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DWALA
DWALA
A ROMANCE
BY
GEORGE CALDERON
AUTHOR OF ‘THE ADVENTURES OF DOWNY V. GREEN’
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1904
[All rights reserved]
TO
KITTIE
DWALA
I
The sun was sinking towards the Borneo mountains. The forest and the sea, inscrutable to the bullying noon, relented in this discreeter light, revealing secrets of green places. Birds began to rustle in the big trees; the shaking of broad leaves in the undergrowth betrayed the movement of beasts of prey going about their daily work. The stately innocence of Nature grew lovelier in a sudden trouble of virginal consciousness.
There was only one sign of human habitation in the landscape—a worn patch by the shore, like a tiny wilderness in a vast oasis. Battered meat-tins, empty bottles, and old newspapers littered the waterline; under the rock was a tumble-down hut and a shed; from a stable at the side a pony looked out patiently over the half-door; something
[2]
rustled in a big cage. In the twilight under the shed a man lay sleeping in a low hammock, grizzled and battered, with one bare brown foot hanging over the edge. He yawned and opened his eyes.
‘Are ye thar, Colonel?’
Another figure, which had been crouching beside the hammock with a palm-leaf, watching the sleeper, slowly uprose. Hardly a human figure this, though dressed like a man; something rather akin to the surrounding forest; a thing of large majestic motions, and melancholy eyes, deep-set under thick eyebrows. The man sat up and coughed for a little while.
‘Whar’s the dinner, Colonel? You’ve not lit the fire yet.’
‘Fire crackles,’ said the Colonel.
The man stretched and spat.
‘Ah, you was afraid the noise’d wake me, sonny. Wahl, hurry up now, for I’m as peckish as a pea-hen.’
The man refilled his pipe from the big tin that lay in the hammock with him, while the Colonel, going hither and thither with large, deft
[3]
movements, piled a fire, boiled a pot and spread the dinner. Dinner ready, he brought it to the man; crouching at his feet he watched him reverently as he handled knife and fork. At the smell of dinner a number of large monkeys came swinging down from the trees and collected outside the shed. A captive chimpanzee came out of a tub-kennel and began to ramble swiftly and silently to and fro on its chain, as if developing in movement some unwholesome purpose conceived in the hours of quiescence. The man threw them pieces from time to time, for which they scrambled and fought in a way that called for interference.
‘Now, Chauncey, you leave pore Amélie’s whiskers alone. That piece was meant for her.... Go slow, Marie! and you, William J. Bryan, get up off Talmage, unless you’ve a yearn for the far-end of my teacher’s help.’
When the meal was over the American took out some sewing—some old clothes of his own, that he was patching up for the Colonel—while the Colonel ate the scraps that remained, and cleared the things away. This done, the Colonel came and sat down once more by the man.
[4]
‘Whar’s your Word-makin’ and Word-takin’ gotten to, Colonel?’ said the American, looking up from his sewing. ‘Hev you bin hidin’ it up that teak tree agen?’
The Colonel looked uncomfortably about him, blinked once or twice, and scratched his thigh.
‘Burn my fingers,’ said the man, ‘but I think you’re as like a human b’y as any ape can get. Slip off yer boots. Mosey up and fetch ’em back right now, you young hellion, and spell me out “Home, sweet home,” afore I get to the end of this seam.’
‘So I’m a scientific discoverer, am I?’ mused the American, left alone. ‘And I’ve foun’ the Missin’ Link at last, hev I? There’ll be a pile o’ money in that, I shouldn’t wonder. The Colonel’ll be mighty pleased when he hears he ain’t an or’nary ape; he’ll be as proud as a Bishop among the angels.’
The Colonel meanwhile came climbing with swift and solemn accuracy down the teak tree, the box of letters in his mouth. The chimpanzee growled and chattered with aimless fury as she roamed to and fro.
[5]
‘See here, Colonel, I’ve hed a letter from the Boss. I fotch it in along with that passel on last Toosday.... Squit that I-talian music, you dun-coloured Dago’—this to the chimpanzee—‘you unlicensed traveller in otto o’ roses; shet yer head, I say, and don’t show yer lunch-hooks at me.... I’ll hev to get rid o’ that dosh-burned critter; she’ll niver be a credit to the Show.... Whar was I? Why, letter from the Boss; that’s so. Wahl, thar was noos in that letter fur you an’ me, Colonel, big noos.’
The Colonel turned his melancholy eyes on his master: their expression never varied, but his breath came quick and fast with an unspoken interrogation.
‘I’d bin expeckin’ it fur a lawng time; but I begin to feel sorter queer now it’s nigh on comin’ true.’
‘Are they goin’ to fetch us away?’ said the Colonel.
‘This vurry next day that is, Colonel; one of his boats will put in here and fetch me away with the whole of my bag o’ tricks to meet the Show in London.’
[6]
‘You’re mighty glad, eh?’
‘I’m that, sonny. But I feel sorter queer too. I’ve grown kinder used to this life, bein’ boss myself an’ all that. And yet, if you come to think of it, ... by Jelly, it’s the queerest thing of all. Me goin’ inter pardnership, as you might say, with an ornary ape! Hand me the matches, sonny—by my foot thar; this blamey pipe’s gone out agen.... Here was I an’ pore old Jabez dumped down by the Boss, to train some monkeys for his show. Whin Jabez took the fever and went over the range I began to be kinder lonesome; got a sorter hungry feel in my teeth with not speakin’. So I slipped into a kinder habit o’ talkin’ to you all like humans, jest to ease my gums. An’ all of a sudden, one fine day, Colonel, you bein’ dissatisfied with yer dinner, you ups an’ answers me back. I was tolerable astonished at the time, I remember, tho’ I didn’t let on, maybe, but jest caught you a clip on the ear for sassin’ yer biggers, an’ passed along. I’d niver hed any back-talk from an anthropoid before. Of course, as you say, it came nateral-like to you; you was on’y addin’ one more language to your
[7]
vurry considerable stock, an’ I reckon from what you tell me that the de-flections of the verb are much simpler in Amurrkan than in Chimpanzee for instance; but the fack remains that you’re the first monkey I iver heard talkin’ outside of his own dialeck. The Boss was considerable interessted in my re-port, an’ he’s worked up a theory of how your species got the bulge on the rest by larnin’ their various lingoes, workin’ trade relations, and pouchin’ the difference of exchange on cokernuts an’ bread-fruits. It’s his idee to deliver himself of a lecture on the subject before the R’yal Institoot, an’ make you sing some o’ your folksongs whin we get to London.’
‘Ah—what like’s London, dad?’
‘Wahl, sonny, it’s not so fine a place as Bawston, but it has its p’ints. The people are easier took in than in Bawston, an’ we find it a better place for a Show. Then they hev a King in London, which we don’t hev in Bawston; besides dooks and markises, which we on’y see in Amurrka in the pairin’ season. An’ Shakspere was born near there too, an’ the original Miss Corelli. One city’s much like another, whin
[8]
you’ve bin three years in Borneo. What a man gits a yearn for is civalisation.’
‘Ci-va-li-sation ... What’s civalisation, dad?’
‘It’s a hard word, sonny; but it means purty well everything we don’t hev here in Borneo. It means leadin’ a higher life, hustlin’ around, machinery, perlicemen, hevin’ a good time, iced drinks, theaters, ringin’ a bell fer yer boots, an’ a hunderd other things. Gas lamps, an’ electric light, an’ beer, an’ wine——’
‘Like yonder?’
‘That’s it, sonny; like that lot I brought from Bilimano, on’y stronger. An’ iverybody’s in lovely close; all the women lookin’ like picters outer “Puck”; all the men wi’ creases down their pants; pavement down along all the streets——’
‘Don’t stop sewin’, dad.’
‘Ah, you young scamp, you’re eager to git inter yer new pair, I can see. Gosh, but the women, they’re hunky.’
‘What like’s the streets, dad?’
‘It’s a cur’ous thing, but you don’t seem to
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take so much interest in the women as I’d hev expected, sonny ... I reckon you were in the habit, before I caught you, of sorter climbin’ out with gals of your own species among the banyan-trees down away in Java; and you don’t set much store by other kinds. That’ll be another p’int for the lecture.... Think what a man I’ll be over in England, sonny; I’ll be top o’ the tree over thar, you’ll be proud to know me. I’ll be flyin’ around the town in a plug hat an’ silver-topped cane, noddin’ an’ affable howdy to my multitudinous friends from the top of a tramcar. “Who’s that?” people will say. “Why, don’t you know? That’s the scientific man who foun’ the Missin’ Link.”’
‘Missin’ ... Missin’ what, dad?’
‘The Missin’ Link.’
‘What’s the ... Missin’ Link?’
‘Wahl, I should smile! Ef I hedn’t clean forgotten to tell you. It’s all in the Boss’s letter. Why—you’re the Missin’ Link, sonny!’
‘What’s that, anyway?’
‘Wahl, sonny, it means a sort o’ monkey that isn’t quite an ornary sort o’ monkey ... kinder,
[10]
sorter.... Wahl, as you might say, sonny, partly almost more like a man.’
‘Like—like you, dad?’
‘Wahl, not that exactly—a sorter lower creation altogether. But there’s a lot o’ scientific folks as says that men are descended from Missin’ Links.’
The Colonel rose to his feet and looked out to sea with dilated nostrils.
‘Missin’ Links ... men ... civalisation ... and Colonel’s a Missin’ Link! Why, then....’
‘Go slow, sonny. I on’y said you was a peg higher’n an omary monkey. Jest sit down quiet an’ figure out “anthropoid” with those letters o’ yourn. You’d be mighty small potatoes in a civalised crowd; so you’ve no need to slop over that way.’
The Colonel sat down, obediently, to his letters, and they both worked in silence for some time.
‘Yes,’ continued the American, ‘I shouldn’t wonder ef they was to eleck me a member of some of those larned societies of theirs. They’ll be askin’ me out to champagne dinners, too, no
[11]
doubt. I shouldn’t wonder now ef I was to be asked to go an’ dine with the Prince of Wales—him I was tellin’ you about; distinguished furriners always go to dine with the Prince o’ Wales.’
‘Take Colonel too, dad?’
‘Whar to, sonny?’
‘The Prince o’ Wales’s.’
‘Now that’s downright foolish to be talkin’ like that, Colonel. You’ll hev to stay with the Show, of course.... You’ll be pleased with the Show; it’s the most fre-quented place in London; they’ll be givin’ you buns an’ candy all day long. The Boss was thinkin’ of puttin’ you in the anamal department, but ef he’s pleased with you I shouldn’t wonder but what he’d promote you to the human monstrosities. I’ll put in a good word for you. We’ve bin the best o’ friends, Colonel; you kin hev the key o’ my trunk any day; but I won’t be able to see so much of you arter to-morrow. No. I’ve been thinkin’ over the question keerfully, an’ I’ve concluded you an’ me’ll not be able to travel over together.’
The Colonel listened with impassive attention.
[12]
The American avoided his eye with some little embarrassment.
‘There’s all manner o’ difficulties, sonny. In the first place, these ignorant Christian sailor-lads that’ll come ashore to-morrow won’t perhaps hardly grasp the situation ef they find me talkin’ ornary sense with a hairy pagan ape; an’ I think you’d best keep yer head shet until they’ve gotten used to the looks of you, an’ I’ve hed time to explain matters. It might create some jealousies in the crew ef you was set up over their heads to consort with the captain an’ the mate, as I’ll be doin’. At first sight it seemed to me as ef you’d hev to travel all alone in the steerage as a third-class passenger.’
‘Steerage—what’s the steerage?’
‘That’s down in the between decks. Not so bad, sonny: I’ve travelled that way often myself. But it’s not high-class, like travellin’ with the captain.... Yes, that’s what I’d meant at first. But there’s obstacles in the way o’ that too, sonny. I’ve been thinkin’ ef we enter you as a passenger there may be difficulties at the Custom House with the Alien Immigrants Act. They’re
[13]
mighty pertikler.... There, that’s done!’ he interjected, as he bit off the thread and held up the new trousers to view. ‘Climb inter those pants, sonny, an’ let’s see how they look.’
The Colonel did as he was told, and the American continued:
‘You an’ me would be mightily put about to fill in the form of declaration as to famaly history an’ religion an’ what not, ef it’s the same as in the States. An’ on the whole I’ve concluded it will be best to put you back in your old hutch and take you over under the Large Wild Anamals Act.’
The Colonel seemed wholly absorbed in the adjustment of his clothes. The muscles of his big jaw worked backwards and forwards to a pressure of the teeth.
‘They’re a bit baggy behind,’ continued his patron. ‘I’ll hev to take a reef in the seat. Slip ’em off again; you won’t be needin’ any close any more till we get over to London.’
Instead of obeying, the Colonel walked slowly forward out of the penthouse to the shade of a young tree where a big wooden cage lay lumbering
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on its side. He looked at it and turned it thoughtfully over with a push of his powerful leg; then laid one hand on the thick bough above him, the other on the stem of the tree. A slow cracking and rustling ensued, splinters gaped white, the bough was in his hands, raised aloft, and descending furiously, smashing the old hutch to little pieces. The American rose astounded from his hammock.
‘Quit that foolin’, and come here!’
Bang! Bang! Bang!
‘Come here, you mule-headed monkey.’
The Colonel dropped breathless for one moment on all fours, rose to his full height swinging the monstrous branch over his head and sending forth a long loud yell like a man in a nightmare, then swept crashing away into the forest, his weapon thumping like a sledge-hammer as he went.
The monkeys in the trees about chattered applause or commentary, a cloud of sea-fowl flew up from the shore, and the American stood scratching the back of his head thoughtfully in the midst. Then he looked round at the trees and the sea and the pony, taking them all into
[15]
his confidence with a discomfited smile; pulled himself together and shouted:
‘Colonel!’
He grew contemptuous at the want of an answer, thrust down the ashes in his pipe with a horny finger, and returned slowly to his rest under the shed, consoling his solitude with a slow-flowing murmur of scorn:
‘All right, my child. You wait till you come back. Civalisation! You! You ornary, popeyed, bobtailed, jimber-jawed, jerrybuilt jackass....’
II
The Colonel went through the virgin forest, spending his fury in motion, swinging forward from branch to branch, running, leaping, till the fury was lost in the recovered delight of liberty. Childhood continued, after an irrelevance.
Here was the old smell of forest earth, the inexhaustible plenty of bare elastic boughs, the cool feeling of fungus, the absence of articulate speech, the impossibility of anger. Night came,
[16]
the grand and terrible night, with its old familiar fear, long lost in the neighbourhood of a confident human mind. He rejoiced in his fear as in a fine quality recovered, rousing it to an ecstasy after long silences, by murmuring his own name in the darkness in terrified tones: ‘Colonel! Colonel!’
Then there came a rustling of leaves, a low chuck-chuck of prey warning prey, the sound of a vast retreat, and the slow padding of panther feet on the forest floor. The Colonel lay still on his bough, tingling with an unnatural calm, and the Panther breathed deep below him and looked up. And the Panther said:
‘I am the Panther, all Panthers in one—a symbol, irresistible.’
Waves of strong life undulated down his spotted tail, as though life passed through him to and from all his tribe; and the Colonel lay in a pleasant fear and numbness on his bough. And the Panther said:
‘I will climb slowly to you.’
‘And leap suddenly!’
‘The glory of my eye shall increase upon you.’
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‘Numbing my limbs!’
‘We will fall and play together on the earth.’
‘I shall die!’
‘A noble death.’
‘I shall be torn and eaten!’
‘And your strength shall go into the strength of All the Panthers.’
But as the Panther reached the fork of the boughs his paw slipped, and the numbness left the Colonel, and he leaped upon the neck of the panther with fingers and teeth, crying:
‘You are not All the Panthers, but a single creature like myself; and I will tear you as I tear a young tree when my limbs desire it.’
They fell together, a long distance, to the earth, and the Colonel grasped one mauling hind-paw of the panther with one foot and gripped him by the belly with the other, and rolled over and over with him, and strangled him, and tore his two jaws apart to the shoulder as an angry man might tear a glove. Then he licked his wounds and slung his boots over his shoulder again, and forgot all about the battle but the joy of unlimited ferocity.
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So he went forward from day to day, forgetful of the past, and thoughtless for the future, till he came to the top of the mountain, and, looking back, beheld the sea. He gazed at it for some time, then murmured ‘Civalisation!’ and fell into a deep gloom of thought.
He followed the tops of the mountains to the north, with an obscure dissatisfaction growing in the dark back places of his mind; the pleasure of motion was poisoned in each extreme tension by a recurrent languor. He lacked something, and he did not know what he lacked. He went idly forward for many days, till he heard the chopping of an axe. He drew stealthily nearer to the sound, and followed the man back in the evening to his village—a village of naked men with dark skins, very orderly and quiet. And the Colonel lurked about by the village and watched the people, and was happy again.
For he had tasted the supreme happiness of the animal, the nearness of Man. The animal that has once had Man for his companion or for his prey is never afterwards contented with other company or fare. Curiosity had taken its place
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among his appetites; the necessity of watching Man’s inscrutable ways, the pleasure of using his implements and reproducing his effects.
III
In the dead of night the Colonel descended into the midst of the village, in boots and torn trousers, and drew water on the long beam-lever from the well and poured it into the tank, talking gently to himself while he did it; and the villagers, awakened by the creaking and rattling, crept to crannies and looked on and trembled.
And in the morning they gathered in the village square and speculated. Who is he? The women were afraid to go into the forest; the ripe crops dropped the seed from their ears in the clearings.
Night after night he was there, and graciously tasted of their offerings of fruit and cakes. No one slept by night but the children, and the priest who dreamed true dreams. The priest
[20]
was their hope, for through him alone could the Soochings learn from the gods what must be believed and done. And day after day the perplexity grew, for the priest was old and forgot his dreams; and though he sat till sunset with the doctors of the law about him, he could not recall them.
But, one day, when they had sat for many hours in silence, watching the True Dreamer with his head bowed between his knees, trying to remember, a young priest spoke:
‘I myself have had a dream.’
‘Of what use are your dreams?’ said the old man, looking quickly up.
‘I dreamed that I saw the True Dreamer sleeping; and over him stood the vision of a dead man, with the burial cords hanging loose about him, and a peeled rod in his hand as of a messenger.’
A murmur ran round the squatting circle.
‘It is true,’ said the old man ‘I have seen this vision three times.’
‘And the True Dreamer said, “Who is he that cometh by night?” And the vision answered,
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“It is the God with Two Names, the inventor of the blow-pipe, come back to be king over the tribe as in the first time.”’
‘Katongo tells the truth,’ said the old man ‘so spake the vision.’
‘And the True Dreamer said, “Who shall be his chief priest and interpret his meaning to the multitude?” And the vision answered, “You yourself, O True Dreamer; and at your right hand shall stand the young man Katongo, who is foolish, but full of zeal.”’
‘All this was so,’ said the old man. ‘And, furthermore, the messenger told me the rites by which the God with Two Names may be propitiated. These rites are a secret which it is unlawful to reveal till the time be come. But should any of them be left undone, pestilence and destruction will fall on the whole tribe.’
The True Dreamer arose and went back to his house. The news spread through the tribe, and there was great rejoicing. The old king was promptly clubbed on the head, and the priests, attended by the state conch-blowers and heralds, proclaimed the accession of the new
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monarch under the title of King Dwala, Him-of-Two-Names, both unknown; drums were beaten, hogs were killed, and the tribe gave itself up to frenzies of loyalty and large draughts of the fermented juice of the mowa-tree.
The Colonel, terrified by the noise, withdrew further into the forest, and did not dare to return for several days. His absence gave no one but the priests the least concern, as his place was efficiently filled by a painted image of ugly and imposing aspect.
Preparations were hurried on for solemnising the nuptials of the new monarch—or the image—at the new moon, to the sacred sago-tree which stood in the middle of the place of assembly.
Politically speaking, the result of all these events was that the war party had captured the machine. The question which divided the Soochings at this time was the relation to be adopted by the tribe towards the gold-diggers who had lately penetrated into the Sooching forest. Many members of the tribe looked upon the miners as harmless idiots, bound by the curse of some more powerful magician to sweat at a
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spade, and too stupid to guard their treasures of wonderful mugs and tins and nails and even large pieces of corrugated iron from the clumsiest of thieves; but the seriously-minded tribesmen, and especially the religious party, penetrated their hidden motive of digging up the Spirit of Tree-Vigour, and bringing upon the Sooching forest that same blight of sterility which followed the track of the white men wherever they went. Nothing, in their view, could appease the already irritated Spirit but the wholesale destruction of these desecrators.
The Colonel’s continued absence put the war party in a dangerous position; the more so as a Jew from the mining camp arrived at this time with a little cartload of looking-glasses and whisky in the village, and brought over a number of wobblers to the party of peace. The True Dreamer worked hard for his party, dreaming judicious dreams by night, and organising search parties in the daytime for the purpose of bringing the new king to his throne.
The Colonel watched the search parties with interest, and at last had the courage to follow
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one of them back to the edge of the camp. That night, as he was amusing himself by the well in the moonlight, he was astonished at hearing a low clear whistle, and seeing men approaching him slowly from every side with deep obeisances; he had never yet seen human beings in this attitude, which seemed to be copied from the other animals. But it appeared that they meant kindly by it, and he let them approach until they made a small circle about him. A gaunt old man stood before him with arms upraised to the sky, pouring forth a torrent of incomprehensible words. Not knowing what was expected of him, the Colonel took a mug that lay beside him, dipped it in the tank, and handed it to the old man, whose eyes gushed over with tears of delight at this sign of favour; while the rest made a clucking noise with their tongues and said:
‘Dwala malana!’—which means, ‘Glory to Him-of-Two-Names.’
They invited him with gestures to taste the dishes of fruit which lay about him; and he did so, to their great joy. The village had all turned
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out by now; torches flared and smoked on every side; and it was in a blaze of light and through a thick avenue of men, women and children that the Colonel was at last conducted to the temple which had been prepared for him. The noise of conchs and drums had no more terrors for him now, and he watched the dances with an intensity of interest that threw him at last into a state of hypnotic coma.
The village slept late next morning. When the Colonel awoke he went out, from force of habit, to prepare breakfast. The guardians who slept on the threshold sat up and watched his movements awhile in stupid amazement; his quiet exit by the window had failed at first to rouse them.
He was working impatiently and irritably: he was afraid of being late; nothing was in its place. There was no axe to chop the wood; he had to break it with his hands. There were no matches, no tins of beef. It took all the gestures of all the priests to make him understand that he must not work. In time he grew used to being waited on by others; he grew used to obeisances
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and reverence. It was a new interest, and not more puzzling than most things. One thing disturbed him. Outside the temple was posted the Royal Minstrel, who played only one tune on his pipe—the Royal Tune. At first the Colonel had been delighted with this tune, and had made the minstrel play it to him from morning till night. But he grew tired of it. Whenever he opened the door, or even so much as showed his head at a window, the minstrel fired off this thing; when he went outside the village on any errand the minstrel followed him playing it. It maddened him, and at last he broke the pipe over the minstrel’s head and slunk back into his temple, and was very miserable for the rest of the day. But the people were delighted with this kingly trait, and the minstrel sold the pieces for a large price.
A strict watch was kept over his movements at first for fear he should escape; but after a while this was relaxed, and he used to roam at will in the forest. He usually returned at night, but not always. He visited the gold-diggings, but was alarmed by the look of the diggers, who reminded him of the American; he was afraid
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they would put him into a hutch. In another part of the forest he found a white man with a large family. The women and children were greatly frightened; but the man invited him into the house and told him he was a Missionary. The Colonel stayed there two days, and was converted to Christianity.
Meanwhile the tribe was preparing for war. The women were sealed up hermetically in huts; the warriors danced and rubbed their muscles with mowa juice; and late one night they disappeared silently with shields and spears among the trees. Next day they appeared again, exultant, with loads of booty; the white men had been utterly routed.
The stupefaction of the succeeding orgies was partially dispelled after many days by the frenzy of inspired minstrels, who proclaimed the imminence of the second Golden Age, and the permanent establishment of the wise and beneficent empire of the great Prince Dwala, Him-of-Two-Names, over the whole of the island, and those eyots beyond which constituted the rest of the habitable world.
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The power of actual motion was finally restored by the rattle of musketry in the grey light of one dawn, and the snapping of twigs overhead, followed by the appearance of men in khaki among the trees. Unarmed and unprepared, the villagers fled into the forest beyond, and not a soul remained but the old Dreamer, who was seeking new visions in the quiet recesses of his sleeping apartment, and the Colonel, who ensconced himself comfortably in the sago-tree to watch this new human phenomenon. Horses crouched and snorted, dragging guns up the last slope, with a cluster of men straining at each wheel; infantrymen advanced and halted and turned at a shouted word; and the Colonel sat and looked on as at a new dance performed for his amusement. He was delighted at the burning of the huts, which made the biggest flame he had ever seen; but he grew tired at last of the long pauses in the ballet; so he climbed down to the tank and splashed water over the officers.
IV
The royal prisoner was royally housed. After the jolting journey in the sultry covered wagon, to the steady tramp of the marching soldiers, and the frightened crying of the old Dreamer who crouched beside him, it was pleasant to be in these spacious rooms, to look from under the sun-blinds into the leafy garden, to sit on the wet stones and dabble in the black pool in the hall.
Prince Dwala was shut up in the Old Residence while the Colonial Office made up its mind what was to be done with him. Compassionate ladies sent him baskets full of flowers. The rest of the prisoners—the Dreamer and a rabble of braves hunted down in the hills—were huddled away in the jail.
The Prince had many visitors. The Governor came, accompanied by his staff, young men in cocked hats, who looked as tall and morose as possible while the Governor lectured him. A young man came from the ‘Pioneer’ and interviewed him as to his opinion of Western civilisation; the Prince’s answers were disjointed,
[30]
amounting to little more than ejaculations, such as ‘iced drinks’ and ‘theaters’; but his interest was evident, and the ‘Pioneer’ said that his views on the subject were ‘quite equal to those of some of the best of our Indian Princes.’ On the all-engrossing gold question he had been diplomatically discreet, nor would he commit himself on the equally difficult question of the British suzerainty over the Soochings.
