Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  All the way up to the Fisherman’s Rest he repeated again and again below his breath: “So much the worse in the end for Whitestrand.”

  CHAPTER XXX.

  THE BARD IN HARNESS.

  “I never felt more astonished in my life,” Hatherley remarked one day some weeks later to a chosen circle at the Cheyne Row Club, “than I felt on the very first morning of my visit to Whitestrand. Talk about being driven by a lady, indeed! Why, that frail little woman’s got the Bard in harness, as right and as tight as if he were a respectable cheesemonger. What on earth do you think happened? As the Divine Singer and I were starting out, stick in hand, for a peregrination of the estate or what there is left of it if that perky little atomy didn’t poke her fuzzy, tow-bewigged head out of the dining-room window, and call out in the most matter-of-fact tone possible: ‘Hugh, if you’re going to the village to-day, mind you don’t forget to bring me back three kippered herrings!’ Three what?’ s’aid I, scarcely believing my ears. Three kippered herrings,’ that unblushing little minx repeated in an audible voice, wholly unabashed at the absurdity of her request. ‘Well,’ said I, in a fever of surprise, ‘it may be all right when you’ve got them well in hand, you know; but you’ll admit, Mrs. Massinger, that’s not the use to which we generally put immortal minstrels!”Oh, but this is such a very mild specimen of the genus, though!’ Mrs. Massinger answered, laughing carelessly. I looked at the Bard with tremulous awe, expecting to see the angry fire in his cold gray eye flashing forth like the leven bolt from heaven to scath and consume her. Not a bit of it. Nary scath! The Immortal Singer merely took out his tablets from his waistcoat pocket and made a note of the absurd commission. And when we came home again an hour afterward, I solemnly assure you he was carrying those three identical kippered herrings, wrapped up in a sheet of dirty newspaper, in the very ‘hand that wrote The Death of Alaric.’ It’s too surprising. The Bard’s done for. His life is finished. There the Man stops. The Husband and Father may drag out a wretched domestic existence yet for another twenty years.

  But the Man is dead, hopelessly dead. Julius Caesar himself’s not more utterly defunct. That girl has extinguished him.”

  “Are there any children, then?” one of the chosen circle puts in casually.

  “Children! No. Bar twins, the plural would surely be premature, so far. There was a child born just after old Mrs. Meysey’s death, I believe; but it came to nothing a mere abortive attempt at a son and heir and left the mother a poor wreck, her own miserable faded photograph. She was a nice little girl enough, in her small way, when she was here in town; amusing and sprightly; but the Bard has done for her, as she’s done for the Bard. It’s a mutual annihilation society, like Stevenson’s Suicide Club, on a more private platform. He seems to have crushed all the giddy girlishness out of her. The fact is, this is a case of incompatibility of disposition for which cause I believe you can get a divorce in Illinois or some other enlightened Far Western community. You can’t stop three days at Whitestrand without feeling there’s a skeleton in the house somewhere!”

  The skeleton in the house, long carefully confined to its native cupboard, had indeed begun to perambulate the Hall in open daylight during the brief period of Hatherley’s visit. He reached the newly remodeled home just in time to dress for dinner. When he descended to the ill-lighted drawing-room, five minutes later Whitestrand could boast no native gas-supply, and candles are expensive he gave his arm with a sense of solemn obligation to poor dark-clad Winifred. Mrs. Massinger was indeed altered sadly altered. Three painful losses in quick succession had told upon that slender pale young wife. She showed her paleness in her deep black dress: colors suited Winifred: in mourning, she was hardly even pretty. The little “arrangement in pink and white” had faded almost into white alone: the pinkness had proved a fleeting pigment: she was not warranted fast colors. But Hatherley did his best with innate gallantry not to notice the change. Fresh from town, crammed with the last good things of the Cheyne Row and Mrs. Bouverie Barton’s Wednesday evenings, he tried hard with conscientious efforts to keep the conversation from flagging visibly. At first he succeeded with creditable skill; and Hugh, looking across at his wife with a curious smile, said in a tone of genuine pleasure: “How delightful it is, after all, Winnie, to get hold of somebody direct from the real live world of London in the midst of our fossilized antediluvian Whitestrand society! I declare, Hatherley, it does one’s heart good, like champagne, to listen to you. A breath of Bohemia blows across Suffolk the moment you arrive. Poor drowsy, somnolent, petrified Suffolk! ‘Silly Suffolk,’ even the aborigines themselves call it. It’s catching, too. I’m almost beginning to fall asleep myself, by force of example.”

