Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  ‘There is work and work, friend Ernest,’ Herr Max answered, as gently as had been his wont in older years; ‘and for my part it seems to me you are better here writing your Social Reformers than making shoes for a single generation. One man builds for to-day, another man builds for to-morrow; and he that plants a fruit tree for his children to eat of is doing as much good work in the world as he that sows the corn in spring to be reaped and eaten at this autumn’s harvest.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ Ernest answered softly. ‘I wish I could think so. But after all I’m not quite sure whether, if we had all starved eighteen months ago together, as seemed so likely then, it wouldn’t have been the most right thing in the end that could possibly have happened to all of us. As things are constituted now, there seems only one life that’s really worth living for an honest man, and that’s a martyr’s. A martyr’s or else a worker’s. And I, I greatly fear, have managed somehow to miss being either. The wind carries us this way and that, and when we would do that which is right, it drifts us away incontinently into that which is only profitable.’

  ‘Dear Ernest,’ Edie cried in her bright old-fashioned manner from the office door, ‘Dot has come in her new frock to bring Daddy home for her birthday dinner as she was promised. Come quick, or your little daughter’ll be very angry with you. And Lady Hilda Berkeley has come, too, to drive us back in her own brougham. Now don’t be a silly, there’s a dear, or say that you can’t drive away from the office of the “Social Reformer” in Lady Hilda’s brougham!’

  Babylon

  First published in 1885, Babylon concerns an artists’ colony in late Victorian Rome. The narrative introduces two artistic geniuses – one a landscape painter; the other a sculptor – from very different humble backgrounds. Hiram Winthrop, a shy young man, is an ardent admirer of nature and has been raised on a farm in New York State, in a family of narrow-minded fundamentalists. Conversely, Colin Churchill is growing up in rural Dorset, spending his time modelling figures in clay from the river for his sweetheart Minna. The local vicar admires Churchill’s work and lends him support in his artistic endeavours.

  Winthrop is rescued by Lothrop Audouin, a rich, refined Boston intellectual, who is a confirmed bachelor that has fled industrial America for a solitary, yet comfortable life on the shores of Lake Ontario. Generously, Audouin funds Winthrop’s schooling and college life. Meanwhile, Churchill works at wood-carving and then puts himself under the tutelage of Cicolari, a stone sculptor, and his genius rapidly expands. After various difficulties, both Churchill and Winthrop are drawn to Rome. Churchill quickly makes a name for himself, but Winthrop is apprenticed to a unsympathetic historical painter and endures a harder time.

  Much lighter in tone, Allen’s second novel is full of lively incident and offers an intriguing account of artistic genius in wholly unpropitious places. Interestingly, there is a model for John Ruskin, under the guise of John Truman, who eventually raises Winthrop to prominence. Critics were quick to point out the close resemblance of the plot to Henry James’ Roderick Hudson, a bildungsroman originally published in 1875 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly.

  The first edition’s title page

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. RURAL AMERICA.

  CHAPTER II. RURAL ENGLAND.

  CHAPTER III. PERNICIOUS LITERATURE.

  CHAPTER IV. PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY.

  CHAPTER V. EMANCIPATION.

  CHAPTER VI. ENTER A NEW ENGLANDER.

  CHAPTER VII. THE DEACON FALTERS.

  CHAPTER VIII. WOOD AND STONE.

  CHAPTER IX. CONSPIRACY.

  CHAPTER X. MINNA IMPROVES HERSELF.

  CHAPTER XI. EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES.

  CHAPTER XII. AN ARTISTIC ENGAGEMENT.

  CHAPTER XIII. AN EVE IN EDEN.

  CHAPTER XIV. MINNA GIVES NOTICE.

  CHAPTER XV. A DOOR OPENS

  CHAPTER XVI. COLIN’S DEPARTURE.

  CHAPTER XVII. A LITTLE CLOUD LIKE A MAN’S HAND.

  CHAPTER XVIII. HIRAM IN WONDERLAND.

  CHAPTER XIX. UNWARRANTABLE INTRUSION.

  CHAPTER XX. THE STRANDS CONVERGE.

  CHAPTER XXI. COLIN SETTLES HIMSELF.

  CHAPTER XXII. HIRAM GETS SETTLED.

  CHAPTER XXIII. RECOGNITION.

  CHAPTER XXIV. GWEN AND HIRAM.

  CHAPTER XXV. MINNA BETTERS HERSELF.

  CHAPTER XXVI. BREAKING UP.

  CHAPTER XXVII. THE DEACON MAKES A GOOD END.

  CHAPTER XXVIII. AN ART PATRON.

