by Grant Allen
Only one eyesore still remained to grieve and annoy him. The Whitestrand poplar yet faced and confronted him wherever he looked. It turned him sick. It poisoned Suffolk for him. The poplar must go! He could never endure it. Life would indeed be a living death, in sight for ever of that detested and grinning memorial. For it grinned at him often from the gnarled and hollow trunk. A human face seemed to laugh out upon him from its shapeless boles a human face, fiendish in it? joy, with a carbuncled nose and grinning mouth. He hated to see it, it grinned so hideously. So he set his wits to work to devise a way of getting rid of that poplar, root and branch, without unnecessarily angering Winifred.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
REHEARSAL.
Meanwhile, when the house was all finished and decorated throughout, Hugh turned his thoughts once more, on fame intent, to his great forthcoming volume of verses. Since he had married Winifred, he had published little, eschewing journalism and such small tasks as unworthy the dignity of accomplished squiredom; but he had been working hard from time to time at polishing and repolishing his magnum opus, “A Life’s Philosophy” a lengthy poem in a metre of his own, more or less novel, and embodying a number of moral reflections, more or less trite, on the youth, adolescence, maturity, and decrepitude of the human subject. It exactly suited Mr. Matthew Arnold’s well-known definition, being, in fact, an exhaustive criticsm of life, as Hugh Massinger himself had found it. He meant to print it in time for the autumn book-season. It was the great stake of his life, and he was confident of success. He had worked it up with ceaseless toil to what seemed to himself the highest possible pitch of artistic handicraft; and he rolled his own sonorous rhymes over and over again with infinite satisfaction upon his literary palate, pronouncing them all, on impartial survey, of most excellent flavor. Nothing in life, indeed, can be more deceptive than the poetaster’s confidence in his own productions. He mistakes familiarity for smoothness of ring, and a practiced hand for genius and originality. It is his fate always to find his own lines absolutely perfect; in which cheerful personal creed the rest of the world mostly fails altogether to agree with him.
In such a self-congratulatory and hopeful mood, Hugh sat one morning in the new drawing-room, holding a quire of closely written sermon-paper, stitched together, in his hand, and gazing affectionately with parental pride at his last-born stanzas. Winifred had only returned yesterday from a shopping expedition up to town, and was idling away a day in rest and repair after her unwonted exertion among the crowded bazaars of the modern Bagdad. So Hugh leaned back in his chair at his ease, and, seized with the sudden thirst for an audience, began to pour forth in her ear in his rotund manner the final finished introductory prelude to his “Life’s Philosophy.” His wife, propped up on the pillows of the sofa and lolling carelessly, listened and smiled as he read and read, with somewhat sceptical though polite indifference.
“Let me see, where had I got to?” Hugh went on once, after one of her frequent and trying critical interruptions. “You put me out so, Winnie, with your constant faultfinding! I can’t recollect how far I’d read to you.”
“‘Begotten unawares:’ now go ahead,” Winifred answered carelessly as carelessly as though it was some other fellow’s poems he had been pouring forth to her.
“‘Or bastard offspring of unconscious nature, Begotten unawares,’ “ Hugh repeated pompously, looking back with a loving eye at his much-admired manuscript. “Now listen to the next good bit, Winifred; it’s really impressive.
XXXII.
“When chaos slowly set to sun or planet, And molten masses hardened into earth; When primal force wrought out on sea and granite The wondrous miracle of living birth; Did mightier Mind, in clouds of glory hidden, Breathe power through its limb to feel and know, Or sentience spring, spontaneous and unbidden, With feeble steps and slow?
XXXIII.
“Are sense and thought but parasites of being?
Did Nature mold our limbs to act and move, But some strange chance endow our eyes with seeing, Our nerves with feeling, and our hearts with love? Since all alone we stand, alone discerning Sorrow from joy, self from the things without; While blind fate tramples on the spirit’s yearning, And floods our souls with doubt.
XXXIV.
