Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  Linnell’s heart beat higher as he thought that by unobtrusive means he might yet be able to redress in part this great wrong of our money-grubbing society, and repay directly to Haviland Dumaresq some fraction of the debt which the world owed him. The list from his agent would arrive no doubt to-morrow morning, and Haviland Dumaresq would go to bed next evening (though he knew it not) a couple of hundred pounds or so the richer for the information. And that would be but the beginning of Linnell’s work. He would not rest, he declared to himself with fervour, till Haviland Dumaresq, that greatest of thinkers, enjoyed the ease he deserved so richly.

  As he turned to examine the books on the shelves — most of them works on philosophy or science, with flattering inscriptions from their authors on the title-page — the door opened, and Psyche entered. Linnell turned round and took her hand gracefully. If he had looked handsome before in his flannels and tennis suit, he looked still handsomer now in evening dress and with a slightly faded blue passion-flower stuck with tender care in his left button-hole. Psyche’s quick eyes recognised that delicate blossom at once.

  ‘Why, that’s one of our own, Mr. Linnell,’ she said, half startled. ‘Did you pick it from the plant at the door as you came in, then?’

  Linnell looked down at it with a hesitating glance.

  ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘The fact is, Miss Dumaresq, it’s a present I’ve received. I was given it by a lady. Miss Maitland wore it at dinner last night. But,’ he added quickly, as Pysche’s face fell most unmistakably at that simple announcement, ‘she told me it was you who’d given it to her, and I kept it accordingly as a little memento. I would prize anything that came from Haviland Dumaresq’s cottage.’

  ‘Let me get you another,’ Psyche said, if only to hide her blushes. ‘That one’s withered.’ And she put her hand out of the open window as she spoke, and pulled a blossom from the creeper that looked in at the mullions of the casement.

  ‘Thank you,’ Linnell answered, taking it from her with a certain picturesque awkwardness of manner. ‘I shall keep them both.’ And he folded the old one reverently as he spoke in a letter he drew from his waistcoat pocket. So much devotion to philosophy is rare; but Haviland Dumaresq was a man in a century — and Psyche was also a girl of a thousand.

  They sat and talked with the constrained self-consciousness of youth and maiden for a few minutes, for Linnell was almost as shrinking as Psyche herself, and then Haviland Dumaresq entered to relieve them from their unwilling tête-à-tête. He was dressed in a very old and worn evening suit, yet carefully brushed and well preserved: his shirt-front and tie were of the whitest and neatest, and the keen gray eyes and grizzled beard showed even more distinctly than ever, so Linnell thought, the vigour and power of that marvellous brain that lay behind the massive and beetling-browed forehead. He bowed with all his usual stately courtliness to the young painter.

  ‘I hope Psyche has been doing her duty as hostess?’ the great man said in that clear and ringing silvery voice of his. ‘I’ve kept you waiting, I’m afraid; but the fact is, I overwrote my time, working at the new chapters on Dissimilation of Verbal Roots, and forgot to dress till twenty past seven. A mind much occupied with internal relations is apt to let external relations slip by unnoticed. You must have observed that yourself, no doubt, in painting.’

  ‘Papa has always to be called two or three times over to every meal,’ Psyche put in, laughing. ‘And whenever I make a soufflé or anything of that sort, I always call him ten minutes beforehand, or else, you know, it’s all gone flat before he comes out of his study to eat it.’

  Just at that moment the Mansels arrived, and the whole party went in to dinner.

  In spite of the bare little dining-room, and the one servant who acted alike as cook and parlour-maid, no dinner was ever prettier or better. It was simple, of course, and of few dishes: you can’t expect much from a one-handed menage; but it bore the impress of a refined household, for all that: it had the nameless charm of perfect gracefulness, which is often wanting to the most sumptuous London entertainments. Linnell felt sure that Psyche had prepared most of it herself beforehand. The pudding was a cold one, and so was the mayonnaise of boiled fish; so that the one servant had nothing to look after in the kitchen but the clear soup and the one small joint. These details of the hidden domestic management, indeed, Linnell appreciated at once from his old African bachelor experience. But everything was dainty, light, and tempting: even the wine, though but a simple claret, was sound and old and of a choice vintage. Haviland Dumaresq’s own conversation with Mrs. Mansel would alone have made any entertainment go off pleasantly. In his stately way, the old man, when once warmed up to talk, could fire off epigram after epigram in quick succession; and when he met a clever woman, who could toss him back the ball as fast as he delivered it, the game between them was well worth watching. Now, Ida Mansel was a clever woman, with just that particular gift of bandying back rapid question and answer which Dumaresq loved as intellectual recreation; and Linnell was content to sit and listen to those two brisk disputants at their mimic conflict for half the evening, with only an occasional aside to Psyche, or a casual remark to his brother-painter. For Haviland Dumaresq’s wit was keen and sharp as his thought was profound; and the contest of words with a pretty woman always stimulated his faculties to their very utmost, and brought out the flashing qualities of his vivid mind in the highest perfection.