He had numerous visits from Mr. Wyndham Cato, the Pro-Boer M.P., who was staying with the Governor, having arrived in the course of a grand tour of the Colonies, destined to supply him with ammunition for an attack on the Government all along the line on the ‘native question.’ But for Mr. Cato, the case of the Soochings would never have attained the importance it had. The Governor was disposed to treat the whole thing as a hole-and-corner brawl, a question of police; he would have bundled Dwala and his braves obscurely away into a penal settlement if he had been left alone. Mr. Cato blew the bubble. Bouverie Street and Whitehall, stimulated by telegrams, reacted one on the
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other. It became a public matter. The Governor smiled benignly, and squared it up to a larger scale. Thanks to Mr. Cato, Prince Dwala was a captive Prince instead of an arrested malefactor. The Prince conceived a warm affection for the little man, who let him try on his gold spectacles, and showed him how his watch wound up.
‘I have very little influence with the Governor; I have done all I can, and I am afraid that your deposition is certain,’ said Mr. Cato, one day, as he and the Prince squatted side by side at the edge of the pool—Mr. Cato folding little paper boats out of pieces of newspaper, while the Prince stirred the water with his foot to make them bob up and down. ‘But, even then, you will still be a Prince, and it is better to be a native Prince than the hereditary tyrant of a so-called civilised country, the heir of one of our mushroom dynasties of Europe, whose only purpose in life is to help a self-elected aristocracy, as vulgar as themselves, to grind down the sweating millions of honest working folk. You will still receive your revenues, if there is any justice left in this disjointed world of ours. I shall agitate to the best of my power
[32]
to get some addition to your income from our niggardly Government. You will be a comparatively rich man, and if you win your lawsuit you ought to do very well indeed. Nobody has a right to prevent your going to London if you wish to. I am starting myself in a few days, and if you will allow me, I shall be very glad to take you with me.’
‘Not in a hutch?’
‘A “hutch”? Don’t be absurd. You won’t be a prisoner. You’ll travel as I travel. And, until some suitable residence has been found for you, I insist on your coming to stay with us at Hampstead. I am sure that my aunt and the two sisters who live with me will welcome you most warmly.’
The lawsuit to which Mr. Cato alluded was one of his own contriving. When the first load of gold from the mines was sold to the Bank, the Solicitor-General for the Colony had put in a claim for a royalty, which was met by the defence that the mine was outside the limits of the colony. The miners set up concessions granted by the deceased monarch of the Soochings. Mr. Cato, a
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republican at home, but a firm upholder of the divine rights of ‘native’ princes, hired a lawyer on behalf of Prince Dwala and claimed the mines as his personal property, set aside from time immemorial for the maintenance of the dignity of the Royal House. The tribe at large had never exercised more than the right of hunting over them. He denied the validity of the concessions, and asked for a declaration that the fee simple was vested in the Prince.
V
Prince Dwala formed a frequent subject of conversation at the Residence. Mr. Cato disagreed on every possible question with everybody there; but they found him a charming visitor, and the process of ‘draain’ his leg,’ as the Scotch call it, was an unfailing amusement to the younger members of the party.
He found them assembled round the breakfast table when he came out on the veranda next morning, beaming round through his gold
[34]
spectacles with that benevolent smile with which he always began the day. Lady Crampton sat at the end, behind a silver urn—a flighty, good-looking creature, who might have passed for thirty. Besides her there were Mademoiselle and the three girls; Dick Crampton, and Reggie the nephew—secretaries both—deep in the batch of last month’s newspapers, which had just arrived.
The Governor and his private secretary were still at work.
‘When’s the execution, Dick?’ said Reggie, helping himself to ham.
‘Half-past ten, old man; you’ve lots of time.’
‘The usual tortures, I suppose?’
‘Just the usual. The Mater’s been up for hours sharpenin’ the spikes of the rack.’
‘Getting rusty, I suppose?’
‘Not they! They got blunted over all those land-tax defaulters last week.’
Helen, the youngest girl, tossed her long hair over her cheeks and exploded with laughter.
‘Soyez gentille, Hélène,’ said Mademoiselle: ‘les jeunes filles bien élevées ne rient pas à table.’
[35]
Mr. Cato adjusted his spectacles, and stared with horror from face to face.
‘What nonsense are those boys talkin’ down there?’ said Lady Crampton. ‘For Heaven’s sake don’t choke, Helen! Dick, you naughty boy, do try to behave.’
‘You mind what the Mater says, Reggie.’
‘What was Her Excellency pleased to remark?’
‘She says you’re not to play the elephas mas gigas ass. Hello, Guv’; good mornin’.’
His Excellency came in, tall and débonnaire, and sat down to breakfast. After him came his private secretary, a pale and anxious young man, who said little, and opened an egg as if he expected to find an important despatch inside it.
‘Any news, Reggie?’ said the Governor, cheerfully rubbing his large white hands together.
‘Fry’s hurt his finger.’
‘Bad luck to it!’
‘Well, Sir Henry,’ said Mr. Cato, beaming away, ‘I’m going to have a good talk with you after breakfast about Prince Dwala.’
[36]
‘Too busy, too busy, my dear Sir. You talk it over with Mr. Batts; he knows all about everything.’
The private secretary looked up darkly, and gave a dry nod at Mr. Cato.
‘Rum chap that Prince,’ said Reggie: ‘looks uncommon like a monkey.’
Mr. Cato flushed with indignation.
‘Please don’t talk like that, Mr. Crampton. I know you mean no harm; but it’s just by little remarks like that that we Englishmen nourish that narrow-minded contempt for natives to which we are all of us only too prone.’
‘Dear little things, monkeys,’ murmured the tactful Lady Crampton: ‘my sister used to keep one in Kensington, till it took to hidin’ food in the beds, and had to be given to the Zoo.’
After breakfast Mr. Cato and Mr. Batts retired into a dark chamber, and discussed the question of the Prince’s future. Mr. Batts sat like an eminent specialist, with folded arms and pursed lips, while Mr. Cato expounded his views. Mr. Batts held out great hopes of the Government coming down handsomely.
[37]
‘My dear Sir, we couldn’t have chosen a better moment for the application. The Colonial Office is bound to spend its grant by the end of the financial year, under penalty of having it reduced in the next Budget—it’s a Treasury rule. What I’m telling you is a secret, mind; don’t let it go any further. Between you and me, my dear Sir, they’re often glad if some expense of this kind turns up to put their surplus into; and once they’ve got him over, it’s easy enough to get the item renewed year by year. They like native potentates; it’s picturesque and popular. As for preventing white men from going into their country, that is a policy which I can’t accept. It’s opposed to the natives’ own interest: their countries could never be developed without European assistance.’
‘How do you mean “developed,” Mr. Batts?’
‘Well, take the question of gold, for instance. These lazy beggars the Soochings would simply leave it lying useless in the ground, as far as they are concerned. Mind you, I’m not saying that all these Jews and foreigners who start the thing are the most desirable people to carry civilisation
[38]
among the savages. Providence works for good by very funny means.’
‘But the gold belongs to the Soochings.’
‘Gold or any other commodity belongs by the law of nature to the man who works it. It’s a reward for his industry. That’s in Mill. It’s not by any means such an easy thing working a mine as you might think, especially in a savage country. First of all, there’s the labour difficulty to deal with.’
‘What do you mean by the “labour difficulty”?’
‘Getting labour, of course; native labour to work the mine.’
‘But what are the Europeans doing there, if they’re not going to labour?’
‘You’ve evidently not studied the mining question, my dear Sir. Once the prospecting is over, Europeans don’t dig. That would be very primitive. They have their work pretty well cut out as it is, pegging out their claims and looking after the men to see they don’t steal. Of course they have to get natives to dig for them—Soochings in this case.’
[39]
‘But why should the Soochings dig for them?’
‘Why should they, my dear Sir? Why, we’d pretty soon make ’em! But it’s no good arguing these big questions on first principles. We simply follow the policy which has worked so well in other parts of the world.... Now what’s your figure for the Prince’s salary from the Colonial Office?’
‘Well, what do you say to a thousand a year?’
‘Oh, make it two, make it two. That Mandingo man gets two thousand; and we don’t want to have our native princes priced lower than Africans. It’s just these things which fix the status of a Colony in the eyes of London people.’
‘Good; two thousand.’
‘And as big a lump down as we can screw out of them. I’ll instruct His Excellency.’
‘Then he’ll get his ordinary revenue from his subjects?’
‘That won’t amount to much.’
‘And the royalties on the gold?’
[40]
‘Don’t count on that. I saw the Chief Justice last night; he’s going to give it against you.’
‘I shall appeal.’
‘To the Privy Council? Well, well: one never knows what will happen when a case gets to the Privy Council.’
VI
Mr. Cato found his path unexpectedly smooth. The Colonial Secretary, delighted at shifting an awkward responsibility on to the shoulders of a political opponent, telegraphed a gracious acceptance of Mr. Cato’s offer to take charge of the Prince. The two thousand a year was promised without bargaining, with another two thousand down for initial expenses. The Colonial Court, it is true, had decided against the Sooching claim, but leave was given to appeal; and Mr. Cato took a lawyer and a packing-case full of evidence with him on board the P. & O. in order to carry the question before the Privy Council.
He had taken up the clubs for Prince
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Dwala on purely unselfish grounds, but he could not help feeling a personal satisfaction in the results of what he had done. His whole tour had been a success; now that he had seen the various kinds of native whom he had so long championed in Parliament, the rightness of his attitude came home to him with a picturesque forcibleness. He was like a dramatist who had seen all his plays acted one after the other for the first time. And now by this last lucky hit he had put himself over the heads of all his rivals in his own peculiar line of politics. Prince Dwala’s case would be famous; his colleagues would help him trounce the Government for this wicked gold war; the credit of it would be his; every question would come round to him for a final answer; the oppressed native would be sitting at home in his drawing-room. As he lay awake in his bunk he caught himself musing pleasurably over the social distinction which it might involve. Nonsense! A Prince is no better than any other man, or very little. Still, other people think so; it would be amusing to watch their demeanour.
[42]
It was no light matter being in charge of a Prince on board ship. Mr. Cato found it best during the daytime to keep him as much as possible in his cabin, where he sat looking patiently out of a port-hole, saying over new words and phrases he had heard, or making cigarettes with the little machine which Mr. Cato carried about with him—a contrivance which inspired him with far greater interest and awe than the complications of the engine-room. It was the best cabin on board, by-the-bye, for the Shanghai merchant had insisted on giving it up to the Prince. It was not that Dwala claimed any outward signs of respect—he was modesty itself; but his presence caused a certain gêne among the other passengers, who were uncertain whether to rise from their seats or not when he entered the reading-room. Then he had no idea of punctuality, and naturally nobody liked to begin dinner until he came in. The sailors had no end of a job enticing him down from the crosstrees, where he had ensconced himself at the sound of the dinner-bell. Then again, the chief steward was nearly frightened out of his wits,
[43]
when he leaned over his shoulder to offer him potatoes, at the way the Prince grabbed his plate and growled, under the impression that he wanted to take it away from him. The passengers saw but little of him till the last night of the voyage, when they insisted on his presiding at the concert in aid of the Sailors’ Orphanage. They were all immensely impressed by the grave attention with which he listened to the comic songs.
Mr. Cato was very busy all day going through the evidence with the lawyer; and half of every night he spent following the Prince in his swift rambles over the ship, seeing that he did not get into mischief. It was a relief when they landed at last in England.
VII
The first thing Mr. Cato did, when he had settled his guest comfortably at home in Hampstead, under the kindly care of his two sisters, was to go and call on Lord Griffinhoofe, his immediate political leader.
[44]
Mr. Cato’s party was divided at this time into many sections. An official leader had at one time been appointed, but in the confusion of politics the party had lost the papers and forgotten his name. The leadership was now divided among a number of eminent men, of whom Lord Griffinhoofe, ex-Cabinet Minister and member of one of the oldest and richest families in England, was not the least. It was generally understood that he would get an important portfolio when a Liberal Government should be formed, and the urbanity of his manner was held to fit him peculiarly for the Foreign Office.
London was out of town when Mr. Cato arrived. The Session was over; but Lord Griffinhoofe was known to have come back on business for a few weeks to his house in Piccadilly. Mr. Cato found the blinds down, and a charwoman washing the steps. He walked in unannounced and entered the well-known reception-room on the ground floor, disguised at present with a furniture of linen bags, enfolding monstrous shapes of large ornaments. Here he found a flushed female, with a bonnet on the
[45]
side of her head, sitting on one of the long row of leather chairs. She smiled and wagged her feathers and roses at him pleasantly, assuring him that ‘the good gentleman’ would be ‘out in a jiffy.’ Mr. Cato seated himself modestly in a dark corner and waited.
After a little while the inner door opened, and Lord Griffinhoofe himself appeared—a large stout man, with peering short-sighted eyes. He smiled and nodded when he found himself confronted by a curtseying female. Then he cleared his throat, looked in three pockets for his eye-glasses, wiped them, and examined the dirty scrap of paper which he held in his hand.
‘Mrs. Waggs?’ he said.
‘Yes, my lord,’ said the smiling woman in the bonnet; ‘that’s my name, sir, after my dear ’usband who went to the bad.’
‘Well, and what can I do for you?’
‘Mrs. Waggs, my lord, that’s my name. I’ve come to be cook, ’earin’ as you was in want of a temp’ry from my good friend Mrs. ’Amilton, who washes the steps, pore thing, of a Saturday when the other lidy ’as to be at ’ome.’
[46]
Lord Griffinhoofe examined the paper very carefully, and cleared his throat again.
‘H’m! It’s very awkward. My wife’s away. I hardly know what to do. You’re a cook, you say?’
‘Mrs. Waggs, my lord. Good plain or fancy with the best of character’s, though short, bein’ a temp’ry.’
‘Can you ... can you dust things, Mrs. Waggs?’
‘Dust? Me dust? No thank you, my lord, not if I know it. Thank ’Eaven, I ’aven’t come down to a duster quite as yet. O no, thank you! Mrs. Waggs, plain or fancy, on the usual terms, but no dustin’, thank you! I’m not an ’ousemaid.’
‘It’s very awkward. So you want to be cook. Can you make pastry?’
‘Anythink in reason, my lord. One doesn’t ask too much of a pore woman with two children and an ’usband in trouble. Pastry is not my fort, nor ’ave I been accustomed to families where pastry was eaten on a large scale.’
‘Well, well. It’s very awkward. The fact is that I have a cook already.’
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‘And well you may, my lord, you that might ’ave dozens for the askin’.’ Mrs. Waggs burst into tears. ‘But it’s ’ard on a pore woman that’s trudged miles an’ miles without a drop o’ drink to look for a job, to be told the place is bespoke.’
‘There, there, don’t cry, Mrs. Waggs. I can’t turn my cook out to make a place for you, can I?’
‘An’ my pore ’usband in trouble, ’im that never did an ’ard day’s work in ’is life before.’
Clouds veiled the serenity of Lord Griffinhoofe’s countenance for a little while, then he passed his hand over his face and emerged with a bright idea.
‘How would it be if you saw the cook and had it out with her?’
Mrs. Waggs, paying no direct attention to this proposal, nor to the next proposal to come back in a few days and see what could be done then, but continuing merely to repeat her name and claims, Lord Griffinhoofe finally decided that the best thing he could do was to ring the bell
[48]
and consult the housekeeper. A lean woman in black presented herself, glanced quickly round, and listened with sour submission while Lord Griffinhoofe explained the situation and its difficulties.
‘Shall I deal with the woman, my lord?’
‘I shall be extremely grateful, Mrs. Porter. I hardly know what to do myself.’
Three short steps brought the housekeeper in front of Mrs. Waggs.
‘Now then, out you go! March!’
Mrs. Waggs quailed and rose obediently.
‘Comin’ here in such a state—the idea!’
The housekeeper shut the front-door behind the visitor, and returned demurely the way she had come.
‘Thank you, Mrs. Porter,’ said Lord Griffinhoofe, with a nervous smile: ‘I thought you would know what was the right thing.... And what can I do for you, Madam?’ he inquired, stumbling on Mr. Cato. ‘What, Mr. Cato! So you’re back. How stupid of them to keep you waiting in here. Come along! Come along!’
He led him into his study beyond.
[49]
‘So you’ve come back for the great fight. It’s a secret—I had a wire this morning—you mustn’t tell anyone; we’re within measurable distance of a General Election.’
‘Yes; I saw it in the “Westminster” last night.’
‘Really! How do these papers find out? It came on me quite as a surprise. I’ve been promised—practically promised the—h’m! h’m! It’s a dead secret, mind; you mustn’t let it out.’
‘Why, the “Westminster”....’
‘They had that in too?’
‘No; in fact they mentioned Lord Rosebery.’
‘Bosh!’
‘Only guesswork, of course,’ added Mr. Cato hastily, seeing an uneasy flush on Lord Griffinhoofe’s face. ‘Quite impracticable! Not a man we could work with.’
‘A mere talker!’
‘With the Eastern Question looming....’
‘A man who can’t say No!’
‘Russia needs a firm hand....’
‘Rosebery’s no more capable of managing
[50]
Russia than I am of managing a ... well, a ... well.... And what was it you came to see me about, Mr. Cato?’
Mr. Cato entered with great detail into all the facts of Prince Dwala’s case. The great man rubbed his fat knees and assumed a sagacious look; his breath came very short, and suddenly he looked as if he were going to cry.
‘Wait a moment, Mr. Cato. If I had a bit of pencil, I should like to put your facts down, so as to get a clear idea. In what year do you say he was born?’
‘I haven’t a notion. These facts aren’t important enough to make a note of.’
‘Then you oughtn’t to tell me them. It only confuses.’
‘The important thing is: how far will the Party help him?’
‘We shall want a pencil for that. It’s such a nuisance my secretary being away. He always has a pencil. He takes his holiday now. Couldn’t we put it off till Parliament assembles?’
‘The matter is urgent.’
‘Everything seems so urgent nowadays,’
[51]
Lord Griffinhoofe smiled sadly, as if remembering better days.
‘We must secure the best lawyers at once.’
‘Oh, it’s a law case! I see.’
‘Yes, I’ve told you so already; an appeal to the Privy Council. Colonial appeals go before the Privy Council.’
‘I remember. That’ll be the Judicial Committee, no doubt. Well, can’t they settle it?’
‘That isn’t the point. It’s a most difficult question of law, and everything depends on how the question is argued. We must get the very best counsel we can. The expenses are enormous.’
‘Can’t the ... er ... the what’s his name manage it?’
‘Prince Dwala? We have no right to ask it of him. His fortune is very small, for a Prince; and I look upon the British nation and the Liberal Party as trustees to see that he gets it intact. I myself have already incurred very heavy expenses.’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t spend your own money.’
‘That’s just it; I want the Party to help with their funds.’
[52]
‘Well, well; if the cause is a good one. We might wait a few months, and see what people think.’
‘But the case will be over.’
‘One can’t help that. We mustn’t rush things.’
Nothing could budge the great man from his attitude of caution and delay. It was evident that, in the absence of his secretary with the pencil, he conceived only the vaguest idea of the question in hand. Mr. Cato went home at last, expressing the heroic resolution to fight the case on his own money, even if it ruined him.
VIII
Mr. Cato’s work was no light matter. He followed the case in every stage; he explained it all to the solicitors, and re-explained it to different layers of barristers. Every new document was submitted to him for revision. He was tormented all the time by anxiety for the future; his fortune was not a large one, and he had to reduce his
[53]
capital to a very serious extent in order to meet the preliminary expenses of the case. The Prince, his guest, must indeed miss no comfort in his house; but in every other respect he enjoined the strictest economy on his sisters.
There were other things also to be thought of. The Prince’s ignorance on many subjects was astonishing; his questions showed it. This was, of course, natural in a native; but if he was to be a social success in England, then, in spite of his age, it was necessary that he should have some education. The Prince raised no objection. He had taken quite a fancy to Miss Briscoe, who appeared at first in the character of a guest at lunch, with no suggestion of the governess about her. A big genial woman of fifty, with thick black eyebrows, and an indomitable belief in the Christian fellowship of all men in this wonderful world, she brought light into Dwala’s life.
For it must be confessed that the Prince’s first impression of this long-desired civilisation was one of disappointment. It was undoubtedly dull in Mr. Cato’s house. Mr. Cato was out all day; and though his aunt was a dear old lady in
[54]
her way, and his sisters two of the most charitable creatures in the neighbourhood, nobody would have called them lively company for a Missing Link. The indoor life told upon his health; the clockwork regularity of the daily round and the entire absence of events reduced his spirits to the lowest depth. He had been accustomed in his childhood to the happy vicissitudes of forest life; to the pleasure of escaping thunderstorms and beasts of prey; to the relief of calm sleep after weeks of storm-rocked trees; to the wild delight after long hunger of finding more than he could eat. It maddened him to hear these old ladies chattering over tiny pulsations of monotony as it they were events; to hear them discussing the paltry British weather under an impervious roof; to hear them talk of burglars in the next parish as if they were tigers on the lower branches; to learn that Julia’s quarrel with Mrs. Armstrong had ended in changing her doctor, when he had pictured her tearing handfuls of fur out of Mrs. Armstrong’s back. He longed to throttle the smug butcher who brought the daily tray of meat, robbing life of all the pleasure of desire.
[55]
When he first arrived the Prince had been so easily amused. It was enough for him to sit at a window and watch the men mending the road; to follow the housemaid from room to room and see her make the beds; to help to screw a leaf into the dining-room table; to dust Mr. Cato’s books. It was, therefore, a great surprise to his host when he blurted this out one evening. Had it been one of his nephews from the country—his youngest sister married the Rector of Woolcombing—Mr. Cato would have known what to do; he would have treated him to some of those amusements which are provided for country nephews; taken him to the British Museum, South Kensington, the Tower of London, or the College of Mining in Jermyn Street; he would have contrived little outings on omnibuses, ending with tea at an Aërated Bread shop. But the Prince seemed too old for these things; the weather was bad; Mr. Cato was busy, and he had determined to keep him at Hampstead till things had settled down and he knew his proper social value.
IX
That was one of Mr. Cato’s chief preoccupations. What was the Prince’s social station in England? How much deference might be demanded of the world? Who were the people to whose company he had a natural right? One must neither prejudice his future by assuming too low a value for him, nor expose him to any rebuff by claiming too much.
The question was one beyond Mr. Cato’s own competence. His thoughts turned to his nephew Pendred. Not a country nephew this, with any implication of humbleness. Quite the contrary; Pendred Lillico, ex-Lieutenant of the Grenadiers, son of Mr. Cato’s half-sister, who had married a hitherto obscure baronet in the days of her beauty. Pendred was a dancing man, a well-known man, a pattern of manners, an arbiter of fashions. They rarely met: Mr. Cato was secretly afraid of his nephew; Pendred seldom had occasion to boast of his uncle.
He arrived on his motor-car—small, fair, translucent, admirable. The occasion suited him.
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Appreciation was his métier—appreciation of frocks, laces, china, women, men. He knew hallmarks, pottery-marks, marks of breeding, marks of coming success. Mr. Cato passed the morning before his arrival in a restless state; he was nervous as to the verdict.
‘How much a year, do you say?’ asked Pendred, in his touching little glass voice.
‘Two thousand.’
‘H’m ... Borneo.... Can I see him?’
‘But that makes no difference, does it?’
‘It’s everything.’
‘But, surely dukes and millionaires aren’t estimated on their personal value?’
‘Oh, once you get into big figures!’
‘But a man’s social value....’
‘Social value, my dear uncle, is human value.’
‘Well, I’m delighted to hear it.’
‘On two thousand a year, that is.... Well, let’s see your man. I think I shall be able to give you an opinion.’
Prince Dwala was seated in an armchair in the library—nursing the fire, remote, abstracted. So
[58]
abstracted that he took no notice of their entrance. Pendred put his head on one side and tried to sketch a rough estimate; he was puzzled. He put his head on the other side and attempted a new valuation. Mr. Cato touched the Prince on the shoulder.
‘I’ve brought you my nephew to make your acquaintance.’
Dwala gave a long sigh and looked up.
‘Nephew ... what’s a nephew?’
‘This is my nephew,’ said Mr. Cato, presenting Pendred, who stepped delicately forward, smiling, with hand extended.
The Prince drew him towards himself. Then suddenly, without any warning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he took him up in his arms and carried him to the light to make a better examination. Mr. Cato stood petrified. Pendred lay perfectly still, looking up with frightened blue eyes. Dwala seated himself on the edge of the table by the window, and put Pendred on his knee. It was the first finished product of civilisation that he had seen, perfect at every point. He smelt him; he stroked his
[59]
hair and ears; he felt the fineness of his clothes; and growled a deep guttural growl of delight.
‘I should like to have a nephew, too.’
‘Put him down, put him down,’ cried Mr. Cato, finding voice: ‘you mustn’t treat Pendred like that!’
Dwala glided obediently off the table, set Pendred on a chair, and crouched at his feet looking up.
‘Does it talk?’ he asked.
‘That’s right. Of course he does. Pendred’s a terrible chatterbox. He’ll talk your head off.’
‘Please make it talk.’
‘How can he talk when you frighten him to death like that?’
‘Don’t be absurd, Uncle Wyndham,’ said Pendred plaintively: ‘I’m not at all frightened, thank you.’ He pulled out his case of gold-tipped cigarettes, and lighted one, at which Dwala growled again and clapped his hands.
‘Did you have a jolly voyage? I hear you were quite a lion on board. Terrible long journey. Awful bore travellin’. What do you think of England?’
[60]
‘Pretty voice! pretty voice!’ said the Prince, stroking one of his little boots. ‘Will it eat? He pulled a biscuit out of his pocket and put it up to Pendred’s lips. Pendred slipped his legs away and jumped up.
‘No, thanks awfully. I must be gettin’ home. People to tea. Awful bore.’ And with this he bolted straight out of the door and through the house to his motor-car, which was snorting and jumping up and down outside, in charge of a man in shiny black surrounded by a crowd of ragamuffins. He was half-way down the road when Mr. Cato emerged in pursuit.
The Prince sat by the fire, nodding his head in high spirits, and ejaculating: ‘Awful bore! Awful bore!’
‘How dare you?’ said Mr. Cato, coming in a moment later, and shutting the door behind him.
‘Dare what?’
‘How dare you treat my nephew like that? Pendred! A gentleman! A future baronet! Here am I, working my fingers to the bone to get justice done to you—at it night and day, spending my substance, sacrificing everything—and
[61]
then, when I invite my nephew out here, who might have helped you in your London career, you treat him like that! You drive him out of the house—he even forgot his gloves.’
‘I liked him. I wanted to keep him.’
‘You treat him like a child, like a plaything, a doll. You forget that he is a man.’
‘Is he a man?’
‘He was twenty-eight in June. Of course he’s a man.’
‘I didn’t know. He has no eye.’
‘No eye? What do you mean?’