“This very tree, whose life is our life’s sister, We know not if the ichor in her veins Thrill with fierce joy when April dews have kissed her, Or shrink in anguish from October rains; We search the mighty world above and under, Yet nowhere find the soul we fain would find; Speech in the hollow rumbling of the thunder, Words in the whispering wind.
XXXV.
“We yearn for brotherhood with lake and mountain, Our conscious soul seeks conscious sympathy; Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, Gods on the craggy height of roaring sea. We find but soulless sequences of matter; Fact linked to fact in adamantine rods; Eternal bonds of former sense and latter; Dead laws for living gods.
“There, Winifred, what do you say to that now? Isn’t that calculated to take the wind out of some of these pretentious fellows’ sails? What do you think of it?”
“Think?” Winifred answered, pursing up her lips into an expression of the utmost professional connoisseurship. “I think ‘granite’ doesn’t rhyme in the English language with ‘planet’; and I consider ‘sentience’ is a horribly prosaic word of its sort to introduce into serious poetry. What’s that stuff about liquor, too? ‘We know not if the liquor in her something.’ I don’t like ‘liquor.’ It’s not good: bar-room English, only fit for a public-house production.”
“I didn’t say ‘liquor,’” Hugh cried indignantly. “I said ‘ichor,’ which of course is a very different matter. ‘We know not if the ichor in her veins.’ Ichor’s the blood of the gods in Homer. That’s the worst of reading these things to women: classical allusion’s an utter blank to them. If you’ve got nothing better than that to object, have the kindness, please, not to interrupt me.”
Winifred closed her lips with a sharp snap; while Hugh went on, nothing abashed, with the same sonorous metremarked mouthing XXXVI.
“They care not any whit for pain or pleasure That seem to men the sum and end of all. Dumb force and barren number are their measure:
What can be, shall be, though the great world fall. They take no heed of man, or man’s deserving, Reck not what happy lives they make, or mar, Work out their fatal will, unswerved, unswerving, And know not that they are.”
“Now, what do you say to that, Winifred Isn’t it just hunky?”
“I don’t like interrupting,” Winifred snapped out savagely. “You told me not to interrupt, except for a good and sufficient reason.”
“Well, don’t be nasty,” Hugh put in, half smiling. “This is business, you know a matter of public appreciation and I want your criticism: it all means money. Criticism from anybody, no matter whom, is always worth at least something.”
“Oh, thank you, so much. That is polite of you. Then if you want criticism, no matter from whom, I should say I fail to perceive, myself, the precise difference you mean to suggest between the two adjectives ‘unswerved’ and ‘unswerving.’ To the untutored intelligence of a mere woman, to whom classical allusion’s an utter blank, they seem to say exactly the same thing twice over.”
“No, no,” Hugh answered, getting warm in self-defense. “ ‘Unswerved’ is passive; ‘unswerving’ is active, or at least middle: the one means that they swerve themselves; the other, that somebody or something else swerves them.”
“You do violence to the genius of the English language,” Winifred remarked curtly. “I may not be acquainted with Latin and Greek, but I talk at least my mother-tongue. Are you going to print nothing but this great, long, dreary incomprehensible ‘Life’s Philosophy in your new volume?”
“I shall make it up mainly with that,” Hugh answered, crestfallen, at so obvious a failure favorably to impress the domestic critic. “But I shall also eke out the titlepiece with a lot of stray occasional verses the ‘Funeral Ode for Gambetta,’ for e
xample, and plenty of others that I haven’t read you. Some of them seem to me tolerably successful.” He was growing modest before the face of her unflinching criticism.
“Read me ‘Gambetta,’” Winifred said with quiet imperiousness. “I’ll see if I like that any better than all this foolish maundering ‘Philosophy.’”