  After dinner, however, when Psyche and Mrs. Mansel had left the table, their conversation fell into a very different channel. A man who meets for the first time in his life one of his pet heroes, likes to make the best of his opportunities by learning as much as he possibly can about the living object of his admiration. Linnell admired Haviland Dumaresq far too profoundly not to be eagerly interested in every detail of his life and history. And Dumaresq, for his part, though he seldom talked of his own affairs, for he was the exact opposite of an egoist — too much absorbed in the world of things to give much of his attention to that solitary unit of humanity, himself — yet broke loose for once, in the presence of one who loved his System, and in a certain grand, impersonal, unostentatious sort of way, gave a brief account of the gradual stages by which that System rose up step after step to full-grown maturity before his mental vision. Linnell listened with all the silent and attentive awe of a disciple as the old man related, bit by bit, how that wonderful conception of the nature of things took gradual concrete shape within him.

  ‘You must have lived a very hard life while you were gathering together the materials for your great work,’ the painter ventured to remark at last, as Dumaresq, pausing, raised his glass of claret to his lips to moisten his throat after the graphic recital. ‘It must have taken you years and years to collect them.’

  The old man gazed across at him with a sharp glance from those keen clear eyes. ‘You are right,’ he said impressively: ‘years and years indeed it took me. For five-and-twenty years I did nothing else but master the infinite mass of detail, the endless facts and principles which went to form the groundwork of the “Encyclopædic Philosophy.” When I left Cambridge, now much more than forty years ago, I made up my mind to devote my life without stint or reserve to the prosecution of that single purpose. I meant to spend myself freely on the work. The goal shone already clear as day in the heavens before me; but I knew that in order to work my plan out in all its fulness I must give up at least ten years of my time to the prosecution of multifarious physical researches. The thing grew as such things always necessarily grow. Before I’d arrived at the preliminary mastery of facts which I felt to be indispensable for the development of my clue, I’d given up a full quarter of a century to the mere task of prior preparation. Then I said to myself my tutelage was over: I might begin to live. I wrote my first volume at once, and I also married. My work was done, all but to write it down. I thought I was justified in taking a little care, for the first time in my life, of my own comfort.’

  ‘But if it isn’t a rude question,’ Linnell cried
, all aglow with the reflected fervour of the old man’s speech, ‘how did you manage to live meanwhile, during the years you gave up to that long preparation?’

  Haviland Dumaresq smiled grimly.

  ‘Like a dog,’ he answered with simple force: ‘like a dog in a kennel. Wherever I was — in London, Paris, Berlin, Washington; for I followed my clue over Europe and America — I took myself a room in the workmen’s quarter, as near as possible to the British Museum, or the Bibliothèque Nationale, or the Smithsonian Institute, or wherever else my chief scene of labour lay; and there I lived on bread and cheese and beer, or sometimes less, for years together, while I was working, and collecting, and observing, and arranging. When I look back upon the past, I wonder at it myself. A certain vivid apostolic energy bore me up then. It has evaporated now, and I’ve become luxurious. But I started in life with exactly fifteen hundred pounds. From the very outset I invested my money, and drawing the interest that accrued each year, I sold out the principal from time to time, to live upon my capital, according as I wanted it. At first, the draughts upon the prime fund were long between; but as years went by and my capital decreased, I had to sell out more and more frequently. Saving and starving the hardest I could starve, sovereign by sovereign, it seemed to slip by me. I gave up the beer; I gave up the cheese; if I could, I would have given up the bread itself, I believe; but in spite of all it still slipped by me. At last, to my utter despair, I found myself one day reduced to my last fifty pounds, while I had still at least five years of solid work staring me in the face unperformed before me. Then I almost gave up all for lost. I fainted in the wilderness. As I sat alone that morning in a fireless room at mid-December, I hid my face in my hands and cried out in my misery. I asked myself why I should continue this task, no man compelling and no man thanking me for it; why I should shut myself out from home and wife and friends and children, and all that other men have always held dearest, for pure love of that vague abstraction, science. I almost gave up out of sheer despondency.’