  CHAPTER XXIX. A VIEW OF ROME, By Hiram Winthrop.

  CHAPTER XXX. MINNA’S RESOLUTION.

  CHAPTER XXXI. COUSINS.

  CHAPTER XXXII. RE-ENTER GWEN.

  CHAPTER XXXIII. CECCA.

  CHAPTER XXXIV. HIRAM SEES LAND.

  CHAPTER XXXV. MAN PROPOSES.

  CHAPTER XXXVI. CECCA SHOWS HER HAND.

  CHAPTER XXXVII. CECCA AND MINNA.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII. GWEN HAS A VISITOR.

  CHAPTER XXXIX. GWEN’S DECISION.

  CHAPTER XL. AFTER THE STORM.

  CHAPTER XLI. AUDOUIN’S MISTAKE.

  CHAPTER XLII. A DISTINGUISHED CRITIC.

  CHAPTER XLIII. THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND.

  CHAPTER XLIV. THE CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS.

  CHAPTER XLV. HOVERING.

  CHAPTER XLVI. AUDOUIN SINKS OR SWIMS.

  CHAPTER XLVII. ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

  Allen close to the time of publication

  CHAPTER I. RURAL AMERICA.

  ‘Whar’s Hiram, Het?’ Deacon Zephaniah Winthrop asked of his wife, tartly. ‘Pears to me that boy’s allus off somewhar, whenever he’s wanted to do anything. Can’t git along without him, any way, when we’ve got to weed the spring peppermint. Whar’s he off, I say, Mehitabel?’

  Mrs. Winthrop drew herself together from the peas she was languidly shelling, and answered in the dry withered tone of a middle-aged northern New Yorker, ‘Wal, I s’pose, Zeph, he’s gone down to the blackberry lot, most likely.’

  ‘Blackberry lot,’ Mr. Winthrop replied with a fine air of irony. ‘Blackberry lot, indeed. What does he want blackberryin’, I should like to know? I’ll blackberry him, I kin tell you, whenever I ketch him. Jest you go an’ holler for him, Het, an’ ef he don’t come ruther sooner’n lightnin’, he’ll ketch it, an’ no mistake, sure as preachin’. I’ve got an orful itchin’, Mis’ Winthrop, to give that thar boy a durned good cow-hidin’ this very minnit.’

  Mrs. Winthrop rose from the basket of peas and proceeded across the front yard with as much alacrity as she could summon up, to call for Hiram. She was a tall, weazened, sallow woman, prematurely aged, with a pair of high cheekbones, and a hard, hungry-looking, unlovable mouth; but she was averse to the extreme and unnecessary measure of cowhiding her firstborn. ‘Hiram,’ she called out, in her loudest and shrillest voice: ‘Hiram!

  Drat the boy, whar is he? Hiram! Hi-ram!’ It was a dreary and a monotonous outlook altogether, that view from the gate of Zephaniah Winthrop’s freehold farm in Geauga County. The homestead itself, an unpainted frame house, consisted of planed planks set carelessly one above the other on upright beams, stood in a weedy yard, surrounded by a raw-looking paling, and unbeautified by a single tree, creeper, shrub, bush, or scented flower. A square house, planted naked in the exact centre of a square yard, desolate and lonely, as though such an idea as that of beauty had never entered into the human heart. In front the long straight township road ran indefinitely as far as the eye could reach in either direction, beginning at the horizon on the north, and ending at the horizon on the south, but leading nowhere in particular, that anyone ever heard of, meanwhile, unless it were to Muddy Creek Dépôt (pronounced deepo) on the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdens-burg Railroad. At considerable intervals along its course, a new but congenitally shabby gate opened here and there into another bare square yard, and gave access to another bare square frame house of unpainted pine planks. In the blanks between these oases of unvarnished ugliness the road, instead of being bordered by green tre
es and smiling hedgerows, pursued its gaunt way, unrejoicing, between open fields or long and hideous snake fences. If you have ever seen a snake fence, you know what that means; if you haven’t seen one, sit down in your own easy chair gratefully and comfortably, and thank an indulgent heaven with all your heart for your happy ignorance.

  Beyond and behind the snake fences lay fields of wheat and meadows and pasture land; not, as in England, green and lush with grass or clover, but all alike bare, brown, weedy, and illimitable. There were no trees to be seen anywhere (though there were plenty of stumps), for this was ‘a very fully settled section,’ as Mr. Winthrop used to murmur to himself complacently: ‘the country thar real beautiful: you might look about you, some parts, for a mile or two right away togither and never see a single tree a-standin’ anywhar.’ Indeed, it was difficult to imagine where on earth a boy could manage to hide himself in all that long, level, leafless district. But Mrs. Winthrop knew better: she knew Hiram was loafing away somewhere down in the blackberry lot beside the river.