Hugh turned over his papers for the piece “by request,” and after some searching among quires and sheets, came at last upon a clean-written copy of his immortal threnody. He began reading out the lugubrious lines in a sufficiently grandiose and sepulchral voice. Winifred listened with careless attention, as to a matter little worthy her sublime consideration. Hugh cleared his throat and rang out magniloquently “She sits once more upon her ancient throne, The fair Republic of our steadfast vows:
A Phrygian bonnet binds her queenly brows; Athwart her neck her knotted hair is blown.
A hundred cities nestle in her lap, Girt round their stately locks with mural crowns:
The folds of her imperial robe enwrap A thousand lesser towns.”
“‘Mural crowns’ is good,” Winifred murmured satirically: “it reminds one so vividly of the stone statues in the Place de la Concorde.”
Hugh took no notice of her intercalary criticism. He went on with ten or twelve stanzas more of the same bombastic, would-be sublime character, and wound up at last in thunderous tones with a prophetic outburst as to the imagined career of some future Gambetta himself possibly “He still shall guide us toward the distant goal; Calm with unerring tact our weak alarms; Train all our youth in skill of manly arms, And knit our sires in unity of soul:
Till bursting iron bars and gates of brass Our own Republic stretch her arm again To raise the weeping daughters of Alsace, And lead thee home, Lorraine.”
“Well, what do you think of that, Winnie?” he asked at last triumphantly, with the air of a man who has trotted out his best war-horse for public inspection and has no fear of the effect he is producing.
“Think?” Winifred answered. “Why, I think, Hugh, that if Swinburne had never written his Ode to Victor Hugo, you would never have written that Funeral March for your precious Gambetta.”
Hugh bit his lip in bitter silence. The criticism was many times worse than harsh: it was true; and he knew it. But a truthful critic is the most galling of all things.
“Well, surely, Winifred,” he cried at last, after a long pouse, “you think those other lines good, don’t you?”
“And when like some fierce whirlwind through the land The wrathful Teuton swept, he only dared To hope and act when every heart and hand, But his alone, despaired.”
“My dear Hugh,” Winifred answered candidly, “don’t you see in your own heart that all this sort of thing may be very well in its own way, but it isn’t original it isn’t inspiration; it isn’t the true sacred fire: it’s only an echo. Echoes do admirably for the young beginner; but in a man of your age for you’re getting on now we expect something native and idiosyncratic. I think Mr. Hatherley called it idiosyncratic. You know Mr. Hatherley said to me once you would never be a poet. You have too good a memory. ‘Whenever Massinger sits down at his desk to write about anything,’ he said in his quiet way, ‘he remembers such a perfect flood of excellent things other people have written about the same subject, that he’s absolutely incapable of originality.’ And the more I see of your poetry, dear, the more do I see that Mr. Hatherley was right right beyond question You’re clever enough, but you know you’re not original.”
Hugh answered her never a single word. To such a knock-down blow as that, any answer at all is clearly impossible. He only muttered something very low about casting one’s pearls before some creature inaudible.
Presently Winifred spoke again. “Let’s go out,” she said, rising from the sofa, “and sit by the sea on the roots of the poplar.”
At the word, Hugh flung down the manuscript in a heap on the ground with a stronger expression than Winifred had ever before heard fall from his lips. “I hate the poplar!” he said angrily; “I detest the poplar! I won’t have the poplar! Nothing on earth will induce me to sit by the poplar!”
“How cross you are!” Winifred cried with a frown. “You jump at me as if you’d snap my head off! And all just because I didn’t like your verses. Very well then; I’ll go and sit there alone. I can amuse myself, fortunately, without your help. I’ve got Mr. Hatherley’s clever article in this month’s ‘Contemporary.’”
That evening, as they sat together silently in the drawing-room, Winifred engaged in the feminine amusement of casting admiring glances at her own walls, and Hugh poring deep over a serious-looking book, Winifred glanced over at him suddenly with a sigh, and murmured half aloud: “After all, really, I don’t think much of it”
“Much of what?” Hugh asked, still bending over the book he was anxiously consulting.