‘Nothing here.’ The Prince moved his hand over his eyes. ‘Nothing behind.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. Eye or no eye, I’ll beg you for the future to be respectful to everybody, mind you—everybody, high or low. Social position makes no difference. Now you’ve spoilt everything. Pendred’s offended. He won’t come back. How can you get on if you behave like that?’
Mr. Cato had heard of a man ‘having a leg,’ but never of a man having ‘no eye.’ It conveyed nothing to him. But the idea was clear and even
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elementary to Dwala. Being a beast, endowed with no reason, having only instinct and that μονὴ αἰσθήματος, or persistence of impressions, which takes the place of reason in the lower animals, he was incapable of the rational classification of natural things which characterises the human outlook. His criteria of species were distinct but illogical; his categories did not tally with human categories; they fell short of them and they overlapped them. Species was defined for him, not by the grouping of attributes, but by an abstract something—a spiritual essence inherent in the attributes. He was guided, to put it in philosophical terms, not by ‘phenomena,’ but by ‘noumena.’ For instance, he knew a horse from a donkey, not by its size, its ears, or its coat, not on consideration, but abruptly, instinctively, round the corner, by an effluence of individuality; in short, by its ‘equinity.’ So too, in the forest, he had always known a venomous cobra from a harmless grass-snake at any distance, not by considerations of form or colour—considerations which might often have led to too late a conclusion—but merely by its ‘cobrinity.’
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But this attitude is liable to error; and Prince Dwala had been led astray by it. His notion of the essence of humanity was formed from the men he had first met; it was limited and imperfect. It included an element not essential to humanity, this ‘eye’ of which he spoke: a thing difficult to define; something revealed in the bodily eye; not exactly strength of will or power to command; not entirely dignity or courage; some reflection rather of the spirit of the universe, a self-completeness and responsibility, a consciousness of individual independence. This he had known and felt in the American, in the Soochings, in Mr. Cato, in the housemaid—it was the basis of his respect and obedience; but it was wanting in Pendred Lillico.
It was fortunate that he was disabused of error so early in his career. He could afford to laugh at his foolishness later—he saw what mistakes of behaviour it would have led him into; for when he came to know London better, he found that the mass of people, both in drawing-rooms and slums, indubitably men, altogether lacked the ‘eye’ which he had thought essential.
X
At breakfast next morning Mr. Cato groaned a good deal over his letters.
‘Well, Wyndham, what does Pendred say?’ asked sister Emily.
Mr. Cato frowned, and shook his head in a menacing aside, enjoining discretion.
‘I was afraid so,’ he said, after breakfast, when Dwala had retired to the study fire. ‘Pendred is very pessimistic. Oh dear, oh dear! And yet, who can say he is not right after the way he was treated? “I am afraid that the same thing cannot be said of your protégé. Quite apart from his rudeness to me—of which I will say nothing, if you will do the same—it is evident that Prince Dwala is not a gentleman. Not at present, at any rate. There is a brusquerie about him which would do very well in a Hapsburg or a Hohenzollern, but not in a deposed Borneo Prince. He doesn’t know how to sit down; nor in fact what to sit on. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands; all his movements are too large, and, as Lady Hamish would say, ‘too
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conclusive.’” Pendred won’t come to lunch on Tuesday—I was afraid not; he leaves town on Monday. However, there is a ray of hope. It is really very generous of Pendred, considering. It is certainly worth trying. “Gentlemen are made as well as born. Captain Howland-Bowser acquired it because he was determined to succeed; and now nobody would know he was not a gentleman, and in fact a very fine gentleman, and received everywhere. Of course it is a secret. I should never have known if Warbeck Wemyss had not told me himself. Present the letter I enclose, and let him see that you mean perfect discretion.”’
‘Who is Warbeck Wemyss? Not the ...’
‘Of course.’
‘The actor?’
‘Gives lessons in manners, do you mean?’
‘But won’t it be very expensive?’
‘Of course Wyndham means the Prince to pay himself.’
‘Now Clara, once for all, let me hear no more of these hints. The Prince shall not pay. We have no right to expect it, poor fellow. We have done very well without going to the country this
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year, and surely we can manage to do it again. If the worst comes to the worst we can move into a smaller house when the Prince leaves us. You must try to be more economical; the bills come to far more than they ought to.’ He closed the discussion by leaving the room.
Warbeck Wemyss consented, on terms. It was a ‘wrench,’ as Traddles would have said; but surely it was worth while. The lessons were a great amusement for the Prince. The going out into the passage; the entering the library, hat in hand; the surprise on Mr. Wemyss’s part; the little interchange on health and weather; the play with his monstrous gloves: the more elaborate lessons; introductions; forgetfulnesses; the assumption of grave interest while a humble Wemyss endeavoured to recall to him where they had met before; the pretended dinners; the new words; the manner of gallantry; the manner of confidence; the gestures and ejaculations of patience under a long anecdote—a thousand situations which pictured a new and delightful universe before his eyes. Dwala had the imitative faculty in perfection; he almost cried with
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humble joy when Wemyss clapped him on the shoulder, and assured him that he would make a gentleman of him in no time. Mr. Cato was delighted with the teacher’s reports: a little slapdash at first; rather random in the use of ‘rippin’’ and ‘awful bore,’ but quicker progress than he had ever seen.
XI
Meanwhile there were other things to raise Mr. Cato’s spirits. Parliament was back. The Government still held good, it is true, in spite of all rumours to the contrary; but opposition is exhilarating. Best of all, the Privy Council was in session. The Crown Officers, worn out with long obstructive sittings, made a poor fight of it: a dispute about a bit of land in Borneo was a small matter compared with the fate of a historic party. The judges were favourably impressed by the brusque appositeness of Mr. Cato’s counsel.
When Mr. Cato came back one day in a
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four-wheeler instead of the omnibus, his sisters knew that something extraordinary had happened.
‘We’ve won!’ he cried, sinking, smiling and exhausted, into an armchair.
Everybody shook hands with Dwala.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said, pressing each hand delicately, and laying his left hand on the top of it, in a graceful and engaging way which Mr. Wemyss had taught him. ‘You’re very kind.’ But he had no understanding of the news. Only at dinner, when a gold-necked bottle of Christmas champagne was produced and they all drank his health, he began to realise that it was something solemn and important.
XII
It was more solemn than anybody suspected. The news from the mines had been good; but it was nothing to what it was going to be. When Mr. Cato came home in the afternoon, two days later, he found a smart brougham at the door. On the hall table lay a card: ‘Baron Blumenstrauss.’
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The famous Baron in his house! The drawing-room was empty. He went into the library. There he beheld an elderly bald-headed Jewish gentleman in a white waistcoat, with fat little purple hands clasping his spread knees, gazing with baggy eyes through dishevelled gold pince-nez at Prince Dwala, who lay back in an armchair, lids down, breathing heavily. At Mr. Cato’s entrance, the visitor took off his pince-nez and looked up.
‘It iss an extra-ordinary ting,’ he said: ‘de shendlemann ’as gone to sleep!’
The Prince awoke at this and leaned forward blinking.
‘Pray continue. It is most interesting.’
‘I am not used to ’ave my beesness bropositions receift in soch a way. I am Baron Blumenstrauss,’ he said, turning to Mr. Cato, with gurgling guttural r’s.
‘Yes?... I am Mr. Cato—Mr. Wyndham Cato ... I ... I live here, you know.’
‘Ah—sit down, Mister Cato. I ’ave read your speeches. You are cleffer man; you ’ave ideas; wrong ideas, bot cleffer. What can I do wid a
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shendlemann dat go to sleep when I make him beesness bropositions? I offer to make him very rich man, he say “rippin’”; I say four hunderd tousand pount a year, he shut his eye; I say fife hunderd tousand pount, he go to sleep.’
‘Five, hundred ... thousand ... pounds!’ ejaculated Mr. Cato faintly, overwhelmed.
‘Effery year.’
‘Why?’
The Baron winked ponderously, with an effort, and smiled with exquisite penetration of Mr. Cato’s labyrinthine slyness.
‘Nod for nussing!’
‘What is the proposition?’
‘Are you de shendlemann’s guardian?’ returned the Baron abruptly.
‘Why no,’ reflected Mr. Cato: ‘I suppose I am not. But I’m his principal adviser.’
‘Ah! I know.’
The Baron rose suddenly, snatching up his white-lined hat and lavender gloves.
‘Well, goot-bye, shendlemen. I haf laties wait for me at home. Adieu, mon Prince.’
‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ said Dwala, with
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careful intonations: ‘I hope you’ll look in again some time.’
‘Goot-bye, I leaf you to your books, your studies. Goot-bye ... Dis vay?’ he appealed to Mr. Cato, moving towards the door.
‘I’ll see you out.’
‘Goot! You haf charming leetle house. Man can see dat Madame haf excellent taste.’
He stopped at the hat-rack, took down a hat and put it into Mr. Cato’s hand, nodding and smiling.
‘Put him on. You come wid me.’
‘I wasn’t going out.’
‘Come alonk. I make you beesness broposition.’ He hurried him down the steps. ‘Leedle flower’s all dead,’ he said, half glancing at the wintry garden. ‘Half-past seex,’ he added, looking at his watch.
As they bowled along in the smooth brougham, night fell. The Baron talked; Mr. Cato began to see dimly the gigantic outline of the thing that he had done. His mind was still numbed with the vastness of big figures; he hardly perceived the order in which things happened. The Baron
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had drawn a paper from some recess of the carriage and put it in his hand; he was fascinated by the purple unconscious forefinger striding about it, and the continuous voice in his ear. It was a map, a copy of the map of the Sooching forest made by the lawyers: ‘As shown in the map appended hereto, and marked C,’ he repeated to himself. Yellow squares, and circles and figures in black had grown on the bare centre since he last saw it. The purple blood-gorged finger was running rapidly from pit to pit; they were all full of gold, and the finger was peeping and gloating and chuckling, planning schemes of union and division, conquest and annihilation. The coachman’s steady back looked in with its two silver eyes from the box, like the face of a giant Fate, rumbling and gliding them to inevitable ends.
The burst of a barrel organ brought him to everyday consciousness. The Baron was still talking.
‘“Are de Government mad?” said my friends to me. “Dey might haf taken de whole ting wid deir retchiment of men; and dey let it all go to
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one shendlemann. An’ now dere can neffer be a war for it; it is brivate broperty. Dey leaf it to de Soochinks? Goot! Someday de Soochinks rebel; dey oppose de Ettucation law, de Tynamite law, de Church law: de Government take it away from dem. Goot! Dat is Bolitics. But dey have made it Broperty: dere is no Bolitics wid Broperty. We shall see big row. De Government will fall.”’
‘They have many things to answer for.’
‘It is solid gold!’
‘Ten thousand butchered Bulgarians lie at their door.’
‘Polgarrians? What are your ten tousand Polgarrians to me, ten hunderd tousand Polgarrians, ten million Polgarrians? A tousand tons of solid gold, I tell you. Dey know nussing, your Government. All de land is one big reef. I haf known it tree munt, you haf known it, efferybody haf known it; but de Government knows nussing, de Brivy Gouncil knows nussing.’
‘Do you mean that the gold runs right across this map, where these marks are?’
‘Natürlich.’
‘Is it a choke? Bah! Den why haf you made soch friends of de Brince?’
‘What’s your proposal?’
‘Wait!’ He put his head out of window and shouted to the driver: ‘Kvicker! Kvicker!’.... ‘I tell you at home. Haf a smoke?’ He held out a fat cigar-case.
‘No thank you.’
‘Take it! take it! Fifty pount a box.’ Mr. Cato still refused.
Gates opened before them; they drove over a gravel court, and ascended broad steps on a red carpet rolled down by footmen.
‘To de English room.’
They flew through a monstrous hall, with three footmen after them; fountains, palms, mosaics, tiles, pillars, galleries, lights; a card-table, dwarfed by the vastness; card-players, lounging men, thin contemptuous women smoking cigarettes. As they bowled rapidly by, the Baron waved flickering red fingers:
‘My exguses laties. Come along Max: beesness!’
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A young Jew arose from the table, threw down his cards, made apologies, and followed quickly.
In the English room the Baron cast rapid gestures at the pictures on the walls:
‘Reynolds, Cainsborough, Dicksee, Constable, Leader, Freeth. Come along, Max. Bring champagne,’ he said to the footmen.
‘Not for me, thank you,’ said Mr. Cato.
‘Goot! I will drink it mysailfe.’
They sat in a blaze of electric light, velvet, gold, Venetian glasses; everything exhaled a fat smell of luxury. This was the stunning atmosphere in which the Baron preferred to make his ‘broposition.’ Papers flitted about the table; champagne and diamond rings flickered before Mr. Cato’s eyes.
The Baron planned an amalgamation, a monopoly; harmony and understanding; big handling and cheap production; the sales regulated; the market chosen; the rate of exchange manipulated. A mass of companies, with different names, different directorates, even different supposititious localities.
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‘If I call him Cato Deeps, and say he is in Mexico, who knows? who cares? De enchineer? I pay him. De public? De diffidends are all in Treadneedle Street.’
An oscillation of good reports and bad reports, share-prices going up and down, with the Baron and his friends in the middle of the see-saw, and money rolling to them from alternate ends of the plank.
‘Gold is goot, but gompanies are better,’ he said.
But the Baron must have a free hand; it amounted to a purchase, a right to exploit. Everything depended on the Prince, and evidently the Prince depended on Mr. Cato. For the one there waited the 500,000l. a year in perpetuity, guaranteed on his own property; for the other, directorships, fees, shares, pickings at every corner; a safe income of at least ten thousand to be had for the asking. He had only to get the Prince’s consent to the bargain.
Mr. Cato flipped aside the personal question without a word. But for the Prince? 500,000l. a year. No one could reasonably ask more of life.
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Had he a right to refuse it? But these companies! tricks of promotion! all the garbage of the money market. Had he a right to accept it? He hesitated.
The butler came in, and murmured in the Baron’s ear.
‘Where?’
‘Just outside, sir.’
‘Gif him a smoke, and tell him to vait.’
‘Can I come in?’ said a voice at the door.
‘Aha, cher Duc!’ cried the Baron with brazen-voiced, brutal bonhomie: ‘go to de pilliard room and vait.’
‘Can’t you spare a moment?’
‘Ne voyez-vous pas?’ The bonhomie passed to imperial fierceness. ‘I am peezy!’
‘Well?’ he said, as Mr. Cato still sat plunged in thought. ‘For you it is leetle question—for de Brince, leetle question: it is me or somebody else. Fife hunderd tousand pount, effery year.’
Mr. Cato still pondered. He thought he saw his duty clearing before him.
‘Well? De Duke vaits; I vait. You
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impoverish de world: you widdraw me from circulation. Is it Yes?’
‘No!’ said Mr. Cato, pushing back his chair. ‘It is No.’
‘Ah?... Who will manage de mines?’
‘The Prince will manage the mines. I will manage the mines.’
‘Goot! You hear, Max? Dis shendlemann will manage de mines.’
Max only stared palely at Mr. Cato. The irony was too great for laughter. He saw a man putting to sea on a plank, unconscious of the deep voice of the gathering tornado; a child going out with a wooden gun to make sport of an angry crowd of sans-culottes.
‘Can I get a copy of the corrected map anywhere?’ asked the Child.
‘Gif him de map, Max,’ said the Baron, with a short, indulgent laugh. ‘My secret achents haf brepared it, Mr. Cato. Gif him de figures, all de papers. Let him haf efferyting. Goot-bye, Mr. Cato. See him to de carriage, Max.’
‘I’ll walk, thank you.’
‘Better drive. Goot-bye.’
‘You will haf deeficulties, Mr. Cato.’
Mr. Cato went home by omnibus. His heart sank as he looked at the map, divorced from the purple finger.
There is lightheartedness in great conflict: we see the larger outline; our forces are fed by the consciousness of it. A field of gold, still in possession; a thing still to sell, if need be: it was an impregnable position. But courage is needed after the battle; we see partially, at short range. To have rejected a magnificent offer, to have so little in its place—some papers, an idea, a consciousness that needed an atlas to explain it. To have rejected the proposals of confident authority creates a helpless mid-air terror; that is the power of religions. Mr. Cato felt like a heretic of the Middle Ages, wondering, on the way to the stake, if after all the Pope were not right.
He went straight to his bedroom; walked up and down in his slippers, lay awake for hours in long moods of elation and depression, and fell asleep at last very cold.
XIII
The wheel had begun to turn. Nothing could stop it now. Next morning came a fresh-looking elderly gentleman in grey, who announced himself as ‘of the Colonial Office.’ He looked about him as if he meant to buy the place; but modestly, as if for someone else. Mr. Cato received him in the drawing-room. He hoped the Prince was well. The Colonial Office had heard of the Prince’s improving fortunes. His business concerned the Prince, but it could most conveniently be broached to Mr. Cato. He would see the Prince afterwards.
It had probably struck Mr. Cato that the time had now arrived for the Prince to set up a separate establishment. The Colonial Office, which was ultimately responsible for him, felt that Mr. Cato’s kindness must not be trespassed on. He must not be allowed to monopolise the Prince.
Mr. Cato had probably noticed that native potentates always had, what you might call, for want of a better word, ‘keepers’ attached to
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their persons while they were in England. The actual title varied. As a rule it was some tall muscular military man who was said to be ‘in attendance on His Majesty the So-and-so.’ It was this functionary’s duty to keep him generally out of mischief; for these Oriental fellows would play the very deuce if left alone. Well, as far as Prince Dwala was concerned, the Colonial Office had decided that a Private Secretary would meet the case, and they had in fact selected the man.
‘Who is it?’ asked Mr. Cato, repressing a pang of jealousy.
‘One of the Huxtables—John Huxtable, a son of the Bishop.’
This again smelt of large success. Mr. Cato knew nothing of this particular John; but he was a Huxtable, and Huxtables are, like Napoleon, not men but institutions. Nature has such caprices. Out of many million wild rough briars, one rougher and crabbeder than all the rest is chosen by her for a fathering stock; whatever is grafted on it thrives. Another is richer, larger, better-flowered, the pride of the field—it is wise, courteous, a soldier, a leader of men; it is made
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a Duke; it is grafted with the delicatest buds of Paestum. But the bloom is frail and mean; shelter and fine feeding avail not, it has a good place in the garden, but it is fragrant only in its name. The Huxtables came of a rough and crabbed stock. Their great-grandfather was somebody’s gamekeeper. His sons throve in business. His grandsons were great men—soldiers, lawyers, priests. His great-grandsons, an innumerable rising generation, were destined for greater greatness. It had become an English custom to see large futures before them. They were big and bony, they played at Lord’s, they abounded in clubs and country houses; their handsome, strong-toothed sisters married well, breeding powerful broad-browed babies that frowned and pinched.
This particular Huxtable had tutored a Prince of the blood. He had been secretary to a philanthropic commission; he would be a Cabinet Minister, a Viceroy—anything he pleased. For the present he would be private secretary to Dwala: he would manage him, regulate him, assert him, protect him, establish him, marry him
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perhaps, and pass on to another broad stage in the regal staircase of his career.
As for the mines, the gentleman in grey had no advice to offer. It was a private affair of Prince Dwala’s; no concern of the Colonial Office. Why not consult some big financier? Baron Blumenstrauss, for instance.
Mr. Cato made no reply.
‘Well, after all,’ the grey gentleman concluded, ‘it had better be left to Mr. Huxtable.’
XIV
The Huxtable came later—a terrifying young man, who said little, but listened with a tolerant smile—and after him a host of others, entailed by his plans for Dwala. A house had been found in Park Lane. The owner, who was travelling in the East, had left the thing intact; his creditors wished to sell it as it stood. The appointments were passable; he had been a rather random collector of good things—some rubbish must be weeded out and replaced, but there was nothing to delay possession.
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However, it must be paid for. If Mr. Cato would produce his accounts, the Huxtable would be glad to go through them with him.
‘Oh, I have no accounts to show.’
‘Why not?’
‘Dwala has been my guest. There is nothing to account for.’
‘But the property in Borneo—you have an account of that?’
‘No.’
‘This is all very curious. A man has a fortune of some hundreds of thousands a year, and no account is kept of it!’
‘But he hasn’t got it yet. It lies buried in the earth in Borneo.’
‘Yes; it consists of mines, I know. But, of course, the fortune was realisable as soon as the Privy Council gave their decision.’
‘Well, it hasn’t been realised.’
‘But the decision was given a week ago. Do you mean to say it has been neglected all this time?’
‘“Neglected” is a piece of impertinence, Mr. Huxtable.’
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‘A week’s income lost means something like 10,000l.’
‘How dare you come to me—me, who has been toiling night and day in the Prince’s interest—in this authoritative, censorious way—I, who am old enough to be your grandfather—talking of neglect?’
‘You regard it as an aspersion? Well, and what are the results of all your labour?’
‘I have secured him justice.’
‘Justice is a matter of law, Mr. Cato: the Privy Council has attended to that. If you were incapable of realising his fortune yourself, why not have applied to some big financier—Baron Blumenstrauss, for instance?’
‘I have seen Baron Blumenstrauss.’
‘Well, what did he say?’
‘He made an offer. He volunteered to buy all the Prince’s rights for 500,000l. a year.’
‘Then, surely, you have realised it?’
‘No, sir, I have not.’
‘You don’t mean that you refused his offer? You weren’t expecting anyone to offer more, I suppose?’
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‘I refused his offer.’
‘On what ground?’
‘I regard Baron Blumenstrauss as an immoral man. I regard his business methods as immoral. If I had accepted the offer on the Prince’s behalf, I should have been advising him to lend himself to a vile system of exploitation, which I regard as one of the most infamous curses of our modern civilisation. I would rather see Dwala starve.’
‘You have taken a very great responsibility on yourself, Mr. Cato.’
‘I am quite willing to bear it.’
A smile flickered round the Huxtable’s nose, and Mr. Cato felt that he was being betrayed into melodrama. Silence ensued.
‘Your sentiments are very noble, Mr. Cato,’ said Huxtable at last. ‘I should say that they did you every credit, if it were your own fortune that we were talking about. But it is not. And if you think it over, you will see that your conduct lies open to the very gravest criticism. By a series of unusual circumstances you find yourself practically master of the disposal of a vast fortune belonging to someone else. Instead of accepting
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an excellent offer for the benefit of the person whose interests you for some reason claim the right of defending, you go off at a tangent in pursuit of your own political theories.’
‘Political theories?’
‘Yes, sir; political theories. Your views are well known. You regard the ways of the money market as immoral; you preach saintliness in the conduct of business; you think our social and financial system a mistake; you are, in fact, opposed to our civilisation as you find it. Those are your politics. Excellent! Charming! That is what makes your speeches a success. Moreover, you have a perfect right to practise your theories with your own property if you please. This Sermon-on-the-Mount way of doing business would make you a delightful customer in the City, no doubt. But when it comes to Prince Dwala’s affairs, the case is different. You are in the position of a trustee.’
‘Then is a trustee to be without a conscience?’
‘Certainly not; that’s just the point. I wonder you mention it. A trustee’s conscience ought to be a very delicate affair.’
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‘Do you mean to insinuate that I have acted without conscience?’
‘I don’t insinuate it, sir; I say it straight out. You have acted unconscientiously.’
‘You have the insolence to say that!’ cried Mr. Cato, jumping up, with tears of fury in his voice. ‘You dare to sit there and tell me I have no conscience; you ... you damnable young prig!’
The Huxtable sat with folded arms, looking at him coldly, magisterially. This young untroubled man was the World, the unrighteous, unanimous World, sitting in judgment on him.
‘You don’t improve your case by losing your temper and being abusive,’ said the World. ‘Your conscience, your whole conscience, should have been bent on serving the Prince’s interests; it was your duty to divest yourself of all personal theories, all prejudices, all principles, and devote yourself only to getting the best price you could. You are not a business man, and you had no right to experiment on the Prince’s behalf with theories of business that never have worked, never will work, and never could work. Nobody will offer
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you a better price than the Baron, because no one can afford a better price.’
‘Well, you have succeeded me. There are the mines intact. Go to the Baron and get him to renew his offer.’
‘The Baron will not make the same offer again.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I have seen the Baron.’
‘You have seen him!... Then all this long discussion was a trap for me?’
‘You can call it a trap if you like, though I think the word is a damaging one for you. I have seen the Baron, and he at once stated that he washed his hands of the whole affair.’
‘But if his only motive is money, things are just as they were a week ago. He can still make his money.’
‘You only expose your ignorance of the man you were so ready to abuse—a man of unsullied reputation, by-the-bye. Money is not his only motive.’
‘What other motive has he?’
‘Pride.’
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‘Him?’
‘Yes, sir; pride. When a man of that magnitude steps off his pedestal and comes down to a suburban house to offer his services to a private individual, he expects to be treated at least with consideration. He is accustomed to dealing with Empires, Governments, National Banks; not with obscure gentlemen in Hampstead villas. What happened? The Prince fell asleep, and you gave the Baron a blunt rebuff.’
‘It’s not my business to keep Prince Dwala awake.’
‘It’s not your business to settle his affairs while he’s asleep. You made an enemy of Baron Blumenstrauss.’
‘The Baron’s enmity to me is of no importance.’
‘Quite true; of no importance. But you made him the Prince’s enemy—an enemy of the estate. He began negotiating against us at once, floating companies over our head. He is omnipotent, and you turned him against the Prince. His pride was hurt.’
‘Surely he can swallow his pride!’
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‘No doubt; but not at the same figure. He offers only 400,000l. a year.’
‘Well, what do you mean to do?’
‘I have accepted his offer.’
‘Ha!... I hope you made a good thing out of it?’
They both rose to their feet.
‘In what way, Mr. Cato?’
‘There was, I suppose, some commission attached to the negotiation?’
‘No, sir; there was no commission. Baron Blumenstrauss knew me better than to offer me any such thing.’
It was perfectly true. It would have been inapt. There were other ways in which the Baron could discharge his debt of gratitude to a young man with a great future.
‘Where is the Prince?’ said Huxtable.
‘What do you want with him?’
‘I am going to take him into London.’
‘His house isn’t ready.’
‘Yes, it is. Will you make out your bill?’
‘What bill?’
‘For the expenses of his keep.’
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‘He has been my guest, I tell you.’
‘As you please. Where is he now?’
‘He has gone for a walk with his governess.’
‘I will wait for him.’
This imperturbable young man sat quietly down in an armchair and cracked his thumb-joints. Mr. Cato looked at him with silent wonder, and left the room. He envied the Huxtable his nerves: his own were in a tumult; he could not have stayed with him a moment longer.
XV
Meanwhile Dwala, all unconscious, was standing on Parliament Hill, with Miss Briscoe’s tall figure at his side. It must have been some unwitting prescience which took them there that day.