  ‘Lot’ is a cheap and nasty equivalent in the great American language for field, meadow, croft, copse, paddock, and all the other beautiful and expressive old-world names which denote in the tongue of the old country our own time-honoured English inclosures. And the blackberry lot, at the bottom of the farm, was the one joy and delight of young Hiram Winthrop’s boyish existence. Though you could hardly guess it, as seen from the farm, there was a river running in the hollow down yonder-Muddy Creek, in fact, which gave its own euphonious name to the naked little Dépôt; not here muddy, indeed, as in its lower reaches, but clear and limpid from the virgin springs of the Gilboa hillsides. Beside the creek, there stretched a waste lot, too rough and stony to be worth the curse of cultivation; and on that lot the blackberry bushes grew in wild profusion, and the morning-glories opened their great pink bells blushingly to the early sun, and the bobolinks chattered in the garish noontide, and the grey squirrels hid by day among the stunted trees, and the chipmunks showed their painted sides for a moment as they darted swiftly in and out from hole to hole amid the tangled brushwood. What a charmed spot it seemed to the boy’s mind, that one solitary patch of undesecrated nature, in the midst of so many blackened stumps, and so much first-rate fall wheat, and such endless, hopeless, dreary hillocks of straight rowed, dry leaved, tillering Indian corn!

  ‘Hiram! Hiram! Hi-ram!’ cried Mrs. Winthrop, growing every moment shriller and shriller.

  Hiram heard, and leaped from the brink at once, though a kingfisher was at that very moment eyeing him with head on one side from the half-concealing foliage of the basswood tree opposite. ‘Yes, marm,’ he answered submissively, showing himself as fast as he was able in the pasture above the blackberry lot. ‘Wal! What is it?’

  ‘Hiram,’ his mother said, as soon as he was within convenient speaking distance, ‘you come right along in here, sonny. Where was you, say? Here’s father swearin he’ll thrash you for goin’ loafin’. He wants you jest to come in at once and help weed the peppermint. I guess you’ve bin down in the blackberry lot, fishin’, or suthin’.’

  ‘I ain’t bin fishin’,’ Hiram answered, with a certain dogged, placid resignation. ‘I’ve bin lookin’ around, and that’s so, mother. On’y lookin’ around at the chipmunks an’ bobolinks, ‘cause I was dreadful tired.’

  ‘Tired of what?’ asked his mother, not uncompassionately.

  ‘Planin’,’ Hiram answered, with a nod. ‘Planks. Father give me forty planks to plane, an’ I’ve done’em.’

  ‘Wal, mind he don’t thrash you, Hiram,’ the sallow-faced woman said, warningly, with as much tenderness in her voice as lay within the compass of her nature. ‘He’s orful mad with you now, ‘cause you didn’t answer immejately when he hollered.’

  ‘Then why don’t he holler loud enough?’ asked Hiram, in an injured tone — he was an ill-clad boy of about twelve— ‘I can’t never hear him down lot yonder.’

  ‘What’s that you got in your pocket, sir?’ Mr. Winthrop puts in, coming up unexpectedly to the pair on the long, straight, blinking high-road. ‘What’s that, naow, eh, sonny?’

  Hiram pulls the evidence of guilt slowly out of his rough tunic. ‘Injuns,’ he answers, shortly, in the true western laconic fashion.

  Mr. Winthrop examines the object carelessly. It is a bit of blackish stone, rudely chipped into shape, and ground at one end to an artificial edge with some nicety of execution.

  ‘Injuns!’ he echoes contemptuously, dashing it on the path: ‘Injuns! Oh yes, this is Injuns! An’ what’s Injuns? Heathens, outlandish heathens; and a drunken, p’isonous crowd at that, too. The noble red man is a fraud; Injuns must go. It allus licks my poor finite understandin’ altogether why the Lord should ever have run this great continent so long with nothin’ better’n Injuns. It’s one o’ them mysteries o’ Providence that ‘taint given us poor wums to comprehend daown here, noways. Wal, they’re all cleared out of this section naow, anyway, and why a lad that’s brought up a Chrischun and Hopkinsite should want to go grubbin’ up their knives and things in this cent’ry is a caution to me, that’s what it is, a reg’lar caution.’

  ‘This ain’t a knife,’ Hiram answered, still doggedly. ‘This is a tommyhawk. Injun knives ain’t made like this ’ere. I’ve had knives, and they’re quite a different kinder pattern.’

  Mr. Winthrop shook his head solemnly.