  At the words, Winifred fired up in defense of her native county. “I’m sure, Hugh,” she said with some asperity, “I don’t know why you’re always trying to run down Suffolk! If you didn’t like us, you should have avoided the shire; you should have carried your respected presence elsewhere. Suffolk never invited you to honor it with your suffrages. You came and settled here of your own free will. And who could be nicer or more cultivated, if it comes to that, than some of our Suffolk aborigines, as you call them? Dear old Mrs. Walpole at the vicarage, for example.”

  Hugh balanced an olive on the end of his fork. “An amiable old Hecuba,” he answered provokingly. “What’s Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba? Her latest dates are about the period of the siege of Troy, or, to be more precisely accurate, the year 1850. She’s extremely well read, I grant you that, in Bulwer Lytton and the poets of the Regency. She adores Cowper, and considers Voltaire a most dangerous writer. She has even heard of Bismarck and Bulgaria; and she understands that a young man named Swinburne has lately published some very objectionable and unwholesome verses, not suited to the cheek of the young person. The idea of sticking me down with people like that, who never read a line of Browning in their lives, and ask if Mr. William Morris, ‘the upholsterer,’ who furnished and decorated our poor little drawing-room, is really a brother of that eccentric and rather heteroctox preacher! My dear Hatherley, when you come down, I feel like a man who has breathed fresh air on some high mountain stimulated and invigorated. You palpitate with actuality. Down here, we stagnate in the seventeenth century.”

  Winifred bit her lip with vexation, but said nothing. It was evident the subject was an unpleasant one to her. But she at least would not trot out the skeleton. Women are all for due concealment of your dirty linen. It is men who insist on washing it in public.

  Next morning the morning of the kippered herring adventure Hugh showed Hatherley round the Whitestrand estate. Hatherley himself was not, to say the truth, in the best of humors. Mrs. Massinger was dull and not what she used to be: she obviously resented his bright London gossip, as throwing into stronger and clearer relief the innate stupidity of her ancestral Suffolk. The breakfast was bad; the coffee sloppy; and the dishes suggested too obvious reminiscences of the joints and entrees at last night’s dinner. Clearly, the Massingers were struggling hard to keep up appearances on an insufficient income. They were stretching their means much too thin. The Morris drawing-room was all very well in its way, of course; but tulip-pattern curtains and De Morgan pottery don’t quite make up for a rechauffe of kidneys. Moreover, a suspicion floated dimly through the air that to-morrow’s dawn would see those three kippered herrings as the sole alternative to the curried drumsticks left behind as a legacy by this evening’s roast chicken. Hatherley was an epicure, like most club-bred men, and his converse for the day took a color from the breakfast table for good or for evil. So he started out that morning in a dormant ill-humor, prepared to tease and “draw” Massinger, who had had the bad taste to desert Bohemia for dull respectability and ill-paid Squiredom in the wilds of Suffolk.

  Hugh showed him first the region of the sandhills. The sandhills were a decent bit to begin with. “Aeolian sands!” Hatherley murmured contemplatively as Hugh mentioned the name. “How very pretty! How very poetical! You can hardly regret i
t yourself, Massinger, this overwhelming of your salt marshes by the shifting sands, when you reflect at leisure it was really done by anything with so sweet an epithet as Aeolian.”

  “I thought so once,” Hugh answered dryly, with obvious distaste, “when it was the property of my late respected father-in-law. But circumstances alter cases, you know, as somebody once remarked with luminous platitude; and since I came into the estate myself, to tell you the truth, I can’t forgive the beastly sands, even though they happen to be called Aeolian.”