London lay at their feet: London, which Dwala had never seen; London, where his life would lie from this day forth. Not the formless, endless, straight-ruled London seen by the man in the street; not a pervading, uniform, roaring,
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inevitable presence: but London apart; in the distance; without sound; without smell; set to a foreground of sun-beaten grass and a gambolling wind from the fields and seas; a thing with a shape; a whole; bounded, surrounded, grim and grimy, sprawling down the dishonoured valley; murky, random, ridged and toothed, like the débris of Ladoga’s ice, piled in the Neva by December.
Dwala laughed.
It was a joke of a magnitude fitted to his monstrous mind. ‘Man is the laughing animal:’ he had proved himself human. Behold, he had worshipped Man and his inventions; he had come forth to see the sublimest invention of all; he had travelled over half the world for it; everywhere they spoke of it with awe. And now he had seen it. It was London.
The hill shook with his laughter. All the birds and beasts in the big city heard it and made answer—cheeping, squeaking, mewing, barking, whinnying, and braying together; forgetful, for the moment, of their long debates on the habits of mankind, their tedious tales of
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human sagacity, their fruitless altercations as to whether men had instinct or were guided only by reason.
The commotion escaped Miss Briscoe’s notice: she heard only one deep guttural laugh beside her, and looking up, beheld a grave impassive face.
‘There is St. Paul’s: do you see, Prince? How grand it looks, watching over the great city like a shepherd over his flock. “Toil on, toil on, my children,” it seems to say: “I am here in the midst of you, the Church, the Temple builded of the lowly Carpenter, with my message of strength for the faint-hearted, consolation for the afflicted, peace for all when the day’s task is done. Toil on, that the great work may be accomplished at last.”’
‘Work? Ah, you may well say work,’ said a voice from the bench beside them.
An old man was sitting there; a handsome old man, with a strong, bony face. His knobbed hands rested on the top of a walking-stick, his chin on his hands. He wore the unmistakable maroon jacket and black shovel-hat of the
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workhouse; corduroys clothed his lean and hollow thighs.
‘Bless you, there’s work for everyone as wants to work. See that chimney down there, that biggun? That’s Boffin’s, where I was. Three and fifty years I worked at Boffin’s.’
‘Was it a happy life?’ asked Miss Briscoe.
‘Happy? Bless you, the times I’ve had there when I was a youngster. Always up to larks. There’s three of my grandsons there now.’
Miss Briscoe admired his furrowed, placid face. ‘Take this,’ she whispered.
The old man looked coldly at a shilling.
‘No, thanky ... but if the gentleman has some tabacca on him, I could do with a bit.’
As they neared the bottom of the hill, Mr. Cato came hurrying towards them. There were tears in his eyes, and wet hollows in his cheeks.
‘Well, Dwala my boy, I’ve brought you news. You’re going into London to-night, to your new home.’
Dwala put up his face to the sky and laughed again.
XVI
Dwala was a social success, an object of multiple affection. His large grave ways, his modesty, his kindliness, made him personally beloved. He was, of course, always a ‘native’; there was no escaping that. But to be tolerated, if you are tolerated everywhere, is social greatness.
One thing he lacked, they said—the sense of humour. The tiny shock that makes a human joke was too slight for his large senses. But humour, after all, is a rather bourgeois quality.
He was adopted from the beginning, pushed, trumpeted, imposed, by that powerful paper the ‘Flywheel.’ He had captivated Captain Howland-Bowser, its correspondent, at the first encounter. The ‘Flywheel,’ descending after a century, from its Olympian heights, into the arena of popular favour—by gradual stages, beginning with the great American ‘pill competition’—had put itself on a level with the rest by adding a column of ‘Beau Monde Intime’ to its daily issue. The thing was done on the old Olympian scale. The column was not entrusted
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to a chattering magpie-newswoman, or to a broken-winged baronet, as is the way with lesser sheets; but to an eagle of the heights—the famous Captain Howland-Bowser, our modern Petronius, the Grand Old Man of Pall Mall; the Buck from Bath, as envious youngsters called him; the well-known author of ‘Furbelows’ and the ‘Gourmet’s Calendar.’
The fateful evening is recorded in his ‘Memoirs of a Man about Town,’ that farrago of entertaining scandal, which proved a mine of wealth to his sorrowing wife and family, to whom he bequeathed the manuscript when he died, as a consolation for a somewhat neglectful attitude in life:
‘It was at Lady L——’s that I first met Prince D——, that “swart monarch” whose brilliant career, with its astonishing dénouement, made so much stir in 19—. I remember that evening well. We had supper at the Blackguards; homards à la Cayenne with crème de crevettes, cailles Frédérique, salade Howland-Bowser, &c., &c. Tom Warboys was there, gallant Tom; Harry Clarke, of Sandown fame; Lord F——
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(Mrs. W——’s Lord F——); R——, the artist; poor H——, who shot himself afterwards; and a few others. W-rb-ck W-m-ss came in later, and delighted the company with some of his well-known anecdotes. We formed a brilliant little group in the dear old club—Adolphe was in his zenith then. The Prince was in great form, saying little, but enjoying all the fun with a grave relish which was all his own. R—— was the only blemish in the galaxy; il faisait tache, as the volatile Gaul would say. H—— was getting hold of him at the time to choose some pictures for the Prince’s “’umble ’ut” in Park Lane. R—— raised a general laugh at his own expense when I pressed him for an estimate of Grisetti’s “Passive Resistance,” the gem of our little collection. The knowingest men in London were agreed that it was not only one of the wittiest pictures of the year, but the girl the man was kissing was the most alluring young female ever clapped on canvas. R—— valued it at twenty pounds—the price of the frame! We roared. It had cost a cool two thousand, and was worth at least five hundred more. So much
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for experts! He was very chapfallen the rest of the evening.
‘However, revenons à notre mouton, as the gay Parisians said, when the siege was raised and bottines sauce souris went out of fashion. It was at the supper-table that Prince D—— revealed that extraordinary delicacy of perception which first opened your humble servant’s eyes to what a pitch refinement can go. His manners, by-the-bye, were unimpeachable: stately, and yet affable. Non imperitus loquor. But the amazing thing was his palate. There are delicate palates in London—though many who pose as “men of culture” have little or none—but the delicacy of Prince D——’s was what I should call “superhuman,” if subsequent events had not proved that this extraordinary gift had, by some topsy-turvy chance, fallen to the lot of one who, I suppose, after all, we must now acknowledge “sub-human.”
‘I had just brought to what I thought, and still think, perfection, a mixed claret, on which I had been at work a long time. The waiter had his orders. “Fiat experimentum,” said I, and three
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bottles, unmarked, were brought. Every one at table was given a liqueur glass of each to taste. The company mumbled and mouthed them, and each one gave a different opinion—all wrong. The poor “gamboge-slinger” admitted at once that he didn’t know port from burgundy: I had suspected as much.
‘“Well, Prince,” said I, “what’s your opinion?” To my astonishment I saw that he hadn’t touched a drop. He sat quite still, leaning back in his chair; his nostrils quivered a little. Suddenly he put out one of his long fingers—his hands were enormous—and touched what I shall call, for short, “Glass A.”
‘“That is a good wine,” he said, “the same as we had at home night before last.” He turned to poor H——.
‘“Château Mauville,” said H——.
‘“And that,” he said, touching Glass B, “is thin and sour; it smells of leather. And that,” he said, touching Glass C, “is a mixture of the two, and very good it is.” Saying which, he drank it off and licked his lips.
‘“Gentlemen!” cried I, jumping up; “this
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is the most extraordinary thing I ever heard. Without tasting a drop, the Prince has guessed exactly right. It’s Château Mauville, which I have mixed—a sudden inspiration which came to me one morning in my bath—with an inferior Spanish claret, tinged with that odd smack of the wine-skin, which I thought would fit in with the rather tea-rosy taste of the Mauville.”
‘You can imagine the excitement which this event produced in that coterie of viveurs. From that moment his success in London was assured. The story got about, in a distorted form of course, as these things will. I was obliged to give the correct version of it in the “Flywheel” a few days later.
‘It was I that introduced him to Lord X——, who had been complaining for years that there wasn’t a man in town fit to drink his Madeira. Trench by trench the citadel of public opinion was stormed and taken. How well I remember,’ &c., &c.
XVII
Prince Dwala succeeded by other qualities than those attributed to him. His wealth raised him to a high tableland, where others also dwelt; it was not his fine palate which raised him higher, nor was it his manners. His manners, in point of fact, were not perfect; his manner perhaps, but not his manners. The finest manners were not to be learnt in the school of Warbeck Wemyss, as he quickly perceived; that was only a preparation, a phase. Captain Howland-Bowser, who believed his own success to be due to that schooling, was mistaken; he underrated himself: his success was greatly due to his fine presence, but still more to the fact that his intelligence stood head and shoulders higher than that of most of those with whom he was thrown into contact; and he had confirmed his pre-eminence by his literary fame.
Prince Dwala’s popularity was chiefly due to the zeal, the zest, the frenzy, with which he threw himself into the distractions and pursuits of the
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best society. He missed nothing: he was everywhere; wakeful, watchful, interested. He was a dancing man, a dining man, a club man, a racing man, an automobilist, a first-nighter. His dark head, groomed to a millimetre, his big figure, tailored to perfection, formed a necessary feature of every gathering.
Nor did he hold himself aloof from the more serious pursuits of the wealthy: he was at every meeting, big or small, that had to do with missionary work, temperance, philanthropy; he visited the Geographical Society, the Antiquaries, the Christian Scientists, and the lady with the crystal globe in Hanover Square.
He was up early, walking through the slums, or having his correspondence read to him. Tired rings grew round the Huxtable’s eyes; the Prince was as fresh as paint. He was studying ‘the Human Question.’
We will not follow him through all the details of his social life: the limbo of frocks and lights, the lovely people, the unlovely, the endless flickering of vivid talk, the millions of ideas, all different in outline but uniform in impulse,
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like the ripples on the Atlantic swell. We come at once to the great day when he met Lady Wyse.
Strange that such a meeting should have marked the day for him as great. Not strange that it should be so for you and me: for us it has inner meanings, implications of success; it marks the grandeur of our flight; it has high possibilities. Who knows but we may catch the fancy of the lovely creature, be admitted freely to her familiar fellowship; penetrate thereby to the very innermost arcana of the Social Mystery?
But for him—a monster of the forest, an elemental being—that happiness should date from his first meeting with a woman whom we must call after all frail, the fine flower of all that is most artificial and decadent in England: that was strange. But so it was.
He had studied; he had seen; he knew the human question to the bottom. But what to make of it? Was this all? Discontentment gnawed him. He suffered a deprivation, as once in the forest, when he lacked Man. Now he had had Man, to the full; he was sated. What more?
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Lady Wyse understood his want, and helped him to supply it. He must reduce himself, limit his range to the human scale; he must put off his elemental largeness and himself be Man; be less—an Englishman, a Londoner.
XVIII
Lady Lillico’s evening was crowded. ‘This is quite an intellectual party to-day,’ she said, shaking hands with Dwala and Huxtable, and leading them down the avenue which opened of its own accord in the forest of men and women. ‘Such a number of literary people. How do you do, Mr. MacAllister? It’s an age since we’ve seen you; and this is your wife, isn’t it? To be sure. Let me introduce you to Prince Dwala.... That was Sandy MacAllister, the author of “The Auld Licht that Failit”—all about those dear primitive Ayrshire people; everybody’s so interested nowadays in their fidelity and simplicity and religiousness and all that. The
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Kirkyard School, they call it. It’s a pity his wife’s so Scotch. Lord Glendover is here....’
‘Cabinet Ministers, Oho!’ said Huxtable.
‘And Lady Violet Huggins, and the Duke of Dover, and Sir Peter Parchmin, the great biologist, and Sir Benet Smyth, and both the Miss Dillwaters. And who else do you think I’ve “bagged,” Mr. Huxtable?’
‘I can’t guess.’
‘Lady Wyse!’
‘Really? I congratulate you.’
‘Isn’t it splendid? She’s been so rude.’
‘Next thing I hear you’ll be having....’
‘S’sh.... General Wapshot, that fierce little man over there, came with her; we didn’t ask him, but he always goes wherever she goes. And isn’t it dreadful, Prince, I asked Wyndham to get Mr. Barlow to come—the new poet, you know; and it turns out that he’s a pro-Boer too, and insists upon reciting his own poems? There he is at this very moment.’
In their course down the room they were passing the door of a smaller apartment, given over for the evening to a set entertainment. They
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could see a rumpled young man waving his arms in there; they caught a whiff of him as they went by.
he was saying.
‘I don’t know what Mr. Disturnal will think; that’s him, there’—she indicated a muscular ruffian with a square blue jaw, priest or prize-fighter, one would have guessed, who was leaning against the door-post listening over his shoulder with a sardonic smile.
‘But, of course, you know all our celebrities already, Prince. He’s the most coming man on the Conservative side, they say; a staunch upholder of the Church, with all the makings of a really great statesman. It was he who saved us only last week over the second reading of that dreadful Prayer Book Amendment Act, by borrowing a pole-cat in Seven Dials just in the nick of time, and hiding it in the Lobby, so that the supporters of the measure couldn’t get in to vote. What a pity Julia isn’t here! I’m sure he’s looking out for her. She’s just gone into
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the rest-cure; quite worn out, poor thing. We live at a terribly high pressure, Prince; people take life so seriously now. Oh, there’s the dear Duke singing one of his delicious songs.’ They were passing the door again on the return journey, and the ping-pang of a banjo came frolicking out on the air with a fat voice lumbering huskily in pursuit:
sang the Duke. Laughter followed with the confused thunder of an attempted chorus. Mr. Disturnal had shifted his other shoulder to the door-post and was looking in, with open mouth and delighted eye.
‘Isn’t it amusing?’ said Lady Lillico. ‘That tall man with the white moustache over there is Captain Howland-Bowser, quite a literary light. You know him? He married one of the Devonshire joneses; the Barley Castle joneses, you know, with a small j.’
Pendred passed at this moment, with a hungry lady of middle years hanging on his arm; he
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slapped the Prince familiarly on the shoulder as he went by. The awkwardness of their first encounter had been quite lived down by now.
‘Oh, please introduce me!’ begged the lady.
‘What, to the Prince?’ said Pendred. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t like him.’
‘I should love him.’
‘He has a most repulsive face.’
‘I love a repulsive face.’
‘He drinks like a fish.’
‘I love a man who drinks. Oh, Mr. Lillico, we mustn’t be too censorious about the conduct of great people; they are exposed to innumerable temptations of which we know nothing.’
This was the famous Miss Dillwater, whose métier in life was loyalty—loyalty to every kind of Royal personage, but more particularly to the unfortunate. From her earliest childhood her dreams had been wholly concerned with kings and queens; in the daytime she thought over the clever answers she would make to monarchs whom she found sitting incognito in parks, and pictured herself kneeling in floods of tears when summoned to the palace the next morning. She had pursued
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Don Carlos from hotel to hotel for years; and only deserted his cause at last to follow King Milan into exile. Every spring she returned to London to lay a wreath on the grave of Mary Queen of Scots, and to conspire with other dangerous people for the restoration of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, our rightful monarch, to the throne of England. Tears coursed down her cheeks when Pendred introduced her, and it was a considerable embarrassment to the Prince when she seized his hairy hand and pressed it fervently to her lips. She followed him about the rest of the evening, with a melancholy smile on her wan face.
‘Oh, Mr. Lillico,’ she said, in an aside to Pendred; ‘I can never thank you enough. He’s wonderful. That great jaw! those big teeth! those long arms! that brow! He reminds me of one of Charlotte Brontë’s heroes. I do love a man!’
The Prince was one of the magnetic centres of the gathering; the particles regrouped themselves as he moved about from place to place. There was one moment when he was comparatively
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deserted; everyone was crowding round a lady in black; angry cries issued from the group. Lady Lillico hurried up to him.
‘Pray come over here, Prince, and listen to what Miss Dillwater’s sister is saying. She is about to reveal the great secret about Guy de Maupassant and Marie Bashkirtseff. She’s a great literary authority, you know. I’ve not read anything by either of them myself as yet, but I’m deeply interested. We are all Bashkirtseffites or Maupassantists now.’
But unfortunately, they were too late for the secret; they came in only for the broken crumbs of it.
‘I was Marie’s greatest friend,’ Miss Sophie was saying; ‘and you may depend upon it, what I tell you is true. That is the reason why they never married. I am a delicate-minded woman, and nothing should have dragged this secret from me if I had not felt the overwhelming importance of it to literature.’
‘The charge is false!’ bellowed a furious voice.
‘The thing will have to be looked into.’
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‘Well, whatever anyone says,’ cried a stout woman, ‘I never have read this Bashkirtseff lady’s diary, and I never will.’
‘And, pray, why not, Madam?’ snorted back an elderly gentleman. ‘Maupassant is a fraud! After what I have heard to-night, I disown him. His books ought never to have been published.’
‘Hear, hear! And with him goes Zola, and all the rest of them. What do you think, Lord Glendover?’
‘Oh, me? I never can see what people want with all these foreign fellers. John Bull’s good enough for me.’
Attention was distracted at this point by a new interest which had arisen on the outskirts of the group. Sir Peter Parchmin, the great savant, the petticoat pet—he had made a fortune in fashionable medical practice, but was forgiven it on his retirement, at fifty, in virtue of his new claims as a researcher in biology—was wriggling faint protests at the violence of a throng of ladies who were propelling him, with the help of a tall octogenarian buffoon, towards the centre of the public.
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‘What’s up?’
‘Parchmin’s going to tell us the latest news about the Missing Link,’ said the big buffoon.
‘Oh, a story about the Missing Link!’ exclaimed Lady Lillico. ‘This is most exciting. Sit down everybody, and let us hear it. I adore scientific things.’
‘Oh, what is the Missing Link?’ said a young lady. ‘I’ve so often heard of it, and wondered what it is.’
‘Well, ladies,’ said the Biologist, taking the centre, and reconciling himself very readily to the situation. He fondled and smoothed his periods with undulating gestures of the long sleek freckled hands. ‘You’ve all of you heard, no doubt, of Darwin?’
‘Oh, yes,’ everybody chorussed.
‘What, Sir Julius Darwin, who bought Upton Holes?’
‘No, no, Lord Glendover,’ explained Lady Lillico, ‘one of the Shropshire Darwins—a very well-known scientist.’
‘Ah!’ said Lord Glendover, sinking back and losing all interest.
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‘Well, when he traced the relationship between Man and the ... er, Anthropoids....’
‘Oh, please don’t use technical terms, Sir Peter!’ cried Lady Lillico. ‘We’re none of us specialists here.’
‘Well, let us say the manlike apes ... when he had traced the relationship, there was still one place left empty in the ... er ... so to speak, in the genealogical tree.’ The Biologist emitted this with a grin. ‘No remains have ever been found of the hypothetical animal from which man and the apes are descended: and this link, which is still lacking to the completeness of the series, has therefore been called the Missing Link.’
A very young soldier, with a handkerchief sticking out of his sleeve, leaned forward at this point, blushing deeply:
‘Then do I understand you, sir, that we are not actually descended from monkeys?’
‘No, not actually descended.’
‘How very curious!’
‘Fancy! This is something quite new.’
‘They certainly ought not to have attacked
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Genesis till they were more sure of their ground.’
‘How amusing of them to call it the Missing Link!’
‘Sort o’ pun, eh?’
‘But what’s the story, Sir Peter?’
‘I’m coming to that.... Now, we may roughly put the date of the Missing Link from which we are descended at about three hundred million years ago.’
An ‘Oh!’ of disappointment ran round the ladies. The representative of the ‘Flywheel’ gave a ‘Humph!’ and walked off, to look at himself in the glass.
‘But wait a moment,’ said the Biologist. ‘Though improbable, it is not impossible that the species from which, by differentiation, arose men on the one hand and apes on the other, should have continued its existence, undifferentiated, at the same time. And the rumour is that there is at least one specimen of the race still alive; and, what is more, that he was lately in the possession of an American, and on the eve of being shipped to England for exhibition.’
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‘What an extraordinary thing!’
‘It’s too fascinating!’
‘Like those Babylonian hieroglyphics at the British Museum.’
‘Yes; or radium.’
‘Or that rhinoceros in Fleet Street.’
‘But how old he must be!’
‘It is said that he escaped to the forest,’ continued the Biologist; ‘and his keeper lost all trace of him. We mean to raise a fund for an expedition to find him.’
‘What’s the good of him?’ asked a surly man—one of the Bashkirtseffites—abruptly.
‘The good, sir? It would be the most important thing in Science for centuries!’
‘What good will it do the community, I should like to know? Will it increase our output, or raise the standard of comfort, or do anything for Civilisation?’
‘Ha! now we’re getting into Politics,’ said Lord Glendover, rising, and thereby giving an impulse which disintegrated Sir Peter’s audience.
Howland-Bowser detached Prince Dwala from
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the group as it broke up, and drew him aside, with an air of important confidence.
‘If you go to the refreshment room,’ he said, ‘don’t touch the champagne that’s open. Ask the head waiter—the old man with the Newgate fringe; if you mention my name, he’ll know. It’s the ... ah ... ha....’
While he was speaking two figures emerged vividly from the mass, coming towards and past them. Eyes darkened over shoulders looking after them. The straight blue figure of a smooth slender woman, diffusing a soft air of beauty and disdain; and half at her side, half behind her, the Biologist, sly and satisfied, hair and flesh of an even tawny hue, the neck bent forward, equally ready to pounce on a victim or suffer a yoke, balancing his body to a Lyceum stride, clasping an elbow with a hand behind his back, bountifully pouring forth minted words and looking through rims of gold into the woman’s face, as it were round the corner of a door, like some mediæval statesman playing bo-peep with a baby king.
Lady Lillico was pursuing with tired and frightened eyes.
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Howland-Bowser cleared his throat and shifted his weight on to one gracefully-curving leg. Lady Lillico had caught them in their passage.
‘Oh, Lady Wyse,’ she said, with a downward inflection of fear, as if she had stepped in a hole, ‘may I introduce Prince Dwala? Prince Dwala: Lady Wyse.’
The blue lady’s eyes traversed Howland-Bowser in the region of the tropics with purely impersonal contempt; he outlined a disclamatory bow, and fingered his tie. The eyes reached Dwala and came to anchor.
‘Oh, you’re the Black Prince,’ said Lady Wyse; ‘the Wild Man from Borneo that everybody talks about?’
Lady Lillico quailed, and vanished through the floor. Howland-Bowser looked round the room, chin up, and walked off with the air of an archdeacon at a school-treat.
‘How delightful!’ pursued the insolent lady slowly. ‘Of course you’re a Mahommedan, and carry little fetishes about with you, and all that.’
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Her eyes were directed vaguely at his shirt-studs. Looking down from above he saw only the lids of them, long-lashed and iris-edged, convexed by the eye-balls, like two delicate blue-veined eggs. She raised them at last, and he looked into them.
It was like looking out to sea.
She looked into his: and it was as if a broad sheet of water had passed swiftly through the forest of her mind, and all the withering thickets, touched by the magic flood, had reared their heads, put forth green leaves, blossomed, and filled with joy-drunk birds, singing full-throated contempt and hatred of mankind. The energy to hate, seared with the long drought of loneliness, was quickened and renewed by this vision of a kindred spirit.
For she too was a monster. Not a monster created, like Dwala, at one wave of the wand by Nature in the woods; but hewn from the living rock by a thousand hands of men, slowly chipped and chiselled and polished and refined till it reached perfection. Every meanness, every flattery that touched her had gone to her moulding;
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till now she was finished, blow-hardened, unmalleable; the multiplied strokes slid off without a trace.
Her position was known to all; there was no secret about it. The great blow that had severed the rough shape from the mass was struck, as it were, before the face of all the world. They might have taken her and tumbled her down the mountain side, to roll ingloriously into the engulfing sea. Instead of that they had set her on a pedestal, carved her with their infamous tools, fawned round her, swinging Lilliputian censers, seeking favour, and singing praise.
She was a monster, and no one knew it. And now at last she had met an equal mind: her eyes met other eyes that saw the world as she saw it—whole and naked at a glance. There was no question of love between them; they met in frozen altitudes far above the world where such things were. They were two comets laughing their way through space together.
All the Biologist saw was an augur-smile upon their lips.
‘Come along,’ said Lady Wyse, slipping her
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white glove through Prince Dwala’s arm. ‘Let’s get somewhere where we can talk.’
‘Then what becomes of me?’ grinned the insinuating savant.
‘Oh, you?’ said the lady. ‘You can go to the devil!’
Captain Howland-Bowser looked enviously after them as they left the room.
‘Your Borneo Prince has made no end of a conquest, Baron,’ he said, finding Blumenstrauss—whom he hated, by-the-bye—at his elbow. ‘H’m! H’m!’
‘Aha, my dear Bowser, wid nine hunderd tousand pount a year one can do anysing.’
What they could have to say to one another in the window-seat, no one could imagine. They were neither of them great talkers; everybody knew that. Yet there was Prince Dwala, with his grave face tilted to one side, eagerly drinking in her words, answering rapidly, decisively; and Lady Wyse giggling like a school-girl, blinking away tears of laughter from her violet eyes. Such a thing had never been seen. How long had they
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known one another? Never met till this evening. Nonsense; he’s there every afternoon.
Whatever the subject of the duologue may have been, the effect of it on Lady Wyse was of the happiest kind. She was metamorphosed; radiant, and, for her, gracious; transfused with life, she seemed taller and larger than before.
The Huxtable’s grim face was wreathed, in spite of him, in smiles; a flush of pleasure peeped out from under his bristling hair as Lady Wyse stopped Dwala before him and demanded an introduction.
‘I’ve heard of you so often, Mr. Huxtable. My father knew your uncle the Judge. I hope you’ll come to some of my Thursdays.’
The scent of her new mood spread abroad like the scent of honey, and the flies came clustering round her. Chief among them Lord Glendover, the Cabinet Minister, who had made four remarks in the course of the evening—all of them foolish. Tall, lean, hairy, brown and grizzled, he was one of those men who, though neither wise, clever,
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strong, nor careful, convey a sense of largeness and deserved success. He would have been important, even as a gardener; he would have ruined the flower-beds, but could never have been dismissed. His only assessable claim to greatness lay in the merit of inheriting a big name and estate. He was, in point of fact, quite stupid; but his opinions, launched from such a dock, went out to sea with all the impressiveness of Atlantic liners, and the smaller craft made way respectfully.
