The whole war was unnecessary, Eugene thinks. The whole war was full of human error. It was foolishness that masqueraded as courage and best not spoken of. “Quite so,” he says.
The Judge presses with more questions. Has he met the Governor? Has he not letters of introduction? A man of his standing and experience must. “I would be pleased to see them.”
“I thank you. It would be an honour, your honour. It is just that I have left them with my wife.”
“Ah, perhaps at another time. When we are both in Victoria.”
“Yes,” Eugene says.
“It is astonishing how many are forged, and so poorly at that.”
“Astonishing,” Eugene says.
“Indeed,” says the Judge and thankfully now speaks of French poetry, the moral role of princes and kings, the theories of Mr. Darwin. “You must have attended a great many interesting lectures while in London.”
“Certainly,” Eugene says. London lectures. They always started out well. Soon enough, however, the endless extrapolations, explanations and examples sent his thoughts drifting over the student watering holes like a lost soul.
The Judge is now speaking of the rights of the populace, states strongly (as Eugene was finding he states all things) that British law be equally applied to all, whether the man be red, black, white or yellow. “The law is colour-blind,” he says.
“Quite so. That is why she is blindfolded. Personally I have always found the image appealing.”
“It makes no difference if she is blindfolded, metaphorically or not. She does not differentiate the yellow from the brown or black.”
Eugene agrees, for he would like this to be a most agreeable evening. In any case, the Judge’s theories make a great deal more sense than those of that damned barrister from Bath whom he met on the passage over. The Judges theories are simpler, easy to recall. His stomach tightens. What if the Judge has heard of his evening at the Governor’s? His disgrace? No other word will suffice. Thank Christ that this Arthur Bushby did not recognize him, though did he not wink before he stumbled off? Surely not.
Eugene hastily offers up Dora, how she is alike to the ruddy-skinned, strong limbed women painted by that Flemish chap.
“Rubens?”
“Exactly so.”
“Good that you are happily married, Mr. Hume.”
Eugene admits wholeheartedly that he is. They continue with the topic of women, the absurdity of crinolines, the darling manner with which women peel an orange, their unfortunate lack of rationality. “Yet this is the thing,” Eugene says. “A man must make his fortune first. He must settle in the world before he binds himself. For women it is different. They are older creatures than us. Yes, I think this is so. They are as wise at eighteen as we are at thirty. They have no need to go off travelling the continent, no need to be studying geometry or philosophy. They are prepared from the cradle to get on with the business of life. Dora, that is, Mrs. Hume, is never plagued with doubts, never sleeps poorly. She chatters cheerfully from morning till night. Sometimes I wonder whether she knows if it is I standing there or merely a wooden post. Sometimes I wonder if I sent another man in my place if she would even notice.”
“She would, I do not doubt. Women notice much more than we credit them.”
“Indeed. Are you planning marriage? If I may be so bold as to ask.”
“Not as yet. I have much work to do before I can contemplate such a state.” At this the Judge looks at the mantel clock. “I must to bed now. I continue my circuit come morning.”
“If you are needing companionship . . .”
The Judge is not. The Judge will be halting at near every roadhouse and ensemble of men, trying cases both petty and severe. He and his small party will be on forest trails, breaking through snow.
“Snow?”
“There is snow in the high country. Have you not heard?”
“Yes, but it is now June.”
The Judge smiles. “You will find the weather here quite inconstant. Take it up as a challenge.”
He stands and offers his hand. Eugene likewise stands. The coffee has worked its magic; he is steady.
“Good night then, Matthew,” Eugene says, for somewhere during the evening they exchanged their first names. Somewhere in the evening that kind of a bond was forged. “I trust we shall meet again.”
The Judge smiles sagely, warmly. “We shall indeed, sir. There is only one destination after all.”
Nine
"Have you ever been to London, Mr. Jim?”
He said no, thought again how she asked the oddest questions. London? Why not Africa? Why not the sun?