  “Aeolian sands,” Hatherley repeated once more, half aloud, with a tender reluctance. “Curious; there’s hardly any word in the language to rhyme with so simple a sound as Aeolian. Tmolian does it, of course; but Tmolian, you see, is scarcely English, or if English at all, only by courtesy. There’s a fellow called Croll, I believe, who’s invented a splendid theory of his own about the Glacial Epoch; but I’ve never seen it anywhere described in print as the Crollian hypothesis. One might coin the adjective, of course, on the analogy of Darwinian and Carlylese and Ruskinesque and Tennysonian; but it’s scarcely legitimate to coin a word for the sake of a rhyme. Aeolian Crollian: the jingle would only go down, I’m afraid, in geological circles.”

  Hugh’s lip curled contemptuously. He had passed through all that: he knew its hollowness only too well the merely literary way of regarding things. Time was when he himself had seen in everything but a chance for crisp and telling epigrams, an opening for a particular rhyme or turn of phrase. Nowadays, however, all that was changed: he knew better: he was a practical man a Squire and a landlord. “My dear fellow,” he said, with some slight acerbity peeping through the threadbare places in his friendly tone, “men talk like that when they’re hopelessly young. Contact with affairs makes a man soon forget phrases. We deal in facts, not words, when we finally arrive at years of discretion. I think now of the reality of the blown sand the depreciation and loss of rent not the mere prettiness of the sound of Aeolian.”

  “Yes, I know, my dear boy,” Hatherley answered, in his patronizing way, scarcely smearing his barb with delusive honey. “You’ve gone over lo the enemy now: you’ve elected to dwell in the courts of Gath: you’re no longer of Ours: you’re an adopted Philistine. Deserters do well to fight in defense, of their new side. You’d rather have your wretched fat salt marshes, with their prize oxen and their lean agues, than all these pretty little tumbled sandhills that make such a fairyland of mimic hillsides. Don’t say you wouldn’t, for I know you would: you descend on stepping-stones of your dead self, the opposite way from Tennyson’s people, to lower things even to the nethermost abysses of Philistia.”

  Hugh swung his cane uneasily in his hand. He remembered only too well that summer afternoon when he himself not yet a full-fledged squireen had indulged in that self-same rhyme of “Aeolian,”

  “Tmolian,” before the astonished face of old Mr. Meysey. He remembered the magnificent long-horned Highland cattle “Bulls that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats,” he had called them that day, after George Meredith. He knew now they were only old Grimes’ black Ayrshires, fattened for market upon the rank salt-marsh vegetation. “Well, you see, Hatherley,” he said, with a certain inward consciousness of appearing to his friend at an appalling disadvantage, “we must look at practical matters from a practical standpoint. Government’s behaved scandalously to the land-owners about the protection of the Suffolk foreshore. These sandhills tell upon a fellow’s income. If the sand could only be turned into gold dust.”

  Hatherley interrupted him with a happy thought.:< ‘Where Afric’s sunny fountains Roll down their golden sands,’” he cried with an aptitude. “If the Char were only Pactolus, now, ‘a fellow’s income’ would be still intact. There’s the very rhyme for you. ‘Aeolian’ Tactolian’; you can write a sonnet to it embodying that notion. At least you could have written one, in the good old days, when you were still landless and still immortal. But in these later times, as you say yourself, contact with affairs has certainly made you forget phrases. You’ve come down from Olympus to be a Suffolk Squire. You’ll admit it yourself, there’s been a terrible falling off, of late, you know one can’t deny it in your verses, Massinger.”

  “Bohemia is naturally intolerant of seceders,” Hugh answered gloomily. “Each man sees in his neighbor’s backsliding the premonition of his own proximate downfall. You will marry in time, and migrate, even you yourself, to fixed quarters in Askelon. Prague’s a capital town to secure lodgings in for some weeks of one’s youth, but it’s not the precise place where a man would like to settle down for a whole lifetime.”

  They walked along in Silence for a while, each absorbed in his own thoughts Hatherley ruminating upon this melancholy spectacle of a degenerate son of dear old Cheyne Row gone wrong forever: Massinger reflecting in his own mind upon the closer insight into the facts of life which property, with its cares and responsibilities, gives one when he suddenly halted with a short sharp whistle at the turn of the path. “Whew!” he cried; “why, what the dickens is this? The poplar’s disappeared at least, it’s place, I mean.”