Sir Benet Smyth winged after him, buoyant with the grave flightiness of diplomacy, and luminous with the coming glory of his tour of the Courts. For the Government, despairing of reforms in the army, was meditating a wholesale purchase of foreign goodwill, a cheap scheme of national defence, founded on the precept, les petits cadeaux font l’amitié. The details were not yet made known, but rumour had it for certain that the Spanish Infanta was to get the Colonelcy of the Irish Guards, the Mad Mullah was to get the Garter, and President Roosevelt was to get Jamaica. It was also said by some that the Government was going to strike out a new line in
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honorary titles by making the Sultan of Turkey Bishop of Birmingham: but this was not certain.
Sir Benet and Lord Glendover sat down with Dwala, the General, the Biologist, the Baron, and Huxtable, in a semi-circle centring on Lady Wyse.
‘We’ve been wondering, dear Lady Wyse,’ said the Biologist, ‘what was the subject of your engrossing conversation with the Prince.’
‘I can guess de sopchect,’ said Baron Blumenstrauss. ‘It was loff ... or beesness.’
‘You were so animated, both of you.’
‘Den it was bote. De Breence would nod be animated by beesness, and de laty would nod be animated by loff!’
‘Ha, ha!’ said Lord Glendover, vaguely discerning the outline of an epigram; ‘that’s a right-and-lefter.’
‘You’re quite right, Baron,’ said Lady Wyse: ‘it was both. We’ve been making a compact, I think you call it. The Prince puts himself unreservedly into my hands. I’m to do whatever I like with him.’
‘Gompacts ...’ began the Baron, and broke off.
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The Biologist looked as if he would like to kick him, but lacked the physical courage.
‘I’ve been telling the Prince he’s too modest,’ said Lady Wyse.
‘P’r’aps you didn’t lead him on enough,’ suggested the diplomat; at which the Biologist vented a sickly grin, and Lady Wyse hit him very hard with her fan.
‘Too modest about himself, I was going to say, if I had a chance of ending my sentences with all you wags about. A man of his talents oughtn’t to be contented to loaf about doing nothing. He might be anything with his intellect—a great writer, or a scientist, or a diplomat, or a financier.’
‘Or a tinker or a tailor, or a soldier or a sailor,’ said the Biologist.
‘Do you think that I’m joking, you idiot?’ said Lady Wyse, emitting a cold shaft of light that went to his backbone.
‘No, of course not, dear Lady Wyse! I was only thinking....’
‘Soldier or sailor—confound you, sir!’ said the
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little General fiercely. ‘There’s no need to drag in the services.’
‘No, no,’ said Lady Wyse: ‘we were talking of intellect.’
‘One isn’t a scientist by wishing it,’ said the Biologist. ‘One has to go through the mill. Besides....’
‘Well, a diplomat, then. He’d look sweet in a cocked hat.’
‘Ah, no really, Lady Wyse, I pro-test,’ said Sir Benet; ‘you don’t know what a grind one has.... Besides....’
‘Ah! I forgot,’ said Lady Wyse, playing with her fan. ‘Prince Dwala’s a black. Isn’t he what’s called a black, Sir Benet?’
‘Well, really, Lady Wyse!’
‘Don’t mind me,’ said Dwala.
‘No, no!’ interposed the Biologist: ‘it’s quite a misuse of terms I assure you. The word is applied loosely to Africans; but it is a mistake to use it in speaking of the Archipelago. The Soochings, as I understand, belong to the Malayan family, with a considerable infusion, no doubt, of Aryan blood. “Dwa-la,” “Two Names,”
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is practically Aryan. So that the Prince belongs, in point of fact, to the same stock as ourselves. In fact, Lady Ballantyne mistook him for an Englishman....’
‘She’s as blind as a bat,’ said Lady Wyse. ‘Still, black or white, he belongs to a very old family.’
‘One of the oldest in the world,’ said Dwala.
‘Well, never mind. Shall we make a writer of him? I’m sure that doesn’t require any preparation.’
‘Ha, ha, that’s good!’ bellowed Lord Glendover. ‘Here, Howland-Bowser’—he beckoned the journalist, who was hovering near the group. ‘Lady Wyse says any fool can be a writer.’ He gripped him by the biceps, presenting him.
‘You know Captain Howland-Bowser, don’t you, Lady Wyse, our great literary man?’
‘No,’ said Lady Wyse, looking calmly at her fan: ‘never heard of him.’
‘Aha, Bowser!’ said the Baron, with a nod.
The Captain withdrew in good order, discomfited but dignified.
‘You’re very discouraging, all of you,’ pursued
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the great lady. ‘I suppose the Baron is now going to tell me that you have to study for twenty years before you can set up as a money-lender.’
‘Dere is only one brofession,’ said the Baron thoughtfully, ‘where one can be great man widout knowing anysing; bot it is de most eenfluential of all.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Bolitics.’
‘Capital!’ said Lady Wyse. ‘We’ll put Prince Dwala in the Cabinet.’
Lord Glendover rose from his chair at this, in what might almost be called a ‘huff.’ His gaunt, important face hung over the group like the top of an old Scotch fir.
‘I don’t know whether this sort of thing is thought funny,’ he said, putting up his large mouth to one side to help support the eye-glass which he was busy placing. ‘But if you imagine, Baron Blumenstrauss, that men are entrusted with responsibility for the welfare of thirty-eight millions of human beings without the most careful process of selection, you are most confoundedly
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mistaken. I never heard such a statement! You’d like to have an entrance examination instituted for Cabinet Ministers, I suppose?’
‘Excellent ideea!’ said the Baron.
‘Sit down,’ said Lady Wyse.
‘Then all I can say is ... you’re an Anarchist! I’ve served my country for forty years,’ he pursued, in a voice broken with emotion, resuming his seat. ‘When I came down, a bright young boy, from Oxford, instead of running about amusing myself, as I might have done, I slaved away for years in an Under-Secretaryship....’
‘This is all in “Who’s Who,”’ said Lady Wyse. ‘We’re talking about Prince Dwala now.’
It was embarrassing and even painful to the smaller quantities of the group to see that great noble child, Lord Glendover, being shaken up and dumped down in this unceremonious way. The diplomat played with his hat, while Huxtable and the Biologist kept very still, with their eyes on the ground. Dwala himself might have been looking on at a game of spillikins for all the interest he showed.
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‘Cabinet Meenister is beeg to begeen?’ propounded the Baron tentatively.
‘It’s impossible!’ murmured Lord Glendover.
‘I don’t know whether you clearly understood what I said about a “compact” just now,’ said Lady Wyse, sitting back, beautifully inert, with her hands in her lap. ‘It’s meant to be taken quite literally. The Prince and I have entered into an offensive and defensive alliance. Whatever we do, we do in common. We have decided that he is to be a Cabinet Minister. You see? If it’s impossible, make it possible. You understand me now, no doubt? I’m pretty clear. You’ll have to exert yourselves, all of you.’ Her eyes travelled slowly from face to face, looking in turn at Lord Glendover, the Diplomat, the Baron, the Biologist, and Huxtable.
‘Yes, you too, Mr. Huxtable.’
Then she suddenly yawned a cat-like yawn, and sauntered forth to where Lady Lillico stood.
‘Good-bye; I’ve had a charming evening. Is this your boy?’
‘Yes, this is Pendred.’
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‘He looks very presentable.’ She nodded and passed on.
Lord Glendover and the Diplomat still sat in their places when the little group dispersed. Lord Glendover rubbed his knees. Their eyes met at last, with the sly surprise of two naughty boys who have just had their ears boxed; smiling defiance, altruistically—each for the other; inwardly resolving to incur no graver danger.
Lord Glendover had only one tiny grain of hope left; he was uneasy till it was shaken out of the sack. He caught Lady Wyse near the door.
‘Do you know that Prince Dwala isn’t a British subject even?’
‘Isn’t he? Make him one.’
‘How am I to make him one?’
‘Oh, the usual way, whatever it is. Find out.’
In the next room she was stopped again. The Biologist came writhing through the grass.
‘I’ve thought of a little plan, dear Lady Wyse, for starting Prince Dwala on his political career.’
‘Have you? I hope it’s a good one.’
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‘First rate. Our member, Crayshaw—he sits for London University, you know....’
‘Hang the details! Ah, there he is!’
Prince Dwala, with his henchman at his side, was lying in wait for Lady Wyse by the second door.
‘Take the ugly duckling away,’ said Lady Wyse; ‘I want to talk to the Prince.’
The Biologist buttonholed poor Huxtable and walked him off. Dwala and Lady Wyse stood face to face again.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well?’ he answered.
They remained for some time in a large, light, comfortable silence.
‘I’d been looking forward to another talk with you,’ said Lady Wyse.
‘Had you?’
‘But I see that we really have nothing to say to one another.’
‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘And never shall,’ she added. ‘It wouldn’t matter if we never met again.’
‘Not a bit.’
‘What fun it is!’
‘Grand!’ said Dwala.
She nodded and went home.
XIX
Hitherto, Dwala had been great, but great only in the relative sense, in comparison with you and me and the Man in the Street; great to the capacity of a vast austerely-fronted house in Park Lane; overwhelming for us on the pavement who fancy him within, infusing that big block with a huge cubic soul; who catch glimpses of him whirling out of the big gates to take tea, no doubt, with Ambassadors and Duchesses, and whirling in again with some real live Royalty—so rumours the little crowd outside as the stout policeman touches his helmet. Not immeasurable, however, to the big-calibred folk who eat with him, talk with him, see him starting on routes of acquaintance which they have long since travelled:
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even to Huxtable, mere man, a calculable quantity.
But a new movement was beginning, an upheaval; volcanic forces were at work; the throes of earthquake, striking premonitory awe into the hearts of men, presaged a rearrangement of geography. And slowly the Great World became aware that a new mountain was rising in its midst.
The Dwala Naturalisation Bill, introduced in the Lords, had run a calm and rapid course, and Dwala was an Englishman. The journals recorded it without exultation: it was placed among the ‘Items of Interest’ in the ‘Daily Mail.’ But soon there followed articles on his scientific interests: it appeared that he was already an eminent philatelist; Huxtable had bought big stamp-collections for him at the sales—Huxtable had innocent tastes which he was now able to enjoy by proxy. The Prince was interested in Antarctic Exploration—at least, he had signed a cheque for a thousand pounds for the Relief Expedition; in astronomy, too, for he had promised a new telescope to the Greenwich
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Observatory. His claims to represent Science in Parliament—since he had decided to go into politics—were indisputable; and there was ground for the rumour that London University had settled upon him for their representative, provided that one or two stipulations were fulfilled. If not, the Government had a safe seat for him in Cornwall.
His private life became a matter of public interest. He had bought Wynfield Castle in Yorkshire; he was fitting it with lifts and electric light; the Saharan Emperor had promised to come over for the shooting next autumn; Sir Benet Smyth, who had arranged the visit, would be there. There was no truth in the rumour of his engagement to Lady Alice Minnifer, Lord Glendover’s daughter; the rumour was at any rate premature.
Politicians began to frequent his ways: he was not destined to be an ordinary humdrum Member, paying a heavy price to be driven in and out of lobbies by a sheep-dog; he was going to be a power. Of what nature, nobody knew exactly; his opinions could only be guessed.
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That mattered very little. All the public has to do is to get the big man and plant him in office; party discipline will do the rest. There were fifteen parties in Parliament, and only two lobbies for them to vote in; leaders with opinions were a drug in the market; better the large unifying vagueness of a mind with none. Why he was to be great no one clearly knew; the fiat had gone forth from some hidden chamber of the citadel; or it had descended inscrutably from heaven, or risen on the breath of the sweating multitude: anyhow, there was a general agreement of unknown origin to magnify the name of Dwala. These things are mysterious, and the responsibility cannot be fixed till the time of recrimination comes.
Huxtable was happy. Well he might be, lucky dog! His uncles smiled and slapped him on the back in public in their big successful way. Lady Glendover remembered his face; Pendred Lillico went about boasting that young Huxtable had been his fag at Eton. These things were pleasant to the Huxtable mind; pleasant also the graciousness of Lady Wyse, who distinguished
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him at her Thursdays above his betters in the social hierarchy.
Yet there were things in Park Lane that he could have wished different. Of course he had done what he could to the right human furnishing of the big house; he had secured his patron the necessary atmosphere of awestruck service, silent efficiency and unassuming pomp. There was the stout butler, who looked like a conscientious low-church Bishop left over from a dinner-party, eager to please but uneasy at finding himself still there. He went about the house silently in flat slippers, seeking a clue to his identity, and looking out of window from time to time, as if he meditated escaping in search of his See. Tall scarlet footmen, with white legs, borrowed from some giant balustrade: stately animals, ‘incedingly upborne,’ like Vashti in ‘Villette’—alert but always perpendicular, eager as midshipmen to the domestic call, blighting visitors at the entry with the frigid consciousness of social difference. For the rest of the economy, invisible hands and watchful eyes; she-brownies that came and went unseen;
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bells that rang in distant corridors, summoning punctual feet to unknown observances; green-baize doors that swung and hid the minor mysteries of the great life.
These things were good. But what of Hartopp and the little girl?
XX
Huxtable’s advertisement in the ‘Morning Post’ had brought applications from 130 valets. It brought also a letter from a country clergyman, beseeking another chance for Prosser—ex-burglar, son of a country poacher, a reformed character—lately returned to his father’s humble home in penitence from Portland, after five years of penal servitude. The blameless, colourless remainder had no chance against him. Dwala was delighted. Prosser came—a little pale man, trim and finicking, with shining eyes; nothing of the brutal house-breaker in him; a man of patient, orderly mind, who had gone to Burglary as another man might
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go to the Bar, because he had ‘influence,’ and no aptitude for any other calling. With his father to back him, he had a connection ready-made among the ‘fences,’ or receivers of stolen goods. He had not thought himself justified in throwing away such chances with a wife and child to keep. He studied the arts of valeting and butlering; entered gentlemen’s houses with a good character from a friendly ‘fence,’ and left them with the jewellery and plate, till he was lagged over a wretched little job in the suburbs, and taken to Portland Bill, where one of his mates—a fraudulent low-church company-promoter—converted him and showed him the wickedness of what he had been doing in all its coarse enormity.
His wife had gone to the bad during his absence, and the little girl had been adopted and cared for by another friendly ‘fence’—an afflicted villain of the name of Hartopp. So much he had heard; but he had not enough the courage of his new innocence to go into that dangerous neighbourhood to find her.
Dwala elicited these facts in cross-examination.
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He was deeply interested in this new side of life; and we must, perforce, follow him into it, though it has little apparent relevance to the present course of the story.
For Dwala’s political eminence is a ‘set piece’ which took some time in the preparing; and in order to give the stage carpenters time to get through with their work, it is convenient at this point to get done with one or two necessary ‘flats.’ Besides, the social heights to which Fate brought him are giddy places for those who have not strong and accustomed heads, and it is safer to descend now and then and amble in the plain, among the greasy multitude that crawls so irrelevantly below—despicable to the mountaineers, who look down and mark the wind-borne cheers, risking their heroic lives at every step among the precipices, yet asking nothing more of the valley than a distant awe, and a handful of guides and porters, with baskets of meat, well-filled, and topped with bottles of good champagne.
Prosser passed under the trees to Hyde Park Corner, bound on his daily walk. His eyes were bright, and the world swam by as unimportant
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as a dream; for Prosser, in the respectable seclusion of his room, had taken to drinking—steady drinking day by day, without resistance or remorse. Life, to which he returned from jail with such hungry imagination, had suddenly revealed itself to him in its ugly arid nakedness: his conversion and good resolutions had stripped it of all its meaning; now it was an old worn billiard-table, with no balls or cues to it; cumbering the room, importunately present, grim and terrible in its powers of insistent boredom. To hide from it—to crouch and hide with his head between his hands, against the dirty floor—that was the only resource since he had renounced the game and sent the balls away. He drank and was happy; not actively happy, but deviating this way and that into dreamy vacancy and strong disgust, escaping the awful middle way of boredom. He felt his control going, and he smiled triumphantly at the coming of his hideous mistress. Often he thought of walking into the servants’ hall and boasting of his secret. But the coarse activity of real life dispelled the longing as soon as he neared his audience. He remained trim, upright, and
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serenely deferent, with shining eyes and pursed dry lips.
At Hyde Park Corner a little crowd was gathered about a musician—an old man, with a leg and a half and a crutch, and a placard ‘BLIND’ on his chest. He had just finished a last shrill bravura on the penny whistle. A respectable wet-eyed girl in black went round with a bag and collected money.
‘Pity the poor blind!’ shouted the musician in a sudden angry imperative.
Prosser wagged his head in a soliloquy of recognition; and gazed giddily at the little girl.
‘Nobody got a penny for the poor blind?’ asked the angry voice.
‘’Ark at ’im,’ said a woman. ‘Why, the gal’s got a nole ’at full!’
‘What girl?’ said the old man sharply.
At that moment the girl dodged through the little crowd and disappeared, bag and all, down Piccadilly.
‘Stop her! stop her!’ cried one or two ineffective voices.
The old man dashed his penny whistle angrily
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on the ground, buried his face in his hands, turned to the wall, and broke into shoulder-shaking sobs.
‘What, ain’t that your gal?’ asked a compassionate stout man in black, with a worn leather bag, touching him gently on the heaving shoulder—a dentist from the slums, one might guess him at.
‘Small girl in black, was it?’ asked the blind man.
‘Yes, I think so. I didn’t exactly notice.’
‘Sort of orphan-looking girl, very quiet?’
‘Yes, that’s her.’
‘That girl’s a——little blood-sucker!’ said the old man. ‘Wherever I go, there’s that girl comes and collects the coppers kind people mean for me. Leave me alone, all of you! Clear out! I’ve broke my whistle now, and haven’t a copper to get another, let alone a crust of bread these three days.’
‘What a shime!’ commented the crowd. ‘Call ’erself a gal! I’d gal ’er! A reg’lar little Bulgarian, that’s what she is!’
‘Now, then, move on there,’ commanded a big
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policeman, bearing down on the crowd, confident in his own broad momentum, like a punt among the reeds. ‘What’s all this?’
‘They’ve been robbin’ a pore blind man, that’s what it is,’ said the benevolent dentist; at which the policeman rounded on him sharply with extended, directing arm.
‘Now then, you move on there!’ And the dentist retired submissively in the direction indicated, hovering in safety.
A benevolent, bent old gentleman, lately helped by the porter down the steps of one of the big bow-windowed clubs, came hobbling up on three legs, and stopped and asked questions. The policeman saluted. The little crowd closed round them; the black helmet in the midst leaned this way and that, arbitrating between misfortune and benevolence. Judgment and award were soon achieved; the black helmet heaved and turned about, and the crowd scattered obediently east and west.
‘What a nice old gentleman!’ said one of many voices passing Prosser.
‘Give ’im a sovring, did he?’
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‘Don’t you wish you was blind, Miss ’Ankin?’
‘Lot of sov’rings you’d give me!’
‘Gow on!’
‘What did they take ’im up for then?’
‘On’y takin’ ’im over the road, stoopid.’
Prosser stood and watched the old man cross in the constable’s grip; saw him loosed into Grosvenor Place; followed, and watched him as he clumped his way along the blank brick wall, leaning forward from the crutch, grotesquely and terribly, towards his extended arm, which beat the pavement with a stick before him, driving pedestrians to right and left, crying furiously as he went ‘Pity the poor blind!’ and stopping now and then to mumble the sovereign and chuckle to himself.
Near Victoria Station he stopped, and thrashed the kerb. A girl slipped out from somewhere and took his arm; the same girl who had so lately robbed him.
‘That you, Joey?’ said the blind man.
‘What luck, Toppin?’
The old man grinned.
‘Got a plunk, Joey; benevolent gent.’
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‘My, what a soft!’
‘Just take me over to Victoria Street. Wait at the Monico; ain’t safe here.’
Over the road he gave the sovereign into her keeping, and she frisked up a side street. Prosser followed him down Victoria Street, helped him silently over the crossings, and was still dreaming of one like himself, meeting an old friend and lacking the energy to acknowledge him; when the blind man turned suddenly and grabbed him by the arm.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Prosser,’ he faltered.
‘I thought so. You’ve been drinking, you —— fool. Where have you been all this time since you came out?’
‘I ... I’m in service.’
‘Ah?’
‘I’ve turned over a new leaf. Was that my little girl?’
‘That was Joey. Why?’
‘I only wanted to know.’
‘Ah! making conversation, as it were. Yes; you’re gentry now, of course—joined the respectable
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classes.’ He fumbled Prosser’s coat as he spoke, feeling round the cloth buttons to see if they were sound and fat. ‘One has to talk for talking’s sake when one belongs to the gentry. Well, I’m off. Don’t waste your elegant conversation on me; go back to the Duchess.... Pity the poor blind!’ He was off again, crying hoarsely along the big grey blocks, and Prosser pursuing timidly.
‘Stop, stop, Mr. Hartopp! You didn’t mind my mentioning the little girl?’
‘Pity the poor blind!’
His appeal to the public was launched with an abrupt intonation which implied a final ‘D—— you!’ as plain as words.
‘It’s my little girl after all,’ said Prosser.
‘Don’t talk like a d——d drunken maudlin fool!’ growled the blind man, stopping short again. People looked over their shoulders as they went past, ladies from the Stores drew aside into the road and hurried by, seeing this maimed old man leaning back over his extended crutch, blaspheming at the trim underling who stood so mild and weak behind him.
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‘I know your sort! rotten gutless puppies that lose their grit as soon as they get under. Portland; good conduct marks; conversion; piety; ticket-of-leave, and then drink, drink, drink! “Gone into service!” “My little girl!” Ugh! What do you want to do with your “little girl”? Would you like the little pet to “go into service” too? and wear a little muslin pinafore, with pockets in front? Speak up, man, speak up. Don’t stand there like a sodden hog, dreaming over your next big drink while I’m making conversation. Don’t you hear me, you elegant toff?’
Prosser started guiltily.
‘I’d been thinking perhaps my employer would find her a nice home somewhere.’
‘A little cottage in the country somewhere, eh? with geraniums in the window and a little watering pot all her own, eh? And what about me? I’d make a pretty footman if you’d recommend me, and stand on the steps in a salmon-coloured suit and help the gentlefolk in and out of their carriages.’
‘He’d do something for you, I’m sure. He’s a very kind master.’
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‘“A very kind master!” Oh, good Lord!... Pity the poor blind!’
‘Mr. Hartopp, Mr. Hartopp!’
The old man stopped again and faced right round.
‘Prosser, if you follow me an inch further I’ll knock out your mucky fuddled brains with my crutch all over the pavement. I swear I will. Go home and soak, you sentimental skunk.’
Prosser stood still for some time watching the angry figure bobbing down the road. Then he turned up by the Turkish Baths and made his way home.
That evening he related the whole of his adventure to Prince Dwala, not even omitting the confession of his own intemperance.
‘So you drink, do you? Drink too much of course, that is.’
‘You’re not angry, sir?’
‘Of course not. Not a bit.... It must be awfully expensive?’
‘I can’t help it, sir. I don’t want to help it. Of course I’ll have to go?’
‘Go where?’
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‘Leave you, I mean, sir.’
‘Oh, please don’t do that, Prosser. You shall have as much as you need. Don’t have more than you really need. I’m sorry it’s you, of course, because I like you so much. But now you explain it to me, I don’t see how it could have been helped. I’m awfully sorry about it. That’s a very wonderful old man.’
‘Mr. Hartopp? Yes, sir.’
‘Do you think he’d come and live here?’
‘He wouldn’t take service, sir.’
‘No, as a friend, I mean. You see, Prosser, this house is much bigger than I really need. I have to live in it, of course, because I’m so rich; besides, there’s poor Huxtable to think of.’
‘You needn’t pity Mr. Huxtable much, sir.’
‘No, that’s true: I suppose he’s very happy. Do you know anything about Mr. Hartopp’s past life? One isn’t born a “Fence” I suppose?’
‘Oh no, sir, it takes a very intelligent man to be a Fence. Mr. Hartopp’s a very intelligent man, and had a first-class education.’
‘What’s his story, then?’
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‘Story, sir? There’s no story as far as I ever heard. Nothing out of the ordinary, sir.’
‘How did he become blind?’
‘Overwork, sir. He was a schoolmaster as a young man down in our part of the country, and overworked his eyes like at his work, sir. That’s how he lost his place. He had a fever, and they took him to the Workhouse Infirmary. It’s that what made him go to the bad, they say, sir; he’d always had a horror of the rates. He often talks of himself as a pauper, as if it was a disgrace like. He’d worked his way up like, sir, and couldn’t stand being mixed up with pauperism. So when they discharged him he came up to London and went to the bad.’
‘Drink, I suppose? It always begins that way, I’m told.’
‘Mr. Hartopp, sir? Oh no, sir, I never knew him drink anything, sir, nor smoke neither. Drink and tobacco he says are ... some funny word, painkillers sort of, to keep the workin’ classes from yellin’ out while they’re bein’ skinned alive. He’s a very funny man, sir, always makin’ jokes. Not but what he’s fond of good livin’ too,
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sir. When trade was good one time he used to go regular every day and lunch at the Carlton. I only found out by chance; I was that surprised. Up till then I’d always took him for a Socialist.’
‘How did he lose his leg?’
‘His leg, sir? I really don’t remember how that was. It wasn’t very long ago, I know. Blind men often get knocked about like in the traffic.’
XXI
Dwala left his valet abruptly and spent many hours walking up and down the picture-gallery, deep in thought. Some of his slow ideas were coming suddenly to maturity.
Men—these strange wild beasts that lived wholly in a delirium of invented characters, assigning fantastic attributes to one another and acting solemn plays where everything was real—blood, knives, and misery—everything but the characters themselves—had thrust on him the
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strangest mask of all; they had made him great. And now, at the touch of one small hand on the lever, all the machinery of the theatre was in motion to make him greater still, with the greatest greatness of all—for so to his rude mind, unskilled in the abstract mystery of Royalty, seemed political greatness, the power of ordering men’s days and nights.