≈ ≈ ≈
1862. The new Westminster Bridge is opened with great ceremony. At the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park an infant giraffe stumbles upward to the urgings of the crowd. And in South Kensington preparations for the International Exhibition have begun. It will be as great as the Great Exhibition of ’51 and all London talks of it. Even Dora talks of it, though she doubts she will see much of it. In a cramped, windowless room off Bond Street Dora and a dozen-odd other women are far too occupied with sewing gowns for the quality. Her skills are not fine enough for the tailoring, not even for the making of ruffles and bows, the edge-workings of lace. Her fingers are not the lily stems of Marie, barely twelve, nor the deft blur of Miss Grower who at thirty looks to be fifty. No, Dora’s clumsy fingers are fit only for the sewing on of buttons and large beads. Even then the sweater, Mr. Haberdale, frowns at her work. He is pot-bellied and scoured with wrinkles and is everywhere at once. At the end of the day he tells the women to open their mouths so that he may inspect for buttons hidden beneath their tongues. Women, young and old, have been known to steal in this manner. He explains this to Dora and inspects so closely, for so long that Dora would love to spit a button into his rheumy eye.
In this month of April they are frantic with work. The Season is near to hand. The working hours stretch from twelve a day to fourteen, and then to seventeen. Mr. Haberdale orders restoratives of nutmeg and gin. He orders, as well, a clock that strikes each hour and releases a mechanical bird that belabours them with its cries.
“But do you know. I half-enjoyed it at first for all that.”
Boston nodded. Thought of the growing lateness of the hour. But he did not leave. It did not seem right to leave.
This is the closest she has yet come to the quality. She imagines that after all this frantic preparation she herself will be attending the balls, the teas, will be riding in Hyde Park, or calling on an acquaintance in the afternoon. It is as if she herself is preparing for the market of marriage. And she loves, indeed, the wondrous gowns heaping the table, the lush colours—apple greens, coral pinks, the purplish-reds of magenta and solferino, named so for battles of the Crimean and not out of fashion yet. And though her fingers may not be deft they have an astonishing knack for assessing say, whether a silk is from China or France, whether a lace is from Nottingham or Holland. She has won admiration for this, has won admiration also for keeping spirits up by telling stories and jokey tales, or did, until Mr. Haberdale commanded silence with the tone of a Reverend high in his pulpit.
At night she dreams of buttons—buttons of shell, buttons of bone, of ivory and silver, enamelled buttons painted with fabulous scenes. She dreams of lines of buttons that stretch to the sky or roll into cracks of the floorboards and then of Mr. Haberdale begging that they be gently prised out. She dreams as well of beads, a lustrous snow of them, delightful until the beads become the size of fists and begin to stun birds, shatter windows, until they find their way into her mouth and she chokes and wakes to a cold room, a pounding heart.
“Though sure I made the best of it. Do you know what I’m meaning?”
Boston muttered he supposed he did.
She is in bespoke tailoring, after all; she is not a slopper in the East End slaving at those treadle machines, making identical drab gowns for whomever chooses to buy them. She earns twenty pounds per year and is reaso
nably fed and has lodgings with the other seamstresses in a room down the stairs from the workroom. She shares a bed with only two others—Mrs. Tavenshaw of the gypsy-dark skin and the mumbling Miss Plamouth. And she has an admirer, doesn’t she? Mr. Haberdale’s son, no less. The elder Mr. Haberdale disapproves, but the younger Mr. Haberdale has an income of his own from investments of one sort or another and will not be deterred. Marriage into the family of the Haberdales! A moderate wealth. Puddings. Sweetmeats. Roasted pheasant. A wood fire in each room. A great step up indeed. And yet the other seamstresses are not as jealous as Dora wishes they could be. Nor is Dora as grateful as she wishes she could be. And why ever not? Well and so, because the young Mr. Haberdale is ugly as sin. No other, gentler expression will suffice. He has a sprouting of orange hair, eyes the shade of agates, and a mouth crowded with yellow teeth. He is a young man by the calculation of his two and twenty years but seems to Dora some creature born underground centuries ago and raised on sour mash. He does not engage in small talk but speaks in passionate spurts of politics and policies, and then lapses into ominous silences that Dora has to fill with words, as if she were a convict bargaining for her life. And why can he never look upon her face? Why fix his gaze on her throat? Still, she accepts his invitations once their hours decrease back to twelve, once Sundays are again a half-day free.