  ‘Seems to me,’ he said with a loud snort, ‘‘taint right of any believin’ boy goin’ lookin’ up these heathenish things, mother. He’s allus bringin’ ’em home — arrowheads, he calls ’em, and tommyhawks, and Lord knows what rubbish — when he ought to be weedin’ in the peppermint lot, an’ earnin’ his livin’. Why wasn’t you here, eh, sonny? Why wasn’t you? Why wasn’t you? Why wasn’t you?’

  As Mr. Winthrop accompanied each of these questions by a cuff, crescendo, on either ear alternately, it is not probable that he himself intended Hiram to reply to them with any particular definiteness. But Hiram, drawing his sleeve across his eyes, and wiping away the tears hastily, proceeded to answer with due deliberation: ‘‘Cause I was tired planin’ planks. So I went down to the blackberry lot, to rest a bit. But you won’t let a feller rest. You want him to be workin’ like a nigger all day.’Taint reasonable.’

  ‘Mother,’ Mr. Winthrop said again, more solemnly than before, ‘it’s my opinion that the old Adam is on-common powerful in this here lad, on-common powerful! Ef he had lived in Bible times, I should hev been afeard of a visible judgment on his head, like the babes that mocked at Elijah. (Or was it Elisha?’ asked Mr. Winthrop to himself, dubitatively. ‘I don’t’zackly recollect the pertickler prophet.) The eye that mocketh at its father, you know, sonny; it’s a dangerous thing, I kin tell you, to mock at your father. Go an’ weed that thar peppermint, sir; go an’ weed that thar peppermint.’ And as he spoke the deacon gave Hiram a parting dig in the side with the handle of the Dutch hoe he was lightly carrying.

  Hiram dodged the hoe quickly, and set off at a run to the peppermint lot. When he got there he waited a moment, and then felt in his pocket cautiously for some other unseen object. Oh joy, it wasn’t broken! He took it out and looked at it tenderly. It was a bobolink’s egg. He held it up to the light, and saw the sunshine gleaming through it.

  ‘Aint it cunning?’ he said to himself, with a little hug and chuckle of triumph. ‘Ain’t it a cunning little egg, either? I thought he’d most broke it, I did, but he hadn’t, seems. It’s the first I ever found, that sort. Oh my, ain’t it cunning?’ And he put the egg back lovingly in his pocket, with great cautiousness.

  For a while the boy went on pulling up the weeds that grew between the wide rows of peppermint, and then at last he came to a big milk-weed in full flower. The flowers were very pretty, and so curious, too. He looked at them and admired them. But he must pull it up: no room in the field for milk-weed (it isn’t a marketable crop, alas!), so he caught the pretty thing in his hands, and uprooted it without a murmur. Thus he went on, row a
fter row, in the hot July sun, till nearly half the peppermint was well weeded.

  Then he sat down to rest a little on the pile of boulders in the far corner. There was no tree to sit under, and no shade; but the boy could at least sit in the eye of the sun on the pile of ice-worn boulders. As he sat, he saw a wonderful and beautiful sight. In the sky above, a great bald-headed eagle came wheeling slowly toward the corner of the fall wheat lot. From the opposite quarter of the sky his partner circled on buoyant wings to meet him; and with wide curves to right and left, crossing and recrossing each other at the central point like well-bred setters, those two magnificent birds swiftly beat the sunlit fields for miles around them. At last, one of the pair detected game; for an instant he checked his flight, to steady his swoop, and then, with wings halffolded, and a rushing noise through the air, he fell plump on the ground at a vague spot in the midst of the meadow. One moment more, and he rose again, with a quivering rabbit suspended from his yellow claws. Presently he made towards the corn lot. It was fenced round, like all the others, with a snake fence, and, to Hiram’s intense joy, the eagle finally settled, just opposite him, on one of the two upright rails that stand as a crook or stake for the top rail, called the rider. Its big white head shone in the sunlight, its throat rang out a sharp, short bark, and it craned its neck this way and that, looking defiantly across the field to Hiram.

  ‘I reckon,’ the boy said to himself quietly, ‘I could draw that thar eagle.’

  He put his hand into his trousers pocket, and pulled out from it a well-worn stump of blacklead pencil. Then from another pocket he took a small blank book, an old account book, in fact, with one side of the pages all unwritten, though the other was closely covered with rows of figures. It was a very precious possession to Hiram Winthrop, that dog-eared little volume, for it was nearly-filled with his own tentative pencil sketches of beast and birds, and all the other beautiful things that lived together in the blackberry bottom. He had never seen anything beautiful anywhere else, and that one spot and that one book were all the world to him that he loved or cared for.