Himself, he was nothing—nothing to anyone but himself; for others he was a suit of irrelevant attributes; no one cared what he thought or felt or was; his Ego had no place in their scheme. He had been always the same; and all his differences were of human making. First Man clapped on him the attribute of Monkey, and purposed putting him in a cage and offering him for an entertainment. Then Man clapped God, King, Prisoner, and Millionaire on him in quick succession; now they were preparing Statesman for him to wear. Empty garments all of them, by the very essence of things: Nature makes no Gods, Kings, Prisoners, Millionaires or Statesmen. All fanciful unsubstantialities of men, real only in their effect on men, as laws of gravity are real
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only in the eagerness of little things to be impelled; empty shells, inhabited by irrelevant I’s that live in corners of them, apart and unconsidered; vacancies, chosen at random for a centre of genuflexions, services, obediences, gold, velvet, paper, and different sorts of food. A wise Providence has ordained that Man’s eyes should be blind to the vision of real naked Nature-given personality: were it suddenly otherwise, the long-wrought classifications of the ages would disappear at once in a confusion of particular differences; all leadership and direction would be lost; just as Science would shiver to a heap of individual facts if she were robbed of her slow-built generalisations.
Dwala saw that he could never merely put aside his mask and say, Behold me as I am. Such revelations are unthinkable to the human mind: one might as well say, Behold me, for I have disappeared. He could renounce Statesman if he liked, stay Millionaire, go back to God or King or Monkey; but until he went away from men, and hid himself in the wild forest, he could
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never be plain self again: he must inhabit either a palace, or a temple, or a cage.
What was he going to do, he asked himself, in this new mask that Man was preparing for him with so much labour? The answer was evident; Lady Wyse knew it too. He was making a Joke, a big slow Joke; men were rolling it painfully up the board for him, panting and groaning, and when it reached the top he would tip it lightly over and see it fall with a crash like a falling mountain. Surely that would make him laugh?
And after? Well, that was a little matter. They would kill him, perhaps; he would die laughing at them, laughing in their angry shame-lit faces as they stabbed him. More probably they would let him go. They would hardly exhibit him in Earl’s Court: ‘Pithecanthropus erectus, ex-Cabinet Minister.’ He would get back to the woods of Borneo again, and laugh among the trees. In any case, he would have had his Joke.
Meanwhile other attributes had been laid on him for which he had no use: power to demand a million little satisfactions, gross and fine, for
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which he had no taste. Space to sleep and wake, food enough to nourish him—that was all he wanted till the great Joke reached the tumbling point. A thousand minor jokes would crop up by the way in the endless inequality of masks: jokes too slender for his own handling. Must all this go to waste? Why not enjoy by proxy? To his large mind it was indifferent who was the agent of enjoyment: himself or another, as they had the fitter talent. Therefore he had long been vaguely seeking someone who could replace him in the present; an ambassador in the courts of luxury; someone vivid, eager, strong and discontented, some Enemy of the World, who could exploit for him the minor meannesses of men, a preparatory humiliation, a handy touchstone for everyday use. Surely Hartopp was the man?
Dwala went with a candle in the middle of the night to his valet’s bedroom and awoke him from uneasy sleep.
‘I’ve made up my mind I must know this Mr. Hartopp, Prosser.’
‘I’m afraid you mightn’t like him if you saw him, sir,’ said the valet, sitting up in his night-cap,
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with hollow eyes, as of one rescued only for a while from some fear to which he must return anon.
‘I don’t know. We’ll go and look for him to-morrow. You know where he lives?’
‘Whereabouts, sir. Somewhere off Shaftesbury Avenue.’
‘All right. We’ll go and look him up to-morrow. That’ll be rippin’. Good-night.’
XXII
Neglecting his engagements and Huxtable’s remonstrances Dwala sought Hartopp for many days in vain. With Prosser at his side he visited the places where children play, open spaces, archipelagos of pavement, washed by the roaring traffic of St. Giles’s: for it was among the children that Prosser gave most hope of finding him.
‘It’s one of his curious ways, bein’ with children, sir; his dram-drinkin’ he calls it. He’s goin’ to raise a Revolution of the children one of these days, he says. He don’t set much store by
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the grown-ups: over-civilised he says they are, while the children are all young savages.’
Hartopp had risen to lofty heights in Prosser’s estimation, since he had realised Dwala’s plans about him; he was a Socrates now, whose every saying had a strange new value in remembrance.
At last they found him. They were standing one sunny summer day in Shaftesbury Avenue, when Prosser cried:
‘There he is!’
A throng of tiny Bacchanals came skipping and whooping out of Endell Street, and in their midst the old Silenus, clumping and swinging jovially along. It was a gay chatter of question and answer, gibe and repartee, flying to and from Silenus to the nymphs, while laughter flickered here and there at random.
They crossed the broad roadway in open defiance of the traffic, and landed on the island where Dwala stood.
‘Five o’clock!’ cried the old Fence as St. Giles’s clock rang out: ‘time you were home for your teas!’ He grinned, and fumbled in his big yellow pocket. ‘What are you waiting for, you
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little animals? Your mothers are all drunk by now, and you’ll get what for if you’re late.... Scramble!’ he shouted, suddenly flinging a handful of pink sweatmeats up in the sunshine and down in the dirt, while the children wallowed and fought with cries of joy.
‘Here’s two toffs,’ said one of the knot of elders, drawing off as Dwala and Prosser approached.
‘Mr. Hartopp,’ murmured Prosser, touching his hat.
‘Aha, my sentimental friend, are you there? I smell you. What’s the news? Have you brought something sweet in chiffon for your darling little daughter to drive in to the Opera to-night?’
‘Hoping you’ll excuse me, Mr. Hartopp, I’ve brought Prince Dwala, my employer, who was anxious to see you.’
‘Oho! the “kind master.” Come to see how the “pooah” live, my Lord?’
‘I’ve come to ask if you won’t come and live with me.’
‘Live with you, d—— you?’
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‘Yes, live with me, at home.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I like you.’
‘The h—— you do! Why?’
‘Because I believe you’re what’s called a “blackguard.”’
‘What’s this feller you’ve got hold of, Prosser? Is he a detective, or a philanthropist, or a lunatic?’
‘He’s what’s called an “eccentric” I believe, Mr. Hartopp.’
‘Where do you live?’ asked the Fence abruptly.
‘Park Lane,’ answered Dwala.
The Fence whistled.
‘What number?’
‘Number —.’
‘Number —?... I’ve got the plans of that somewhere. What’s the plate like, Prosser?’
‘Very handy, Mr. Hartopp,’ answered the valet, falling into old tracks of thought.
‘It’s beautiful plate,’ said Dwala: ‘all the most expensive kinds. You’d have it on the table every day at meals if you came and lived
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with me, Mr. Hartopp: of course you wouldn’t see it, because you’re blind, but you’d know it was there. It’s a lovely house altogether, I believe: everything’s as expensive as we could get anywhere; there are five footmen, and heaven only knows how many housemaids. What I’m looking for is somebody who’d really enjoy all these things. I can’t. It’s such a pity you’re blind, because you’ll miss a lot; in fact, I had half a mind not to ask you, because you were blind. But I was so awfully fetched by the way you threw those sweetmeats to the children.’
‘You’re another d——d sentimentalist, I see. Does he drink too, Prosser?’
‘No, I don’t drink,’ said Dwala: ‘I have so many other amusements.’
‘What’s your income?’
‘Four hundred thousand pounds a year.’
‘Four hun.... Good Lord! you ought to be ashamed of yourself.... Here, Thomas, Andy—anybody there?’ he cried out, hobbling excitedly towards the iron seats.
‘I’m here, Bill!’ came a voice from the distance.
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‘All right, I don’t want you.’ He hobbled back again, and blew three calls on a dog-whistle which hung from his neck. ‘I’ll call Joey.’ Joey came frisking up from nowhere, as dirty as mud could make her.
She turned formal at once on seeing the ‘nobs,’ and put out her tongue at Prosser.
‘Joey, old girl, you see these two d——d fools here? One of ’em’s a Prince of ancient lineage.’
‘What, that great big ugly bloke?’
‘With four hundred thousand pounds a year!’
‘Lor’!’ said Joey, politely.
‘Borrow a hanky from some nice little girl and prepare for hysterics, for the other one’s your long-lost father!’
‘He drinks,’ said Joey, edging away.
Hartopp laughed. ‘It’s wonderful what a lot these children know. Now look here, Joey.... Joey’s included, of course?’
‘Yes, Joey’s included,’ answered Dwala.
‘You wouldn’t like to be a real lady, would you, Joey?’
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‘Wouldn’t I!’ said Joey, shyly but decisively.
‘What! Be a rotten West-End kid?’
Joey giggled an affirmative.
‘Wash every day?’ Another giggle.
‘Ain’t she sweet?’ murmured Prosser.
A sudden idea flashed over Joey’s face.
‘With him about?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I’d be about, Joey,’ said Prosser.
Without a moment’s hesitation Joey fled through the traffic and down St. Martin’s Lane.
‘Well?’ said Dwala: ‘what’s your decision, Mr. Hartopp?’
‘Go to h——!’ said the blind man, hobbling resolutely away. The Prince and Prosser, after standing a little longer, turned and went sadly home again.
XXIII
As Dwala and Huxtable were sitting at breakfast one morning, a week later, the butler leaned down in his gentle fatherly way over the Prince’s
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shoulder, and told him that a man had been asking for him.
‘A blind man, sir, with a little girl with him; very respectable. They came about half-past seven.’
‘Where are they?’
‘They went away again, sir.’
‘Did they say if they were coming back?’
‘Not a word, sir; they just turned round and went into the Park when they heard you wasn’t up.’
Dwala then propounded at length to Huxtable all his ideas about Hartopp and Joey. Huxtable listened quietly, with an occasional colourless: ‘Quite so, quite so.’ He retired to his room after breakfast, and walked up and down a great deal. His ideas cleared after some hours of perambulation. He arrived at the same conclusion as Prosser. Prince Dwala was an eccentric. He thought over the cases of a number of peers and millionaires he knew about who had been eccentric, and suddenly realised that eccentricity was more than respectable; it was chic: it belonged to the grandest school of behaviour. It was not
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what he had expected in coming to Prince Dwala; his own part would be difficult and call for care. It was like the Boer War; that had been eccentric too; but for that very reason it had been the making of his cousin Jim, who was now in command of a brigade. When he came down to luncheon he looked at Dwala with an interest almost tender.
Meanwhile Hartopp and Joey had not come back. Dwala had been out into Park Lane three or four times in the course of the morning, looking vainly up and down for them. There was only a patient four-wheeled cab, with two big new leather trunks on it, standing a little way off the gate; the driver opened his eyes heavily each time Dwala emerged, and then returned to sleep.
It was one of those solemn summer days which visit London like dreams: one of those days when Hyde Park, with its smooth lawns and ancient dignity of trees, seems like the revelation of a purpose in this fantastic world—a purpose to which the surface of aristocratic life, with its carriages and frocks and parasols, seems so well
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attuned, that one is convinced that the whole mass of it must needs be as respectable as Nature.
They came at last: Dwala was on the steps to meet them: Hartopp in a well-brushed black tail coat; Joey looking ugly in a tight velvet frock and feathered hat, her hair drawn back into a pig-tail, all clean but her hands.
They both looked tired and saddened. Dwala felt a sudden disillusion, a reduction of something big to small dimensions.
‘Is that your cab outside?’ he asked.
Joey nodded. ‘But we’ve not decided yet. We’ve only come to have a look.’
She ran up the steps, and stopped, peering into the dark entry, awed by the motionless forms of the big footmen.
They went all over the house with Dwala, from bottom to top, conscientiously, doggedly, examining everything. Joey insisted: Hartopp followed, mumbling morosely. Joey listened to all explanations with that air of undue, almost effusive, attentiveness, which marches so nearly with boredom. They saw Huxtable once on a landing: he was passing from one room to
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another, in spectacles, with a bundle of papers; he always wore spectacles till tea-time. He looked at them drily, externally, as one looks at events in another family.
A kind of depression, a melancholy hush, weighed on the whole house and household, as if someone had just died. One thing only was certain: they all knew that the pretence of a probation was an empty one; Hartopp and Joey had come to stay.
Hartopp was aware of this, and wondered at his own blank listlessness. The Enemy of Society felt suddenly as a wild bull might, which had spent a long hot day goring a big cathedral and was now being led quietly to a pew. There is a magic in our masquerading: it is with deep feelings of solemnity that man shuffles off one disguise and gets into another; the fraudulent company-promoter, growing rich, enters upon his fortune almost with the same ennobling awe as a young girl going to her Confirmation.
Hartopp made an effort: he stopped Dwala as they went downstairs.
‘Let’s understand one another clearly, Prince
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What’s-your-name. If I come, I come as a free man: Joey too. We come as gentry, or we don’t come at all. The servants are to treat us with respect as such. Do you see?’
‘Of course, of course.’
‘We’ll have the best of everything: eat what we like, drink what we like, spend as much money as we like. Do you see? No d——d philanthropy.’
‘I promise you solemnly.’
‘That’s right.’
The cabman was paid off and the boxes were brought in.
‘Both Joey’s,’ said Hartopp: ‘I’ve brought nothing.’
‘I’ll have a fire in my bedroom, please,’ said Joey.
Huxtable came in at tea-time and recounted three amusing anecdotes, at which Joey stared in awe and the old man chuckled faintly. The butler inquired if the young lady would like a maid to unpack her boxes. Joey declined: she would do it herself.
She went out primly after tea, to see to it,
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jangling keys on a string. Huxtable went back to some mysterious ‘work.’
Then the air cleared suddenly. The blind man unbent with a touch of humour. It is humour that keeps the door in the wall through which alone we may hope to peep into our neighbour’s garden. We have passed that ivy-grown, impenetrable portal a thousand times, when suddenly one day we find it open, and instead of a dog growling in an arid patch of weeds, we find a friendly neighbour grinning in our face.
‘Do you know what’s in those boxes?’ said Hartopp confidentially.
‘No; what?’
‘Wood pavement.’ He exploded with laughter. ‘Her things weren’t fit to bring, but she wouldn’t be seen arriving without luggage; so she put that in to weight them down. That’s what the fire’s for. She’ll keep ’em locked till she’s got it all burnt—a little day by day. Don’t let her know I told you.’
It was a great nuisance, Dwala said, he had to go out that evening. Huxtable must entertain
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them. As for himself, he was dining with Lady Wyse.
‘Is Lady Wyse a friend of yours?’
‘A great friend.’
‘The one whose name’s always in the paper?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, take my advice and don’t let Joey know.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’d look down on you.’
‘Why? Lady Wyse is a very charming woman.’
‘You say that because you’re a toff. She’d hear a very different name, if she came down our street. I’d tell her straight myself.’
XXIV
It was quite a small party at Lady Wyse’s. Disturnal was there, the rising young High Church M.P.; Sir Peter Parchmin; his wife, and a few miscellaneous ladies; General Wapshot; a Man with a Clever Face; an Eminent Scientist; and a Philosopher. This last was not a speaking character; a little wizened man with a bald
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head; he had made a reputation in his youth by retiring into solitude for three years and coming back with the apophthegm, ‘Give me a pebble and a protoplasm and I will make you a universe.’ Nobody having given him either, his plans had rested there. They put him in a Chair at Cambridge, and he had never opened his mouth since. He and the Eminent Scientist were men with that peculiar knack the learned have of looking out of place in any clothes they wear, but convincing you somehow that they would look more out of place without them. Lady Wyse had invited them quite at random, because she thought they would be interested in a scientific scheme which Sir Peter was to propound that night; she could not surely be expected to distinguish different sorts of savants?
Lady Parchmin was a tired but talkative blonde, who made one feel sorry for Sir Peter in a kind of abstract way; yet she was a saint, and he was an immoral man. He pretended to pursue Lady Wyse from mean and interested motives; but there he lied. His love for Lady Wyse was the only genuine sentiment he had
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ever felt—that was why she tolerated him; she was a strong ennobling thought, like Wagner music remembered or imagined in a railway train; his wife, the eternal passenger who sat before him, dim and dowdy, on the other seat, was only a monument of dull duty and a long-forgotten fancy.
Dinner was drawing to a close. Wine and fruit were going round; the butler had marched his squad away.
The Man with the Clever Face suddenly distinguished himself—Lady Wyse had introduced him as ‘the well-known Mr. Holmes,’ but neither Disturnal nor the General nor the Eminent Scientist remembered to have heard of him before. Lady Parchmin had been recounting her emotions on seeing a newspaper placard as she drove to dinner.
‘“There,” said I when I saw it, “I’m sure it’s the man I saw them arresting this morning.”’
Mr. Holmes broke silence for the first time. He fixed his penetrating gaze on Lady Parchmin’s hair, and said:
‘You must have said that to yourself then, for you drove here alone.’
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She put her hands up quickly to her head, saying:
‘Good Heavens! How do you know that? I did. Peter walked.’
‘How extraordinary!’ murmured the guests.
‘Do tell me how you told?’ said Lady Parchmin.
Mr. Holmes looked round the table with a dry, triumphant smile; then leaned confidentially towards Lady Parchmin, and explained:
‘I saw your husband’s goloshes in the hall.’
‘You must be a detective!’ said Lady Parchmin.
‘I am,’ he said.
‘How funny!’
‘Odd thing to meet at dinner, isn’t it?’ said their hostess languidly. ‘Now then, Sir Peter, out with your little scheme.’
Sir Peter cleared his throat and rearranged his wine-glasses. He looked at Dwala.
‘I think you were present, Prince, at an evening at Lady Lillico’s, where I was made to deliver a little lecture on the Missing Link?’
Dwala looked steadily into the Biologist’s
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eyes: he saw nothing there but an enterprise and the desire to please; but he was conscious of a secret triumph of amusement emanating from Lady Wyse.
‘Yes, I was there.’
‘I mentioned, if you remember, a scheme for an expedition?’
‘Yes, to find the Missing Link.’
‘Quite so. Well, our plan is this—I’m empowered to speak for the University—the new writ is issued, and we can proceed to nomination at any moment. Now, of course, we don’t sell our nomination; you quite understand that?’
Mr. Disturnal caught his roving eye, and nodded brightly.
‘But we’re determined to have a scientific man, or a man interested in science. The University is delighted to accept you; but you must prove your interest in science in the way that they select. Well, they’ve selected a way, and if you accept their conditions, you’ll be nominated on Saturday, which is the same thing with us as being elected.’
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‘What’s the condition?’ asked Dwala.
‘That you guarantee the Missing Link Search Fund by handing in a cheque for 50,000l., the balance, if any, to be returned when the search is over. Mr. Holmes here is going out to Borneo in charge of the expedition; and a scientist or two will go with him. Do you accept?’
Dwala glanced at Lady Wyse.
‘Certainly. I’ll send you the cheque to-night.’
‘And what do you propose to do with the Missing Link when you’ve got him?’ asked Mr. Disturnal.
‘Ah!’ said the Biologist, consulting the eye of the Eminent Scientist: ‘that’s a big question.’
‘Can’t you imagine,’ said Lady Wyse, ‘what a scientist would do with a strange animal?’
‘I’d put him in a bag and drown him, by Gad!’ said the General genially.
‘Ah, you’re not a scientist, General,’ said Lady Wyse. ‘Sir Peter would thank Providence humbly for his opportunities, and set about studying the creature’s soul. Can’t you imagine him walking politely round it asking questions?’
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‘Lady Wyse is joking, of course,’ said the Biologist. ‘If I got hold of the animal, I know perfectly well what I should do.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Mr. Disturnal, in his bright, intellectual way.
‘I should examine his hippocampus minor.’
‘Well, really!’ said Lady Wyse, pushing back her chair: ‘we women had better be going.’
‘It’s a curve in the brain,’ almost shouted Sir Peter, hurrying to the door handle: ‘the thing Owen and Huxley fell out about.’
‘Bring the men up quick,’ said Lady Wyse. ‘I and your wife’ll have nothing to talk about upstairs but you, and we’ll both be bored to death.’
Mr. Holmes, who went early, had a great send-off; he was going straight to Plymouth that night to superintend the preparation for the expedition, which had only awaited Dwala’s promise. Sir Peter Parchmin made a speech, and Mr. Holmes made a speech, and everybody waved handkerchiefs on the balcony as he drove away.
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‘Well,’ said Lady Wyse, as Dwala sat down beside her at last: ‘what do you think of my little joke?’
‘It’s too human.’
‘I thought you’d be amused.’
‘It takes a great deal to make me laugh.’
‘Are you afraid people will discover your secret?’
‘I think you’re rash.’
‘I’m not. I’m calculating. Arrived where you are, you could sit all day on a churchyard wall yelling your secret in people’s ears, and they would pay no attention to it.’
‘Unless an honest man came by, or a clever one.’
‘An honest man wouldn’t be clever enough to hear it, and a clever one wouldn’t be honest enough to repeat it.’
‘Don’t endanger a joke for the sake of a ... an epigram.’
‘Do you know, Prince, I have a sort of presentiment our joke will never come off.’
‘Shall I never have a good laugh before I die?’
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‘Who knows? Something may turn up.... But why do you cough like that? Are you ill?’
‘No. I often cough like that.’
‘It would spoil everything if you were ill.’
With a little gesture Lady Wyse summoned the watchful Parchmin, and bade him bring his fellow-savants.
‘What’s the matter with Prince Dwala?’ she asked. ‘He coughs in a funny way. Examine him.’
The command covered the whole trio. The Philosopher assumed a frivolous look. The Eminent Scientist disclaimed competence: he was Chemistry or something.
‘Nonsense!’ said Lady Wyse. ‘What’s the good of being a scientist?’
Dwala towered serenely while the Biologist and the Eminent Scientist—having exchanged grimaces of apology—walked round and round him, with their ears to his sides, one behind the other, as if it were a game, with an occasional murmur from the Biologist of ‘Cough again’—‘Say ninety-nine.’
The little bald Philosopher stood opposite,
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with his eyebrows raised and his hands behind his back, tipping himself patiently up and down on his toes, like a half-witted child. The Biologist, meeting the Eminent Scientist accidentally at a corner, made a parenthesis of his mouth and shook his head. Coming to the perpendicular soon, he recommended care and a healthy life.
‘Do you think there’s anything the matter with the Prince?’ Lady Wyse asked Parchmin, aside.
‘I couldn’t say,’ said the Biologist. ‘I should like to examine him properly first.’
‘How properly?’
‘One can’t tell anything through a shirt-front.’
‘Take him in there,’ she commanded, pointing to the door of the next room, ‘and examine him thoroughly.’
Dwala hesitated. ‘Isn’t he ... clever?’ he murmured.
‘It’s all right,’ she smiled back; ‘he isn’t honest.’
A few minutes later, when the guests were gathering about Lady Wyse to say good-bye,
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the door of the side-room burst open, and Sir Peter Parchmin came tumbling out, white with horror. He seized the General, who was nearest to him, in a wild embrace—half as a leaning-post, half as a protection—crying:
‘Good Lord! He’s got a ta ... ta ... ta....’
‘Confound you, sir!’ said the General; ‘do you take me for Lady Parchmin?’
The Biologist only clung the closer, babbling feebly in his ear:
‘He’s got a ta ... ta ... tail!’
It was true. Dwala had a tail. Now I am aware that in these days of learning, when many an ordinary College Don knows as much science as the elder Pliny, this will seem almost incredible; and in the eyes of some it will throw doubt on the truth of my story, for it is well known that the anthropoid apes have no tails. But then Dwala was not an anthropoid ape, but a Missing Link. The fact is that in the old times there were as many varieties of Pithecanthropus erectus as there are nowadays of Homo
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sapiens britannicus; but the physical differences between them were far more clearly marked than ours. The aristocracy of the race, to which Dwala’s family belonged, were distinguished from the plebeians, not merely by the greater stoutness of their bony structure and the superior coarseness of their fur—distinctions which a demagogue might have argued down to nothing—but also by the possession of tails, a thing about which there could be no mistake. Among the lower classes even the merest stump, the flattering evidence of an old scandal, entitled the owner to a certain measure of respect.
‘Confound his tail!’ exclaimed the peppery General, pushing him away. ‘Who’s got a tail? the dog?’
‘Dog?’ murmured the Biologist, in the dazed, indignant tones of a man under the influence of a drug. ‘No! Prince Dwala!’
The General dropped rigid into an armchair, and bobbed up and down on the springs of it. A shocked silence fell on the room, as if something grossly indelicate had been shouted out.
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Men blinked and lowered their heads; women stared and raised them. There was a movement as of looking for things lost, an untranslated impulse towards the stairs.
Lady Wyse, the one thing alive in this wax-work show, went quickly to the door and put her back against it, hand on handle, to prevent the figures from escaping.
‘Sir Peter is talking like an idiot,’ she said, in low, clear tones; ‘he knows perfectly well that Prince Dwala no more has a tail than any one of us has.’
The horror of the fact suggested passed directly into indignation at the suggestion of it. They turned on the Biologist, demanding an explanation. The little General voiced the public feeling. He shot up out of his chair, and shook the tall savant violently by the lappels of his coat.
‘Have you been drinking, sir? Do you know that there are ladies present?’
A chorus of inarticulate wrath went up. They crowded scowling round the frightened Parchmin, women with folded arms, men with
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their hands thrust deep down into their trouser pockets.
‘Now then sir, explain yourself!’ said the General; ‘what do you mean by a tail?’
‘Da ... da ... did I say a tail?’
The General shook him again. ‘You know you did!’
‘I ... I ... I ... I didn’t mean a tail,’ stammered the Biologist; ‘not in the ordinary sense....’
‘You said tail, sir!’
‘I didn’t mean an ... an ... an actual prolongation of the caudal vertebrae.’
‘Well, what did you mean, then?’
‘I only meant he had....’
‘Go on.’
‘I thought I detected....’
‘Go on—go on.’
‘That if the Prince wasn’t careful ... there was a sort of incipient hardening of the skin which might lead to what German doctors call a “tail.” It’s a purely technical term. I ... I ... apologise, I’m sure, for having spoken inadvertently.’
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‘He ought to be ashamed of himself!’ was the general verdict.
‘What a dreadful thing to happen at a dinner-party!’
‘At Lady Wyse’s too, of all places!’
They all turned their backs on him, and crowded round Dwala, who emerged serenely at this moment from the next room; shaking hands warmly with him, as if he had just achieved a triumph. Mr. Disturnal smiled him a meaning smile as he said good-bye.
Dwala and the Biologist were the last to go.
‘Good-bye,’ said Lady Wyse to Sir Peter. ‘I suppose you’ll stop the Expedition now?’
‘Stop the Expedition? Why?’
‘Great heavens! Then you haven’t guessed the secret after all?’
The Biologist stared at her with wild eyes for several seconds, then suddenly twirled and fell like a sack on the floor. When they had bathed him back to his senses at last, he sat up on his hands and said:
‘Prince Dwala must blow his brains out!’
Lady Wyse rang laughter like a bell.
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‘Why?’ asked Dwala, greatly interested.
‘Any English gentleman would.’
‘I forbid it!’ said Lady Wyse.
‘Why?’