Inexplicably, their first outing finds them at the tanning factory where the men labour at noxious vats. The pure finders come in with their reeking buckets and carts. One lad boasts he has the pure not only of Lord so-and-so’s mastiffs, but also that of the Lord himself, thus his offering is certain to tan a hide to the finest quality. The foreman cuffs him. Dora protests to Mr. Haberdale. She can barely breathe; her dress will become soiled. And what does Mr. Haberdale do? He takes her to a match factory and points out a woman, her jaw glowing palely green with the fossy. He takes her to watch the destitute men breaking granite for their bread. He takes her to the slave market at Bethnal Green though he has no intention of acquiring a servant. He points out the chimney sweeps, the crossing sweeps, a young girl holding out an orange as if she were holding out the world. Points out these things as if Dora has never seen them, nor known of them. In the vast market of Newcut he buys nothing and asks that she does not, that she merely observe. And so she observes a Punch and Judy show. Punch beats Judy with a stick and casts their baby into the oven. Judy leaps about in puppet fury. Dora laughs. Mr. Haberdale does not. Indeed, he frowns so hard it seems the points of his mouth might peg him to the ground.
“My father often took me to see these shows,” Dora says, “it’s why I like them so,” and then tells him about her father’s demise, his miserable half-life and then the fire that truly killed him along with her mother and all that they had worked for. Tears spill from her eyes as she tells him this. And his reply? He asks her opinions of the proletariat.
“The what?”
“The workers! That is, the labourers! The toilers!” he says, gesturing all about him.
“A fine lot for the most part,” Dora replies, bewildered.
Mr. Haberdale sighs, but then he is ever sighing like some benighted swain.
Dora supposes all this odd behaviour is in preparation for a mysterious business venture. Perhaps Mr. Haberdale is hoping to challenge his father. Certainly he has asked her to not mention, should his father ask, that they have been visiting low neighbourhoods and wretched factories. In the end, Dora hardly cares about Mr. Haberdale’s purposes. She has only so much free time. She does not wish to waste it watching the labours of others, feeling their misery seep into her as if her skin were a sieve. “The Seven Dials is where I want to go,” she says. “You may come or not.” Mr. Haberdale trails her reluctantly, momentarily cowed. From one Mr. Cohen, an old acquaintance, Dora bargains for a matching bodice and skirt. The fabric is a damask with green and yellow stripes. The trimmings are of lace and crimped silk. She buys, as well, her first true hoops. She spends near the whole of her scanty savings, but the style is of only a decade past; the tears and stains are moderate and easy enough to mend and scrub. She is most pleased with her purchase, even though Mr. Haberdale asks how it is she can wear cast-off garments, that is, how she can become a rich woman’s shadow, a tatterdemalion in fact. She barely attends him, insists now that they eat and drink and be among talking and laughter.
Mr. Haberdale acquiesces readily enough and takes her to an old-fashioned coffee shop with high-backed pews and tables pocked with burns and scattered with periodicals. Through the charry air Dora sees only one other woman and this a woman of dubious morals and so she smiles only from politeness when Mr. Haberdale introduces her to a group of youngish men in decent coats, all who greet him companionably enough. It seems the younger Mr. Haberdale is known here. Possibly even liked. She cannot recall the conversation, cannot recall their faces, only that the coffee dished from the vat was bitter and hardly warmed and the word proletariat rose up again and again. And then Mr. Haberdale stands and asks her to stand. She, apparently, is to be an emblem. She is of the exploited. “Look upon her hands,” he says. Dora lifts them up hesitantly and the men gasp as if she were holding up bloodied stumps. Mr. Haberdale clears his throat. Never has she heard him speak for so long and so passionately and with so little faltering. “This woman slaves in obscurity in poisonous rooms while below roll the carriages of the bloated rich and all about the shops are bursting with goods made of blood and ceaseless toil. In a year, that is, six months, her beauty will be gone. She will be hunched, her hands like claws. She will be consumptive! Blinded! She will descend to the slop trade and then, if still unmarried, she will supplement her wages with the wages of the street, will become, yes, a dollymop, and descend at last fully, that is, into that most degraded of trades.”