“Why, of that gourd I brought home from town yesterday. You know Mrs. Walpole’s got a gourd in her drawing-room; and every time I went into the vicarage I said to myself: ‘Oh, how lovely it is! How exquisite! How foreign-looking! If only I had a gourd like that, now, I think life would be really endurable. It gives the last touch of art to the picture. Our new drawing-room would look just perfection with such a gourd as hers to finish the wall with,’ Well, I saw the exact counterpart of that very gourd the day before yesterday at a shop in Bond Street. I bought it, and brought it home with exceeding great joy. I thought I should then be quite happy. I hung it up on the wall to try, this morning. And sitting here all evening, looking at it with my head first on one side and then on the other, I’ve said to myself a thousand times over: ‘It doesn’t look one bit like Mrs. Waipole’s. After all, I don’t know that I’m so much happier, now I’ve got it, than I was before I had a gourd of my own at all to look at.”
Hugh groaned. The unconscious allegory was far too obvious in its application not to sink into the very depths of his soul. He turned back to his book, and sighed inwardly to think for what a feeble, unsatisfactory shadow of a gourd he had sacrifice-d his own life not to speak of Winifred’s and Elsie’s.
By-and-by Winifred rose and crossed the room. “What’s that you are studying so intently?” she asked, with a suspicious glance at the book in his fingers.
Hugh hesitated, and seemed half inclined for a moment to shut the book with a bang and hide it away from her. Then he made up his mind with a fresh resolve to brazen it out. “Gordon’s ‘Electricity and Magnetism,’ “ he answered quietly, as unabashed as possible, holding the volume half-closed with his forefinger at the page he had just hunted up. “I’m I’m interested at present to some extent in the subject of electricity. I’m thinking of getting it up a little.”
Winifred took the book from his hand, wondering, with a masterful air of perfect authority. He yielded like a lamb. On immaterial questions it was his policy not to resist her. She turned to the page where his finger had rested and ran it down lightly with her quick eye. The key-words showed in some degree at what it was driving: “Franklin’s Experiment.”
“Means of Collection.”
“Theory of Lightning Rods.”
“RuhmkorfFs Coils.”
“Drawing down Electric Discharges from the Clouds.” Why, what was all this? She turned round to him inquiringly. Hugh shuffled in an uneasy way in his chair. The husband who shuffles betrays his cause. “We must put up conductors, Winnie,” he said hesitatingly, with a hot face, “to protect those new gables at the east wing. It’s dangerous to leave the house so exposed. I’ll order them down from London to-morrow.”
“Conductors! Fiddlesticks!” Winifred answered in a breath, with wifely promptitude. “Lightning never hurt the house yet, and it’s not going to begin hurting it now, just because an Immortal Poet with a fad for electricity has come to live and compose at Whitestrand. If anything, it ought to go the other way. Bards, you know, are exempt from thunderbolts. Didn’t you read me the lines yourself, ‘God’s lightnings spared, they said, Alone the holier head, Whose laur
els screened it,’ or something to that effect. You’re all right, you see. Poets can never get struck, I fancy.”
“But ‘Mr. Hatherley said to me once you would never be a poet,’ “ Hugh repeated with a smile, exactly mimicking Winifred’s querulous little voice and manner. “As my own wife doesn’t consider me a poet, Winifred, I shall venture to do as I like myself about my private property.”
Winifred took up a bedroom candle and lighted it quietly without a word. Then she went up to muse in her own bedroom over her new gourd and other disillusionments.
As soon as she was gone, Hugh rose from his chair and walked slowly into his own study. Gordon’s “Electricity” was still in his hand, and his ringer pointed to that incriminating passage. He sat down at the sloping desk and wrote a short note to a well-known firm of scientific instrument makers whose address he had copied a week before from the advertisement sheet of “Nature.”
“Whitestrand Hall, Almundham, Suffolk.
“Gentlemen, “Please forward me to the above address, at your earliest convenience, your most powerful form of Ruhmkorff Induction Coil, with secondary wires attached, for which cheque will be sent in full on receipt of invoice or retail price-list.