‘He’d spoil his hippocampus minor.’
‘Pah!’ exploded Sir Peter bitterly: ‘you always take his side.’
XXV
Arrived in his own hall, Dwala became aware of a faint shrill voice talking rapidly and jerkily, accompanied by an even whirring noise. He opened the library door. The room was lighted brilliantly. To the left sat Hartopp, in evening dress, in a big armchair, with his leg on another chair; a champagne bottle and glasses were on a table beside him; he was smoking a fat cigar, and grinning as he listened. Below him, sitting on the floor, with her pale face thrown back against the chair, was Joey fast asleep. In the middle of the room sat Huxtable, serious and concentrated, managing the gramophone: one
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hand hovered over it, deft, square, and muscular, lightly adjusting some moth’s wing of a lever in the instrument. Beyond him, in the background, was a stout, serious, important looking man, with his face blacked—a nigger minstrel in red and black striped trousers, with a tiny doll’s hat pinned on the front of his head—who rose respectfully at Dwala’s entrance, a glass of champagne in one hand and a banjo in the other.
Evidently Huxtable had been doing his best to entertain the guests.
XXVI
Dwala was duly elected, and took his seat in the House of Commons.
This Parliament, which had come in with loud blowing of trumpets as a truly representative assembly, was but a poor thing after all, the rickety child of a long line of dissipated ancestors; a perplexity of Imperialists, Federalists, Separatists, Food Taxers, Free Traders,
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Church Reformers, Church Defenders, Labour Members, Irish Members, and Members frankly representative of private aims—men who sat for cotton, or coal, or simply beer. No Prime Minister could have ruled the country with it.
The Government was in a tottering condition. Round after round they had been so heavily punished by the Opposition, that it was all they could do to stand up, dizzy and defensive, to await the knock-out blow. The Irish Party, sated with concessions, had got altogether out of hand, and at last gone frankly over to the other side. O’Grady, their leader, like an elusive knight in a game of chess, sprang here and there about the board, attacking in two or three places at once; while the big-wigs of the Liberal Party sat solidly on their squares, breathing destruction down appropriated lines. Tory Rooks and Tory Bishops trembled every time O’Grady moved, and pawns went down like nine-pins, sacrificed in the hope of deferring the inevitable check-mate. The poor Premier, designed by Nature for a life of contemplation, marvelled at the inconsiderate unrest of public men, and sought a decent
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opportunity of withdrawing to the urbane refinements of private life.
Meanwhile, what is called ‘the business of the country’ must be carried on. Posts worth several thousand pounds a year cannot be left begging for an occupant; as Ministers went under in the attack, new Ministers must be found, not among the jealous multitude of small-bore country squires and city manufacturers, but among the big guns of longer range. Dwala was eminently one of this park. His apparition in politics had been so sudden; the influence of his backers was so strong; his stooping from big opportunities of pleasure to the tedium of Parliament was so much of a condescension, that the Party felt he had a right to a handsome recompense. Besides, the last vacant post could only be filled by a representative of one of the great seats of learning. Dwala was made President of the Board of Education. He said nothing, he did nothing; others talked and worked; and all agreed that he was a great success. He was the best-informed Minister in the Cabinet. Others acted and did harm; he studied and did none.
XXVII
Much time passed. The Government stagnated, but the national life went on, like a river piling its waters against the tottering dam.
Then came the Great Crisis in which the Prime Minister went down. The nation was no longer on the brink of ruin, as the ravens had so long croaked, but in the very midst of it.
There is an all-powerful Guardian of Truth, who avenges every lie. Master, not of the world, which runs by rule, but of the Inward Meaning of it, which is beyond the range of law; Master, not of enterprises and institutions, but of the living souls of things which they rudely symbolise; as the Poet is Master, not of words and verses, but of the thing obscurely hidden in them; as the Musician is Master, not of notes and harmonies, but of the soul made audible in them, like an invisible gossamer thread revealed in dew: He teaches by destroying. The history of Man is the history of the Master’s contempt for lies. The seer of the Inward Truth sings its glory to a world of fools, who mistake his
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symbols for the Truth itself and the seer for the Master of it, building states and religions of the symbols; whereat the True Master laughs, and the building tumbles, crushing men in its ruins.
Ruins of lies fell upon England, crushing those that dwelt there as they fell. England had reverenced forms and insulted realities. With antiquarian fervour run riotously mad, we had thrust full-blooded, growing realities into the shrunken and tattered livery of old forms, stifling the life out of them; realities of Pure Ethic and Awe of the Insoluble Secret into old liveries of Christian dogma; realities of Anglo-Saxon gospel of universal Freedom into liveries of insolent insular Imperialism; realities of Democracy into old liveries of Feudalism, raising Tailors to high places due to sages and centaurs—summoning Lords of the Shears and Thread to put patches over the rents burst in the garments by the swelling life within, when we should have torn the old fripperies away and let the Titan loose from his bondage.
England was rich in men and minds and
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money; but the different owners of them stood face to face clutching their wealth, hissing defiance, petrified with jealousy, while the worms crept in and devoured it, and England starved. Good Government costs but little; but these men, rich in hands and brains and the plunder of the centuries, wrangled who should pay for Government, each preferring Anarchy to Government at his own cost; and the foreigners coursed over the seas and took everything but the bare land from us; the foreigners had no need to take that from us for our ruin, for life is not the thing that stands still in its place, but the thing that comes and goes, and while we boasted of our fleet—as the paunchy brewer boasts of his cellar full of vats—and while we boasted that no one dared to invade our country, the pride and the boast turned bitter on our lips, and we found ourselves the starving masters of a sun-sucked ash-heap.
So came the great Famine, punishing the lies; men, women, and children died in their thousands; the poor birds died also, and the dogs and the horses—losing their long faith in the wisdom of
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imperial man. The Titan’s livery hung loose about him; and the Lord High Tailors shook their heads over their steak and onion, and said that the waist needed taking in.
Men had not died without a struggle; there had been riots and fighting and theft; empty bellies had gone of their own accord through broken windows to fill themselves with guinea loaves, and thence to the crowded gaols to pick oakum into ropes to hang their leaders with; women died patiently, like overloaded horses that fall on the climbing hill, with a last look of the white bewildered eye entreating pardon of their masters for having failed to drag the burden to the top. Children died believing in their mothers; women died believing in some God or Fate; men died believing in nothing but the Police.
At last the Famine abated; the ships of corn came hurrying in. Men are men after all; and
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what is the function of the Colonies if not to forgive the senile sins of England—to overlook the insults of the Old Dotard’s vanity, and help him in his hour of need?
For England is at once Titan and Dotard. Youth and old age, submissive strength and tyrannous impotence—these are the two forces which make the parallelogram of public life. The hard old father hobbles nobly on his ebony cane in the sunshine of the castle terrace, unwilling to shuffle off his gout and agues and be at peace, because he envies possession to this rugged giant of an heir-in-tail, whom he keeps carrying burdens, like Caliban, in the cattle yard. Happy the day when we shall bear the old man at last, with ceremonious countenances, to the expectant churchyard, and pack him solemnly away in his ancestral vault.
The habit of trusting in symbols instead of realities is not easily put off. Those who have lived in darkness cannot face the sun of truth at once; when the castle falls they run, not to the fields, but to the stalls and sheds. When the vengeance of disaster comes upon a nation,
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men fly instinctively from the owlish darkness of their ruined symbols to the twilight of other symbols.
Dreading above all things the multiple solitude which hastens every way at once; craving before all things that sureness of direction in space which makes the intensity both of hope and of prayer; fixing their eyes on a personality as the distracted peasant fixes his eyes on an image or an eikon, the crowd betake themselves, of a sudden unanimous impulse, all in one way, shouting the name of a saviour or a scapegoat, clearing confusion by the embodiment of vengeance and deliverance in limited thinkable dimensions. They burn the witch, and clamour round the prophet.
But of forty million men, who can say which is the true prophet?
In times of peace the mass of men live like fish in tanks, aware of dim shades that come and go beyond, recking little of what is outside their own tiny range of weed and gravel. To be great with the mass is not to be a collection of definite great facts, but only a constantly recurring vagueness.
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‘I know his name,’ is the sum of ordinary knowledge of great men. But with constant repetition the name of a man or a cause takes on an awe-inspiring, trust-compelling quality, and the fishes cry ecstatically: ‘Napoleon!’ ‘Buller!’ ‘Chamberlain!’ ‘Carter’s Little Liver Pills!’ ‘Hurrah!’—and this makes fame. While the great Poet is starving obscurely into immortality, the crowd without is staring awestruck at the famous Laureate’s feather-nodding coach, as it rolls him to oblivion in St. Paul’s. Why are all these people craning and jostling in the roadway? Is it because they loved the Laureate’s poems? Did he touch some chord in their hearts which the poor Poet’s fingers were too delicate to handle? Not a bit! They know the one man’s verses no better than the other’s; they stand lamenting for the Laureate simply because they have so often heard his name.
And now Dwala’s was such a name. His mind and character were still unknown, even to journalists; but the wavering darkness of his name had long been familiar to the fish in every tank. For months they had read of him in
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papers and magazines: his wealth, his success, his eccentricity, had been the talk of England. Then he had gone into Parliament and figured large in the comic cartoons. Others, after short notability, had lost favour by their speeches or their deeds; Dwala had left his reputation to grow of itself, like a tree. They felt his largeness. He was talked of everywhere as the capable man of the Cabinet. A Minister, he was remarkable even among ordinary Members as the man who never spoke. He was the ‘strong and silent man in a babbling age.’
In the hour of despair the people clamoured, with as much reason as they usually have for such clamouring: ‘Prince Dwala alone can save us! Down with Glendover! Down with Whitstable! Down with Huggins! Dwala for ever!’ The papers talked of a new era and a new man, who was to ‘cleanse the Augean stable’ and set Old England on its legs again.
For the lobby and the drawing-room all this had to be translated into a new language, full of such terms as ‘popular in the House’—‘the support of the Church Party’—‘keep things
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going’—‘able to entertain’—‘stop the mouth of the Irish Members.’ The division of ‘politics’ from national life which such phrases indicate does not arise from any cynicism in the ruling classes, but from our system of government itself. The evil begins in the polling booth, where men are elected, not to sit for England, but to sit for a party or for local wants. The interest of the nation is the only interest unrepresented in the House of Commons.
Deafened with the shouts of the people, afraid to venture to his official home through the angry crowds that filled Whitehall, the Premier tendered his resignation, and retired—poor scapegoat—to his gardened grange, to finish his book on Problems of Pure Thought.
XXVIII
Disturnal came and went with an air of genial mystery. The cab that carried him from Lady Wyse’s to Prince Dwala’s carried the fate of the nation on its two wheels. He came to assure
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Dwala of the support of the powerful Catholic Anglican party, of which he was business manager.
‘Of course, I’m only a layman,’ he said, with his broad muscular clean-shaven smile; ‘but you may take it the thing is done. The Bishop of Windsor will have to come and see you, just as a matter of form. He’s our President. He’s a dear old thing; you’ll like him. You’ll only have to give him some lunch, and pat him on the back and send him home again. I’ve settled it all with Lady Wyse.’
The Bishop came to lunch—really a ‘dear old thing’; a crumpled and furrowed saint, with the wise brow of a Scotch terrier, fitted for better things than to be managed by a scheming Jesuit like Disturnal. Dwala respected him as a man; Huxtable as a Bishop; Hartopp as neither. The mere title of Bishop was enough to provoke the fury of that pewed ox. The old Fence broke in on the respectable conversation of the lunch-table with ribald questions and sly allusions to Lady Wyse, and parsons, and hopes of the Archbishopric—all of which amused him very much, and only bewildered the good prelate, who had
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no notion what he was driving at. Hartopp soon pushed his plate away, and sat with his chin resting on the table and his pale blind eye-balls turned on the Bishop, chuckling to himself, like the head of some decapitated sorcerer in the ‘Arabian Nights’ making fun of a wicked Caliph.
His conversational successes pleased him so much that he grew gay and gallant when Dwala brought up Lady Wyse herself an hour later to his rooms to introduce her.
That crafty lady had prepared the way for friendship three weeks before by sending him ‘The Doings of Thomasina,’ over which the world was laughing—written by a lady of fashion, and absolutely true to life, so Huxtable assured him. It had been the delight of many evenings when Huxtable read it aloud to him and Dwala.
‘If people went on like that in Seven Dials,’ he said, ‘there’d be black eyes all round, and a lickin’ for the girl at the end of every page.’
But he chuckled hugely, relishing it as a light upon the manners and customs of the nobs.
He had the first floor to himself now, eight rooms in a suite. He was very strict in his sense
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of property, rushing out like an angry spider from his lair if he heard sounds of intrusion. But this afternoon he needed company as an outlet for the pride of his conversational performance, and he hobbled forth on the landing with a grin when he heard voices on the stairs.
‘Ah, Lady Wyse, is it? We had some talk about you at lunch to-day, my lady. “Lady Wyse is an old friend of mine,” says the Bishop. “Ha, ha,” says I; “she’s a fine woman by all accounts.” And then I laughed, and Huxtable up and asked the Bishop about the state of the Parsons’ Relief Fund. “Parsons,” says I; “why I read the Bible right through once when I was a boy, for a bet, and the word parson isn’t mentioned once in the whole of the book. I suppose you hope to be Archbishop some day?” says I. He pretended not to hear; but I wasn’t going to let him off. “Didn’t Lady Wyse say anything about you bein’ made Archbishop?” I says. “Not a word,” says he. “Didn’t she wink?” says I. “One doesn’t wink at Bishops,” says Huxtable. “Ah,” says I; “you don’t know Lady Wyse”; and I and the Bishop roared
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with laughter. The old man knows a thing or two.’
Lady Wyse listened patiently, and charmed the Fence outright, without exertion, by sitting down at the piano—his piano, which nobody might touch without his leave—and playing him ‘Simple Aveu’ and ‘The Song which Reached my Heart.’ The proletariat, who abhor sentimentality in real life, like nothing else in art. The sound of the music drew Joey, a sad little creature now that she saw the possible limitations of the pleasure of wearing new hats and steaming slowly in a motor-car round the Park. Hearing her footstep four rooms off, while he was leaning, full of noble emotion, over the plaintive piano, Hartopp rushed thumping away, knocking over little tables as he went, and cursing to himself.
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s only me, Toppin.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I come to hear the music.’
‘What do you mean by comin’ in without askin’? Have you cleaned yourself up?’
‘Not partic’lar.’
XXIX
They had tea in Hartopp’s room. Lord Glendover came in to inquire after Dwala’s health, which had been visibly failing the last few days.
‘We’ve cleared the last obstacle now,’ said Lady Wyse, marching up and down the room. ‘To-morrow Dwala will step into the Premiership. Hooray for the new Premier!’
She waved her cigarette triumphantly in the air.
‘The Church Party practically held the balance, don’t you see? Well, they were ready to follow Lord Whitstable, or Huggins, or Strafford-Leslie, or Prince Dwala. Lord Glendover, of course, was out of it. Well, Whitstable’s shelved: he’s incompetent, and he knows it.’
‘It’s very hard on him,’ said Lord Glendover.
‘Still, he gets the Governorship of Australia,’
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said Lady Wyse; ‘and that’s fifteen thousand or so a year; not so bad after all. He’s responsible for the loss of thousands of lives in Africa.’
‘Yes; but think of the poor beggar’s feelings!’
‘Huggins’s hopes were ruined by his case against the Red Sea Shipping Company. It came out that his firm had been exporting arms to the Mad Mullah.’
‘But quite innocently!’ said Lord Glendover. ‘He’s a business man; he didn’t know it was against the law.’
‘So there was only the Prince and Strafford-Leslie left in the running. Strafford-Leslie offered an Episcopal Council for Church Jurisdiction; and we ... well, we really offered nothing.’
She laughed.
XXX
His appointment as Prime Minister was in the papers two days later, with a throng of leading articles shouting Evoë!
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A spirit of busy gaiety ruled over the big house in Park Lane; such a spirit of Bohemian ease as comes where private theatricals are preparing. The policy of the Empire and the distribution of places centred there. Everything bustled cheerfully; doors stood open; people came and went; meals were snatched on corners of littered tables: the servants were infected; footmen ran up and down the stairs like school-boys; housemaids tittered at baize-doors, and forgot pails on landings.
And in the midst of it, still and listless, sat Dwala—the new Prime Minister. Something strange had happened; he saw the world fading and losing interest before his eyes. What was the thing he had looked forward to so eagerly? A joke? What is a joke? In this new obscurity his mind could not piece the thing together aright. Some sort of surprise and ridicule? No matter. He was sorry for these pitiful actors now; there was something so futile about all this busy scheming in a world of shades. To show the unimportance of importance? Was that his joke? Pooh! the joke itself was not
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important enough to amuse him now; five minutes’ fun for a Hartopp; nothing more.
Strange that the world should have altered so! He had noticed something amiss with it that day he went to Windsor to receive his appointment as Prime Minister; an unnatural clearness, like the clearness of a landscape before a storm.
As he stood on the platform at Paddington, looking at the crowd of pleasure-seekers—men and women in boating-costumes—he had seen them, not as creatures of flesh and clothes, but as translucent wraiths, grinning and gibbering in one another’s faces; the only real live being there, the Guard—Odysseus playing Charon in Hades—watchful, responsible, long-glancing down the train, touching his hat, receiving obols from the shades.
Tears came into Lady Wyse’s heart as she sat and looked at him. She guessed the truth, which he did not suspect; death was going to take from her the companion-mind which had made her wilderness green again. But that belief she put away from herself and him.
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In other things they thought together, these two minds: his, the elemental, the slow, the encompassing; hers, the polished, the swift, the penetrating; his, like the thunder rolling, huge and formless; hers, like the music of the master’s fiddle, delicate, exact, exhaustive. Both saw their old scheme for laughter vanish like a mirage in the desert as the traveller approaches; and in its place, from the heart of all things, welled up the new thought, the greater thought, suited to the solemn grandeur of their friendship.
Dwala was at a table, coughing feebly; opposite him Huxtable, busy with ink and papers. Lady Wyse sat talking intermittently, absently, listlessly, with Lord Glendover by the empty tea-cups. She rose, and strayed over to Dwala’s table, where she stood awhile picking up papers and throwing them down again.
‘What this?... “The best hundred books.”’
‘That’s for the prospectus of Glenister’s new “Dwala Classics,”’ said Huxtable.
‘“The Bible, Shakespere, Confucius, Hi-ti-hi, Kipling, the Q’urân, The Doings of Thomasina” ...’
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She tore it up and threw it on the floor, paying no heed to Huxtable. Then she picked up another paper and read it out aloud: “I am in favour of inducing the Colonies to put heavy duties on all foreign goods. This will promote a friendly feeling between England and her dependencies.”
‘That’s rather neat,’ said Lord Glendover.
‘Dull, I call it,’ said Lady Wyse.
‘It’s out of the draft for the new pronouncement,’ said Huxtable.
She took a pencil, and amended it.
‘“I am in favour of inducing the Colonies to put heavy duties on one another’s goods. This will promote a friendly feeling between England and foreign countries.” That’s better, don’t you think, Lord Glendover?’
‘Yes, I think it is,’ said the noble Lord; ‘I like that touch about “foreign countries.”’
Huxtable leaned forward as if about to speak; but sank back and cracked his thumbs. She stood biting her pencil for a little time, and then tore the pronouncement also in pieces, and threw it on the floor. She walked up and down, and
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stopped in front of Lord Glendover, with folded arms, and with tears standing in her eyes.
‘It is a pitiful, pitiful thing,’ she said; ‘you are all so good, one is obliged to believe in the Devil.’
‘That don’t hang together, you know,’ said Lord Glendover gravely.
‘It is like some hideous game, where each child has to speak a harmless word in turn, and the whole sentence is rank blasphemy and wickedness. Each of you goes through a foolish, innocent routine, with a clear conscience and the applause of the poor multitude; and the result is misery, misery, misery. Not random misery, here and there, such as you harmless creatures might chance on by the way, but a fearful consistent scheme of deeply-calculated, universal misery—a thing of hellish contrivance, worthy of the fiery genius of the sulphur pit. What am I, and what is this poor Lord Glendover? Makers and unmakers of men? Pah! We are pitiful pawns in the awful game, dreaming we move of our own accord only because the other pawns do not jostle us. Why do we stay cumbering the
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board? God knows! And yet without us there would be no game. It lies with us, it lies with us to put an end to it.’
She spoke with lifted arm and ringing voice, like a prophet of repentance; while Lord Glendover leaned back in his low chair, looking up over his brown clasped hands with frightened eyes. There was something comical in this big creature’s dependent, child-like look. Lady Wyse smiled suddenly at him:
‘We must kick over the board, my little man, and spoil the Devil’s game.’
The scared look spread downwards to his mouth. He did not understand any of the words she spoke; but a vague instinct of wisdom and alarm shot through him, as through a baby hare, which thought it was play, and suddenly finds death baying on every side.
‘You don’t mean reconstruction, do you, Lady Wyse? Dwala’s not going to....’
The awfulness was too sudden-spreading to be crumpled back into words. She smiled again.
‘Revolution, my child, revolution! We’ll
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make Old England stand on its head and shout.’
‘Good Gad! But he’s bound to us in honour. Dwala’s a gentleman—we look to him. We’d never have put him up if he hadn’t been pledged in honour. He can’t go back on us now.’
‘He’s pledged to nothing, any more than I am; any more than a ship is that you may charter to carry a cargo of slaves to Jamaica. And if the ship is turned round in mid-Atlantic, and carried back to the coast of Africa, what use is it your crying out: “You’re not a gentleman, you ship! We trusted you, we chartered you to carry our blacks to slavery, and here you are taking us back to be eaten by the cannibals.” I’m sorry for you, Lord Glendover, quite sorry enough. You’re a good man, and not more stupid than most. You might have been a decent farmer, or bricklayer, or gamekeeper; but you’ve gone along the beaten track that leads to villainy—unconscious, irreclaimable villainy. You don’t see it, and you never will. Go home and be obscure. I’m sorry for you; but I’m sorrier
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for the forty million blacks that we have on board, and now we mean to carry them back to Africa.’
Lord Glendover went away, gloomy and bewildered, feeling great national misfortunes gathering in the air. He visited his colleagues, and considered how the country could be saved.
But salvation was not to come from Lord Glendover.
XXXI
Parliament was dissolved, and the Great Policy was launched. The obscurity had been suddenly lifted from Dwala’s mind: a hectic strength and clearness took its place. He and Lady Wyse did not so much invent the New Charter as discover it: it was the revelation of a thing existent; as they sat pen in hand the words came to them from some far place, illuminating and inevitable.
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XXXII
A month had passed. The General Election was over. The great drought, the heaviness, the dull unrest was ended. The Dragon of the myth, the monster which slowly sucks up the waters, condemning the land to infertility and pestilence, was slain, and the waters gushed forth again to fruitfulness. The myriad warriors who had helped to pierce his flanks went coursing over the plain, with a brandishing of spears and cries of ‘Victory!’ St. George turned in his long sleep and opened his heavy eyes. Well did he know those triumphing shouts. Was the race of dragons ended now, or would a new dragon spring from the blood of the old as heretofore?
XXXIII
Success is a strong wine. It was running vividly in Dwala’s veins. Every least thing he did seemed to him fate-ordered and conclusive. Oh, the pride of it, the joy of it, the ease of it! The acclamations and the consciousness of right!
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The new Civilisation was like a poem, the scheme of which has come whole and organic to the poet, and which germinates therefore without constraint into its natural, necessary verses. The right men and the right ideas fell of themselves into their places, like particles forming a system of crystals. Dwala had found the basic idea, which all this turbid mass had been so long awaiting. He created life and received it. That same life flowed into his fibres, from the movement of the multitude, which flows into the peasant-woman’s baby out of the dust gathered on the busy highway.
Lady Wyse, seeing the easy joyful motion of his limbs and hearing the deep vigour of his voice, put her presentiments away. Dwala himself looked back in wonder at that grey mood when the world had faded from him. He was like the traveller who stands in the garish whirl of the fair, wondering if this can be the place that looked so grim on Sunday. He was enjoying the strong rush of life which a kindly Heaven sends to the consumptive as consolation for their early death.
He had new friends about him now. The
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Glendovers, the Disturnals, and the rest of that crew had vanished into the Unknown; they were growing turnips, shooting partridges, or riding on motor-ears somewhere in the Outer Darkness. Hartopp and Prosser were still there; Joey had run away to Seven Dials; Huxtable had packed his boxes, and stayed on in a condition of provisional irresolution.
On Dwala’s third floor lived an ascetic pensioner—a certain Mr. Bone, an American, a traveller in the East, a friend of Lady Wyse—connected by some mystery of familiarity with Dwala’s past. Rumour had it that he was an adventurer who had been Dwala’s Prime Minister in his days of sovereignty.
Dwala’s palace, in fact, was fast turning into a monastery, where the Abbot, with his little cell by the hall-door, was the least luxuriously housed of all.
Prosser, as I said, was still there, but he was no longer there as valet. The acceptance of such personal service was inconsistent with the Prince’s New Humanity, and Prosser was quite incapable of performing his duties properly. For some
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time he had contented himself with a life of ease in his own room. But his politics also had changed: he did not see why he should be worse off than Hartopp, and, by force of gradual asking, acquired the whole of the second floor, over Hartopp, for his portion. He had everything he could think of wanting in his rooms; but even that did not content him. He had thought that wealth was all he needed to make him happy in his sober intervals; but soon found out that he was mistaken. His career had given him a longing for other people’s property; things lost their interest for him once they became his own. He craved for the excitements of the past. Scissors, and ashtrays, and other glittering things got a way of disappearing wherever he went about the house. One night Dwala was aroused by the screaming of a police whistle from one of Hartopp’s windows over him, and going up he found the Fence sitting on Prosser’s chest in the window-seat, and blowing for all he was worth. A broken cupboard and a trailing jemmy explained the situation.
‘All right, guvnor, I’ll go quietly,’ said
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Prosser, in a squeezed husky voice; ‘I’m nabbed right enough this time.’ All the household crowded in at the doorway with scared faces; policemen appeared, and the alarm ended with the lights being turned up and everybody sitting down together, policemen and all, to a scratch supper in the dining-room, and laughing uproariously, as if something very funny had occurred.
The best of Prosser was that he never made any unpleasantness about being arrested. He would surrender at discretion to the housemaid or the boot boy, and offer to ‘go quietly.’ The policemen outside entered into the joke of it, and were ready on the doorstep to come in for their supper and half-crown whenever the episcopal butler ran out of a night—as he always did—to fetch them. The American was the only one who missed the fun of the thing; he swore that if he found anyone prowling about his rooms he would punch his head and hand him over, bag and baggage, to the police.
