midnight; the drive seemed interminable to Hyacinth’s impatience and curiosity. He sat next Muniment, who passed a strong arm round him, holding him allthe way as if for a tacit sign of indebtedness. This gave Hyacinth pleasure till he began to wonder if it mightn’t represent also the instinct to make sure of him as against possible weak afterthoughts. They all ended by sitting silent as the cab jogged along murky miles, and by the time it stopped our young man had wholly lost, in the drizzling gloom, a sense of their whereabouts.
END OF VOL. I
Printed byR. & R. Clark, Limited,Edinburgh.