  “Ah, yes! Mrs. Massinger told me all about that unlucky poplar when you were gone last night,” Hatherley answered cheerfully. “The only good object in the view, she said and I can easily believe her, to judge by the remainder. It got struck by lightning one stormy night, and disappeared then and there entirely!”

  “This is strange very strange!” Hugh went on to himself, never heeding the babbling interruption. “The sand’s clearly collected on this side of late. There’s a distinct hummock here, like the ones at Grimes’. I wonder what on earth these waves and mounds of sand can mean? The wind’s not going to attack this side of the river, too, is it?”

  “Ah, Squoire,” a man at work in the field put in, coming up to join them, and leaning upon his pitchfork “ah’m glad yo’ve come to see it yourself, naow. That’s jest what it be. The sand’s a-driftin’. Ah said to Tom, the night the thunderbolt took th’ owd poplar ah said: Tom,’ says ah, ‘that there poplar were the only bar as stopped the river an’ the sand from shifting. It’s shifted all along till it’s reached the poplar; an’ naow it’ll shift an’ shift, an’ shift tiH k gets to Lowestoft or mayhap to Norwich.’ An’ if yo’ll look, Squoire, yo’ll see for yourself the river’s acshally ninnin’ zackly where the tree had used to stand; an’ the sand’s a-driftin’ an’ a-driftin,’ same as it allays drift down yonner at Grimes’. An’ it’s my belief it’ll never stop till it’s reached the poplar; an’ naow it’ll shift, an’ shift, an’ strand.”

  Hugh Massinger gazed in silence at the spot where the Whitestrand poplar had once stood with an utter feeling of sinking helplessness taking possession of his heart and bos6m. A single glance told him beyond doubt the man was right. The poplar had stood as the one frail barrier to the winds and waves of the German Ocean. He had burnt it down, by wile and guile, of deliberate intent, that night of the thunderstorm, to get rid of the single mute witness to Elsie’s suicide. And now his Nemesis had worked itself out. The sea was advancing, inch by inch, with irresistible march, against doomed Whitestrand.

  Inch by inch! Nay, yard by yard. Gazing across to the opposite bank, and roughly measuring the distance with his eye, Hugh saw the river had been diverted northward many feet since he last visited the site of the poplar. He always avoided that hateful spot: the very interval that had elapsed since his last visit enabled him all the better to gauge at sight the distance the river had advanced meanwhile in its silent invasion.

  “I must get an engineer to come down and see to this,” he said shortly. “We must put up a breakwater ourselves, I suppose, since a supine administration refuses to help us. I wonder who’s the proper man to go to for breakwaters? I’d wire to town to-night, if I knew whom to wire to, and check the thing before it runs any farther.”

  “What’s that Swinburne says?” Hatherley asked musingly. “I forget the exact run of the particular lines, but they occur somewhere in the ‘Hymn to Prose
rpine’

  ‘Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins? will ye chasten the high sea with rods? Will ye take her to chain her with chains which is older than all, ye gods?’

  I don’t expect, my dear boy, your engineer will do much for you. Man’s but a pigmy before these natural powers. A breakwater’s helpless against the ceaseless dashing of the eternal sea.”

  Hugh Massinger almost lost his temper especially when he reflected with bitter self-abasement that those were the very lines he had quoted to Elsie in his foolish preterritorial days about Mr. Meysey’s sensible proposal for obtaining an injunction against the German Ocean. “Eternal sea! Eternal fiddlesticks!” he answered testily. “It’s all very well for you to talk; but it’s a matter of life and death to me, this checking the inroads of your eternal humbug. Eternal sea, indeed! What utter rubbish! It’s the curse of the purely literary intellect that it never looks at Things at all, but only at Phrases. We’ve got to build a breakwater, that’s what it comes to. And a breakwater’ll run into a pot of money.”

  “Pity the old tree ever got burnt down, anyhow, to begin with,” Hatherley murmured low, endeavoring, now he had fairly drawn his man, to assume a sympathetic expression of countenance.

  “No!” Hugh thundered back savagely at last, unable to control himself. “Having to build a breakwater’s bad enough; but I wouldn’t have that hateful old tree back again there for all the gold that ever flowed in that Pactolus you chatter about. Leave the tree alone, I say. Confound it! I hate it!”