Dwala himself was already tired of the joke, when the butler—rather dishevelled—came in to the picture-gallery where he was pacing up and
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down, one afternoon, with a sheaf of spoons in one hand and the crestfallen Prosser in the other.
‘Why don’t you steal something big and have done with it?’ Dwala said, when he and the ex-valet were left alone. ‘One of these pictures, for instance; they’re very valuable some of them, I know. Now here’s a tremendously fine thing, I’m told. Who’s it by? The name’s written on the frame.’
‘Rubens, sir.’
‘Now you take that, Prosser, some night. I don’t want it a bit, I assure you. It’s worth something like fifteen thousand pounds, I’m told.’
Prosser returned it after a couple of days.
‘I can’t sleep with it in the room, I can’t, sir. When I shuts my eyes I seems to see all them ladies rollin’ up and down and every way till I’m fairly giddy. But I promise you, sir, I won’t go in no more for little thievin’s, I’ll keep my eyes open for something big.’
XXXIV
Sir Peter Parchmin was a rare visitor. He disliked the company which Dwala kept; he
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couldn’t get on with Mr. Cato, who was always in and out of the house. He was growing visibly older in the effort of keeping his countenance, while his colleagues gloated over despatches of the Missing Link Expedition, which kept writing hopefully from Borneo that it was on the eve of achieving its object; Mr. Holmes had seen curious scratches on trees, or had heard peculiar noises at night; once they sent home a button which he had discovered in the forest. The hopes of the scientific world ran high.
‘You must get those people to come home, Sir Peter,’ said Dwala to the Biologist, on one of his visits. ‘He’s a terrible fellow is that Mr. Holmes; I shouldn’t feel safe in going back while he’s out there. He’d have me, tail and all, in no time.’
‘But good heavens, dear Prince, you’re not thinking of leaving us?’ said the Biologist. Joyful relief soared upwards from his heart; he had barely time to clap a distressful expression over it to keep it from escaping.
‘Yes,’ said Dwala, ‘I’m going home. I have my own life to live, you know. I’ve been a slave over here, working for the good of Man.
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My work is done; I have delivered my message; and now I’m going back to my wild life in the forest while I’m still young and strong. I mean to ... to throw all this off’—he flapped his coat like a bird—‘and enjoy myself.’
‘I trust you will be very very happy,’ said the Biologist, shaking him warmly by the hand. ‘How are you going to manage about the money?’ he asked in a lower voice.
‘They’re arranging it in there,’ said Dwala, in the same precautious tones, pointing to a door, behind which voices could be heard.
The door opened at that moment and admitted an elderly obsequious man in black, with a big parchment folded under his arm; and behind him came Baron Blumenstrauss, Lady Wyse, Mr. Cato, and a lean brown man with a tuft on his chin, whom Sir Peter had seen there once before. This man smiled at Sir Peter drily. The obsequious man said good-bye, and shook hands with the Prince.
‘It’s all right, your Royal Highness; signed, sealed, delivered, and stamped.’
‘Quite sound in law, is it?’ said the Prince.
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‘Inter fifos,’ nodded the Baron; ‘sount as a pell.’
The obsequious gentleman hurried out.
‘Fonny man!’ said the Baron, patting the Prince on the shoulder, and smiling at Sir Peter; ‘he gif his broperty all away, effery penny.’
‘It’s generous, dear Prince,’ said the Biologist, ‘but is it wise? Even out there, no doubt, one has expenses.’
‘Oh! I sha’n’t want any money,’ said the Prince.
‘They have no pockets, you know,’ said Lady Wyse.
Whereupon the Baron, who was not initiated, adjusted his glasses and looked at her with great attention.
‘Remember King Lear,’ said the Biologist. ‘He divided his property in two’....
‘Seely fellow!’ said the Baron.
‘And his daughters were both ungrateful.’
‘Natürlich!’ said the Baron. ‘He trowed away de chief ting he haf; he gif de broperty widout de power. If I difide my corner in Brazilians into two corners for de boys, do you tink Max and Choel loff me very moch?’
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‘You would find some Cordelia, I am sure, dear Baron.’
‘Nod widout monny,’ said the Baron.
‘There’s no Cordelia in this case,’ said Lady Wyse; ‘I’m Goneril and the other lady all in one.’
‘Really?’ The Biologist was all smiles and proffered hands. ‘I congratulate you. The Prince couldn’t have disposed of his fortune better, I’m sure.’
‘Ah! that depends how people treat us.’
‘Dere is gondition,’ said the Baron, looking at his watch.
‘May one inquire, dear Prince, what the condition is?’
‘Oh! it’s a mere nothing.’
‘Lady Wyse publish his “Memoirs,”’ said the Baron.
The Biologist turned pale.
‘That reminds me,’ said the American; ‘I mustn’t leave those papers litterin’ about. I forgot to lock them up.’
‘Goot-bye,’ said the Baron. ‘I haf beesness encagement.’ He followed the American out at the door.
[222]
‘Of course!’ said the Biologist, brightening. ‘“Memoirs of a Statesman”—anecdotes of the great people you have met. Who is the American-looking man?’
‘Oh! that’s Mr. Bone, one of my collaborators. Mr. Cato and Lady Wyse are the others; between us, you see, we cover the whole ground. I met Mr. Bone in Borneo. In fact, he was ... he was my proprietor. I’m going to leave the history of my life as a legacy and a lesson to the English Nation.’
‘You’ll have to go over to Borneo with the Prince, Sir Peter,’ said Lady Wyse: ‘you’ll be much more comfortable up one of his trees than you will be in England.’
The question had been debated many and many a time between them. Mr. Cato, as always, was for candour; he felt that Dwala was in a false position; he thought the secret should be published at once, and guaranteed the enthusiastic interest of the nation. Mr. Bone, for other reasons, agreed with him as to immediate publication; he thought there was money in it. Lady Wyse was all for caution; she
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lacked the business instinct of the American, and the optimism of Mr. Cato; she doubted the enthusiasm of the public; she thought it was running into unnecessary danger to publish the secret before the Prince was out of the country. It had therefore been agreed that she should publish it as soon as he was safe in the great forest again. She was ready to incur any danger herself; she was tired of life; and she did not in the least mind what happened to the Biologist.
The Biologist saw ruin impending. Savage, reckless hatred welled in his breast as he looked at this great creature, fatally sick, but rejoicing in a present intensity of life and vigour. He groped about for something sharp and venomous to pierce him with; to make him fall beside him into the valley of despair. He walked up to Dwala, hissing like a serpent in his face.
‘You have come to Man as an apostle, bringing us a new message of Civilisation.’
Dwala nodded, rather proudly.
‘Do you know what Man has given to you in return? What Man always gives to such animals? What any scientist could have told
[224]
you you were bound to get in coming?... Consumption.... Phthisis pulmonalis.... Death!... Going back while you’re young and strong to your wild life in the forest! Pish! You won’t live the month out. I knew it that night. You’re a dying beast.’
Alas! why had Lady Wyse never told him? He had never thought of that. Life hummed and bubbled through his veins. He knew nothing of sickness and death. He had always been alive. The world had been faint at times; but that was the world, not he. A stiffening horror ran through him; he felt his skin moving against his clothes. Then his mind ran rapidly through all the series of events—the growth to the full knowledge of Man, the labouring hope of a joke, the change, the revelation, the submission to an overwhelming truth, the rejoicing millions.... Then suddenly this discovery of an unsuspected vengeance-for-benefit which had been stealing slowly and surely from the first in his steps, to spring at last on his back in the moment of fruition.
It was too funny; the surprise of the inevitable
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overcame him; it was a Joke which suddenly leaped up embracing the whole life of a created being, and the destiny of a nation—of humanity itself.
Dwala laughed. For the last time he laughed. A laugh to which his others were childish crowings; a laugh which flung horror on to the walls and into the darkened air, and spread a sudden dismay of things worse than death throughout the land. Men stopped in their work and in their talk and their lips grew pale without a cause; some goodness had gone out of Providence; some terror had been added to Fate. From the fire of that dismay the Biologist emerged a withered and broken man; Mr. Cato never flinched, his sheer goodness protected him; Lady Wyse broke into tears. She, too, was unscathed. No human canon of ethics has been invented by which she could be called good; she was a breaker of laws, an enemy of her kind. But in the place of ‘goodness’ she had a greatness which set her above the need of it.
When the paroxysm of laughter was ended, Dwala staggered and sank into a chair, and they
[226]
saw him hanging from it with the blood streaming out of his mouth.
At once they were in the world of definite, manageable facts again. The Biologist became the attentive practitioner, Lady Wyse the understanding woman, Mr. Cato the bewildered layman, busily doing unnecessary things, ringing the bell, calling for brandy, hurrying out into the hall to see why they were so long. Huxtable and the American came running down the stairs, and Dwala was carried to his room and put to bed.
XXXV
While all the household radiated about Dwala’s sick-bed, and there was no attention for any other thing, the Biologist ran swiftly up the stairs, guided by a superhuman instinct of despair, straight to the American’s room. He was going to seize the ‘Memoirs’ and burn them. Dwala was dying; no new authentic copy could be produced again. In the doorway he saw that his instincts
[227]
had guided him aright. American things greeted his eyes—an American hat on the chest of drawers, American corn-cob pipes on the mantelpiece. But what was this? Something alive in the room! A man crouching behind the table with a bundle of papers. It was Prosser ‘doing something big’ at last. Too much astonished to move for a moment, Sir Peter stood staring stupidly at the frightened, cowering figure behind the table.
‘Hello: what are you doin’ here?’ said a voice in the doorway. Then the American espied the broken desk, and a moment later the Biologist found himself clutched by the collar, trying helplessly to protect his head from a flailing fist, while Prosser’s shadow shot low and horizontal through the doorway.
‘The Memoirs! the Memoirs!’ yelled the Biologist. ‘The d——d thief’s stolen the Memoirs! Let me go! Let me go! It’s Prosser, not me! Oh, for God’s sake, don’t hit me again!’
At the mention of Prosser the American stayed his hand, fumbled Sir Peter’s pockets,
[228]
then snatched him by the collar, and ran down the stairs, dragging him after him like a live thing in a sack. But they were too slow for Prosser. As they came out into Park Lane shouting ‘Stop thief! stop thief!’ there was the fat policeman saluting and grinning delightedly.
‘He’s got clean away this time, sir.’
‘Heavens alive! Why didn’t you stop him?’
‘I knows my place, sir’—with a wink. ‘It’s only Mr. Prosser.’
‘Blow your whistle, man! Blow your whistle! He’s stolen State Papers.’
The policeman walked very slowly forward to the edge of the pavement and looked up and down the road, then turned about, smiling rather nervously.
‘Do you reely mean it, sir?’
‘Good Lord!’ said the American, and started off running madly without another word into Oxford Street; while the Biologist careered, wild and hatless, up Grosvenor Street, yelling desperately ‘Prosser, dear Prosser!’ to the scandal of Mayfair.
XXXVI
Among the many unnecessary things which Mr. Cato did in the bewilderment of Dwala’s sudden illness, the most unnecessary was to telegraph news of it to his sister, Lady Lillico.
‘Dwala ill lung hemorrhage doctors offer little hope recovery Wyndham.’
They were in the drawing-room when the telegram came, just preparing to go and dress for dinner.
‘How too perfectly frightful!’ cried Lady Lillico. ‘The Premier dying! I must go at once.’
‘Good Lord, Louisa, what for?’ said her husband.
‘Don’t be so cynical, John. If Wyndham has telegraphed for me?’
‘Are you going to nurse the Prince?’
‘Of course I am. Pray keep your insinuations for some more fitting time. What brutes men are! I believe you feel nothing even now!’ At which she began to cry.
‘What about yer dinner?’
‘As if I could dine! Tell Hopkins to make up a little basket of something to eat on the
[230]
way. One mustn’t give any extra trouble. Oh dear, oh dear; and my maid’s out! I shall have to take Emily. You must send Harper on at once when she comes in.’
However, no feats of heroism were demanded of Lady Lillico. She found Mr. Cato and Huxtable waiting for her with a comfortable meal—Lady Wyse stayed with Dwala—for though the servants’ hall was all agog with the events of the afternoon, and the butler darkly prognosticated ‘the worst,’ things above stairs were in their usual train. And when she presented herself an hour later, almost gay with fine emotion, in a ‘business-like costume,’ cap and pinafore complete, in the darkened sick-room, Lady Wyse, who hurried to the door to check her entry—her violet eyes grown nearly black, and looking ‘very wicked,’ as Lady Lillico said afterwards—told her baldly that she would not be wanted till the morning.
XXXVII
When the sun cast his cold inquiring eye on England in the morning, and the innocent fields
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awoke in their grey shifts of dew, the trains that shot North, West, and South from London over the landscape, like worldly thoughts in a house of prayer, bore the tidings of Dwala’s disgrace. Trainloads of newspapers, the white wax sweated forth by the grimy bees in the sleepless hives of the big city, rattled past answering loads of milk and meat, gifts of the country, making the daily exchange. Squires and parsons were too shocked to eat their breakfast; their wives raced against the doctor to carry the news from house to house; the schoolmasters told the children; the children carried the tidings with the handkerchief of dinner to their fathers under the trees in the field. There was no room for hesitation; verdict and judgment were pronounced already. The country had been made the victim of a hideous hoax. Dwala and all his works must perish.
And yet, when the Biologist blurted his hint of a tail, a roomful of people turned and rent him! It is the way of the world; it is part of good manners. A partial revelation, a timid hint, an indiscretion, is smothered ignominiously; when the whole blatant truth brays out, men
[232]
welcome it with ferocious joy. So, in the ancient days, tactless young angels in Heaven were sent to Coventry who alluded to Lucifer’s tail, or noticed anything odd about his feet; but when his tumbling-day came at last, the Seraphim were in the very front of the crowd which stood pelting meteors and yelling Caudate! ungulate! down from the clouds.
Men shut up their shops in London and gathered about taverns and corner-posts to unravel the sense of the bewildering news. Public Opinion, deserting the grass of the Parks, slouched into the streets to learn what it must do.
When Joey ran down into the street to fetch the morning milk, the news stared out at her from the boards in pink and black: ‘Dwala, the Missing Link!’
‘Golly!’ said her pals; ‘what’s your bloke been up to now?’
Joey was a heroine every day—the greatness of her acquaintance had a savour in Seven Dials which it had lacked in Park Lane; but this morning she soared altogether out of sight.
[233]
What were milk-jugs and breakfast to such a thing as this? The milk penny went in a couple of newspapers, and she darted off with them across country for Dwala’s house. Who knew but she might be the first to bring him the great news?
Everybody was in the streets, as happens when public events are astir; and every street sent forth a thin stream that trickled in the same direction, till it formed a full river in Park Lane. A posse of policemen guarded the spiked gates.
‘Move on! Move on!’ said the official voice.
‘None of your nonsense, constable; I’m a friend of the Missin’ Link.’
‘What! Miss Joey!’ beamed a familiar face from under a helmet. ‘Let her in, Bill; she won’t ’urt ’im.’
The steps were littered with telegrams that lay like autumn leaves unswept; and an anxious footman, muttering to himself, was strapping a bag in the entry.
‘Is the Missin’ Link at home, young man?’
[234]
‘The brutes! To leave me behind, all alone!’
It was the last of the servants, deserted like an unwilling Casa Bianca in the general flight, while packing his things in his cubicle. A moment later he had gone too, without even looking at her, and she stood alone in the empty, echoing hall. She could hear Hartopp cursing and thumping with his wooden leg on the floor above. Then a pistol-shot rang out somewhere in the house, and she was frightened. While she stood hesitating which way to run a door swung to, and Lady Wyse walked across the hall, with a basin steaming in her hands. She went in at another door, and Joey followed her, clutching her newspapers.
Dwala sat up in bed, propped against pillows, with ghastly, hollow eyes; and on the chair beside him was Mr. Cato, pale and dishevelled, fast asleep. A cold wave of disappointment surged over Joey. Was this what Missing Links looked like? But he smiled at her, and the old feeling of fellowship came back.
‘Have you heard the news?’ said Joey.
[235]
Dwala nodded. ‘What do they say?’
Joey read him column on column of frantic outcry, at all of which he smiled gently.
‘This is our joke,’ he said, at last, to Lady Wyse.
‘It’s not our best.’
Then there came a tap at the door, and a gentle voice saying:
‘May I come in?’
Lady Lillico had been awoken by a dream with the sound of a shot in it. Nine o’clock! Why, where was Harper? She rang, and rang in vain. Then she looked out of window, and smiled and nodded at the crowd. How sweet of them to be so anxious about the poor dear Prince! And still no Harper. Never mind! One must expect to rough it in a house of sickness. She knotted her hair and slipped on her dressing-gown; a first visit in déshabillé lends a motherly grace to a nurse’s part.
She tripped lightly down the silent stairs to Dwala’s room.
‘May I come in?’
She tip-toed up to the bed with a ceremonious
[236]
face. Mr. Cato frowned; Lady Wyse looked at her with cold curiosity.
‘Have you heard the news?’ said Joey, rustling a newspaper.
‘Evidently not,’ said Lady Wyse.
‘It’s all come out,’ said Mr. Cato, sepulchrally.
‘What’s come out?’ said his sister, scared. ‘I’ve heard nothing.’
Joey thrust the paper at her with an indicating finger.
She stared for a long time at the words without understanding; then fell into a chair and laughed hysterically.
‘What do you think of it now they’ve caught it?’ whispered Dwala, turning white eyes towards her.
‘Well, really, you ridiculous creature!’ she exclaimed, flapping at him with a little lace handkerchief, half coquettishly, half as if keeping something off. ‘It’s so out of the common.... The Prime Minister!... One doesn’t know what to say!’
‘He’s dying,’ said Mr. Cato.
‘Wyndham! How can you!’
[237]
‘Lady Wyse must go and get some sleep now; you will take her place.’
‘Don’t be idiotic! I should be no use. Oh dear, oh dear! Where can Harper be?’
‘Sit down, Louisa!’ said Mr. Cato sternly, barring her way. ‘Lady Wyse has been up all night.’
‘Don’t be so cruel.... Let me go! let me go!’ she screamed in an access of sudden fear, wrenched herself free from him, and ran towards the door.
Then abruptly her horror leaped up and overwhelmed her; the instinct of flying from the incomprehensible—the instinct of the horse which shies at a piece of moving paper—was swallowed up in the nightmare of realising that the impossible had happened, was in this very room with her. This man she had come to nurse, this man with whom she had talked and shaken hands, was suddenly not a man, but something unknown and monstrous, of another world. Her faculties failed, as at sight of a ghost, not in fear of injury, but in the mere awfulness of the alien power. She staggered out at the door crying ‘Save me! save me!’ threw her hands forward in
[238]
her first natural gesture since childhood, and fell swooning in the hall. When she came back to consciousness, after long journeying in nightmare worlds, she heard angry voices speaking near her.
‘Let me out, d—— you!’ said Hartopp—that dreadful Mr. Hartopp—‘they’re throwing stones at my windows, I tell you. They’ll smash my china! Let me get at the brutes!’
‘This door ain’t goin’ to be opened till the Prince is re-moved.’
It was the American who answered him. He stood with his hat on, leaning against the barred and bolted hall-door, his arms folded and a pistol drooping from either hand.
‘D—— the ——!’ said Hartopp. ‘Why don’t you chuck him out and have done with it? It’s all his fault.’
‘Thank God you’re back!’ said Lady Wyse’s voice right over Lady Lillico’s head. ‘Have you arranged it?’
‘The Boss is agreeable,’ said the American. ‘The “Phineas” will be at Blackwall at twelve o’clock, steam up. One of his vans is waitin’ down back in Butlin Street now, and we must
[239]
shift the Prince at once, before any onpleasantness begins. There was no other way; the Prince will hev to go as an anamal.’
A stone came jingling through the window beside them, and others followed in showers.
‘B—— brutes!’ said the blind man.
‘Where’s Huxtable?’ said Lady Wyse.
‘Huxtable’s gone.’
‘Skunk!’ said Joey.
‘Not quite a skunk,’ said the American; ‘“skunk” is goin’ too fur.’
There was a roar and a rush outside, battle cries, shrieks of despairing whistles, and a moment later a heavy battering at the mahogany of the front door.
Lady Lillico, fully conscious at last, jumped up with piercing yells. She ran this way and that, bewildered.
‘We must get the Prince away quickly,’ said Lady Wyse, going towards his room.
‘Oh, let me out, let me out somewhere!’ cried Lady Lillico. Joey ran past with her tongue thrust mockingly forth, like a heraldic lion gardant.
[240]
‘Here, give me your pistols,’ said the blind man; ‘I’ll give the brutes what for!’
Slowly and heavily they carried Dwala out across the hall, wrapped in his blankets like a gigantic mummy; while Hartopp stood in an expectant joy of ferocity guarding the entrance. Down the kitchen passage they carried him, and out into the high-walled garden—with Lady Lillico flitting like a Banshee before them—through the stable-yard, and into the deserted street, where the van was waiting for them. Public Opinion, so rigorous once in its denunciation of ‘frontal attacks,’ seemed to have forgotten the ‘lessons of the Boer War.’ When the big door was battered down, and the furious crowd broke in, half a dozen of them fell mortally wounded before Hartopp was overpowered. The old Fence died, fighting like a tiger for his property.
What was Dwala thinking of as he lumbered slowly through the length of London in that menagerie van? Was he laughing quietly to himself at the thought that he, the saviour of
[241]
England, the superhuman mind, was being hustled secretly out of England, for a trivial pride of species, as if he had committed some unspeakable crime? Was he weeping at the nearness of his separation from this handful of faithful friends? Probably not. His mind, withdrawn to the innermost darkness of the caves, was probably busy with the trivial thoughts which beset men at such times. It is only in the last moment that the soul throws off the load of little things, and, soaring like a bird, sees Life and Death spreading in their vastness beneath it. He lay still, with his eyes shut, and his temples hollow with decay. Lady Lillico was fast asleep, under a black cloak which somebody had thrown over her. The rest sat silent in the jolting twilight with their feet in the straw.
‘It’s a lesson for all of us,’ murmured Mr. Cato at last.
‘It’s that,’ said the American; ‘it p’ints a moral sharp enough to hurt.’
As Mr. Cato stood with Joey on the jetty,
[242]
watching the last moments of departure, the American came to the bulwarks with Lady Wyse, and, leaning over, beckoned him.
‘“Skunk” was goin’ too fur for Huxtable. I’ve just bin tellin’ Lady Wyse; he shot himself whin the noos came. I found him lyin’ in his room.’
‘Was he dead?’ murmured Mr. Cato, awestruck at the fall of an enemy.
The American nodded.
‘Deader’n a smelt.’
‘I wish I were dead too!’ said Mr. Cato bitterly.
The American made a motion of diving with his joined hands. Mr. Cato shook his head.
‘I have my two sisters to look after.’
‘I wish you joy.’
Then the cables were loosed, the screw snorted in the water, the American waved, and followed Lady Wyse into the cabin; the boat slid away from the jetty, and, slowly turning in mid-stream, reared its defiant head towards the sea.
After many days of alert and passive silence,
[243]
Dwala died on his pallet on the deck. He turned his face sideways down into the pillow, as if to hide the smile that was rising to his lips; then breathed one deep, luxurious sigh, and was ended. They wrapped him in sacking, with an iron reel at his feet; and in the cold, clear morning, when the sun mounted flat and yellow to its daily course and the low mists smoked this way and that along the waves, they slid him without a word off a door and over the bulwarks.
Down, down through the crystal indifference, wavering gently to his appointed place in the rocky bottom of the rapt thicket of weeds; losing the last remnant of individuality as the motion ceased; indistinguishable from a little heap of sand; lying careless and obscure, like some tired animal which has crept to rest in the wild garden of a crumbled castle in an empty world, long since abandoned and forgotten by mankind.
The ‘Phineas’ paused for a moment in mid-ocean, the only living thing of its tribe upon the waters without a purpose straining in its hull. The hesitation lasted only a moment. The boat swung round, took one look at the horizon, then
[244]
dashed forwards again on the home journey to England and new work.
England had gone back to its occupations. The papers spoke of the return of political sanity; of the rejection of ideas from a tainted source; of the restoration of the system which had been the bulwark of our greatness through so many centuries. The composition of Lord Glendover’s Cabinet attested his sincere intention of putting public affairs on a business-like and efficient footing.
There is no remedy for the errors of Democracy; there is no elasticity of energy to fulfil purposes conceived on a larger scale than its every-day thought. Other systems may be purged by the rising waves of national life; but Democracy is exhaustive.
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From THE PALL MALL GAZETTE.—‘The main interest of the book, which is very strong indeed, begins when Vincent returns, when Harold Caffyn discovers the secret, when every page threatens to bring down doom on the head of the miserable Mark. Will he confess? Will he drown himself? Will Vincent denounce him? Will Caffyn inform on him? Will his wife abandon him?—we ask eagerly as we read and cannot cease reading till the puzzle is solved in a series of exciting situations.’
THE PARIAH. Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.
From THE SATURDAY REVIEW.—‘In “The Pariah” we are more than ever struck by the sharp intuitive perception and the satirical balancing of judgment which make the author’s writings such extremely entertaining reading. There is not a dull page—we might say, not a dull sentence—in it....’
VICE VERSÂ; or, a Lesson to Fathers. Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.
From THE SATURDAY REVIEW.—‘If ever there was a book made up from beginning to end of laughter, and yet not a comic book, or a “merry” book, or a book of jokes, or a book of pictures, or a jest book, or a tomfool book, but a perfectly sober and serious book, in the reading of which a sober man may laugh without shame from beginning to end, it is the book called “Vice Versâ; or, a Lesson to Fathers.”... We close the book, recommending it very earnestly to all fathers in the first instance, and their sons, nephews, uncles, and male cousins next.’
A FALLEN IDOL. Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.
From THE TIMES.—‘Will delight the multitudinous public that laughed over “Vice Versâ.”... The boy who brings the accursed image to Champion’s house, Mr. Bales, the artist’s factotum, and above all Mr. Yarker, the ex-butler who has turned policeman, are figures whom it is as pleasant to meet as it is impossible to forget.’
LYRE AND LANCET. With 24 Full-page Illustrations. Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.
From THE SPEAKER.—‘Mr. Anstey has surpassed himself in “Lyre and Lancet.”... One of the brightest and most entertaining bits of comedy we have had for many a day.’
London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place, S.W.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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