Dora protests. She will never become . . . how dare he suggest. . . . Her cheeks burn. She is of a sudden aware of the tawdry brightness of her gown here in the coal stained coffee-house. She dashes out. Mr. Haberdale catches her in the street. He shouts to be heard above the street callers and the clatter of wheels. “I am sorry, my dearest, that is, I apologize. I beg. Please. Do you not see? The workers, the labourers I mean, those in the street, that is, the people, yes the people, they must be told of, that is, they must be made aware of their own misery. Only then can the revolution begin.” That was all he was attempting. He did not wish to humiliate her. Soon such a word as humiliation will be forgotten in any case. His voice catches. Tears are glistening in his eyes, much to her astonishment.
“Made aware of their misery, that’s what he said, Mr. Jim. How can a person not be aware of their own misery? That was the most absurd thing I’d ever heard. It is alike to not being aware you had a broken limb.”
Boston muttered some agreement and noted that a spider had woven half a web by this time, there in the join of her cabin door.
≈ ≈ ≈
To atone, to explain, Mr. Haberdale takes her to the library of the British museum and after some searching, finds a man at a table, scratching at a notebook, a barricade of books about him. He is dark of hair, well-featured and weary-eyed, his accent hushed and heavy. Dora is introduced and then Mr. Haberdale and the man whisper and nod as if the keepers of some great knowledge. The man is an exile of some sort. “He has written a great Manifesto,” Mr. Haberdale later tells her in the green shade of Hyde Park. “It will revolutionize the world, that is, I mean to say, we shall all be equal. The workers will have control of the profits of their labour and then all of mankind will eat and drink their fill and have clothing enough and then, only then, will they practice the high arts, music, that is, and poetry.”
Dora had never heard such nonsense and tells him so. Why should the quality want to be equal to the lower orders? Why indeed should Mr. Haberdale? And what of the organ grinders, are not they making music and on a scrap of bread a day? What of the tract sellers? “There’s your music, sir, there’s your poetry.”
“You do not understand, no, not at all. I will teac
h you, that is, instruct you, and you will become a champion, indeed, a paragon, a gleaming light for the cause.” He kisses her cheek then and it is like being rubbed with a mollusc. She tells him she will no longer see him. She will no longer step out with him of an evening nor a Sunday, unless . . . unless perhaps it is to the Cremorne Gardens? Mr. Haberdale calls it a gross leviathan built on the backs of the poor or some such thing and yet in the end he acquiesces, daring as he does so to look at her face, her eyes.
“Ah, but it were grand, Mr. Jim. You have never seen the like here. Imagine you are in a dozen countries at once. Imagine China temples and Swiss houses and snake charmers and a great maypole and dancing, ’course, and fireworks, oh, like a fiery garden in the sky.”
They are watching an operetta when a voice at Dora’s elbow says, “Ah, it is this I missed some.” Another voice agrees wholeheartedly.
Both are dark-eyed, plump and bustling, both have a wealth of black glossy curls. They are identical, in fact, excepting the fine scar on the cheek of one, the plumper figure of the other. Their dresses are splendidly ornate, multi-coloured affairs with skirts round as tabletops. Dora falls into conversation with them while Mr. Haberdale frowns, once again.
“A seamstress for the quality! Ah, where we live seamstresses are rare indeed.”
“Rare as coal fires and starlings.”
“Yes, sister. Oh, the things I do not miss. Oh!”
“I must ask, and begging your pardon . . .”
“From the Antipodes!”
“Oh, the other end of the world!”
“We are from Australia! Australia!” they say in unison.
“How delightful!” Dora says, and claps her hands. Mr. Haberdale takes Dora’s elbow. But Dora cannot be spun like a top. She firmly plants her feet. “And what is it like there? You must tell me.”
“The birds make you think of a painter gone mad.”
“Gone quite mad. And there is an animal that hops instead of runs, truly.”
Reckoning of Boston Jim Page 9