  ‘And what did you do at last?’ Linnell asked, deeply interested.

  ‘For a time I hardly knew what to do. I told my philosophic acquaintances (for I had a few in London) the whole facts of the case; and some of them asked me to come and dine with them, and some of them said it was very hard lines, and some of them proposed to make a fund to help me. But I wouldn’t hear of that; even for Philosophy’s sake, I was far too proud to accept alms from any man. I nearly broke down with anxiety and despair. Mill made interest for me with your kinsman, old Sir Austen Linnell, who had then charge of the Foreign Office: and Sir Austen tempted me with the offer of a consulship in Peru, which I almost accepted. So broken-hearted was I, that I almost accepted it. Six hundred a year, and collateral advantages. For once in my life the filthy lucre for a moment tempted me. But just at that instant, that critical instant, as luck would have it, an old uncle of mine in America died unexpectedly — a poor man, but he left me his savings, some six hundred pounds all told; and it just pulled me through: it gave me the precise respite I needed. Six hundred pounds was wealth untold to me. I went to work again with redoubled vigour, and spent it every penny for the sake of the System. At the end of five years I sat down a beggar; but with the first volume of my precious book in good black print on my knees before me.’

  Linnell drew a long breath.

  ‘To you, Mansel,’ he said, turning round to his friend, ‘I suppose this is all an old, old story: but as for me, who hear it to-night for the first time, why, it fairly takes my breath away. I call it nothing short of heroic.’

  Mansel shook his head.

  ‘It’s as new to me, my dear fellow, as to you,’ he answered in a low voice. ‘Dumaresq has never before this evening told me a single word about it.’

  The old philosopher sighed profoundly.

  ‘What use?’ he said, with a gesture of deprecation. ‘Why trouble our heads about so small a matter? The universe swarms and teems with worlds around us. We men are but parasites on the warped surface of a tiny satellite of a tenth-rate sun, set in the midst of a boundless cosmos, whose depths are everywhere pregnant with problems. Why should we go out of our way, I wonder, to wring our hands over this fly or that; to discuss the history of any particular individual small parasite among us? The book got done at last; that’s the great thing. The world at large may not care to look at it; but there it is, in evidence to this day, the monument of a lifetime, a germ of intellectual yeast cast loose into the fermenting thought of humanity, and slowly but surely assimilating to itself all suitable particles in that vast mass of inane and clashing atoms.’

  They paused a moment, and gazed hard at their glasses. Dumaresq’s earnestness held them spell-bound. Linnell was the first to break the solemn silence.

  ‘It was a noble life,’ he said, ‘nobly wasted.’

  To their immense astonishment, Haviland Dumaresq made answer energetically:

  ‘Ay, wasted indeed! There you say true. Utterly, inexpressibly, irretrievably wasted! And therein lies the sting of the whole story. If I had it all to live over again, of course, I’d waste it as freely a second time — I can’t help that: nature has built me so that I must turn perforce to philosophy and science, and spill the wine of my life for the advancement of thought, as naturally as the moth flies into the candle, or the lemming drowns itself in the bays of the Baltic. But wasted it is, as you say, for all that. Now that I’m old, and can look down calmly from the pinnacle of age on the import of life, I see that the world itself is wiser in its generation than any one among its wayward children. The general intelligence, from which all individual intelligence derives itself, runs deeper and truer than any man’s personality. The way of the world is the best way in the end, if we only had the sense to see it. Si jeunesse savait, ou si vieillesse pouvait, is the sum and substance of all experience. If I had my life to live over again, I’d live it as I’ve lived it, mistakes and all, I don’t doubt, because it’s the natural and inevitable outcome of my own perverse and unhappy idiosyncrasy. Philosophy lures me as gin lures drunkards. But if I had to advise any other person, any young man or woman beginning life with high ideals and noble aspirations, I’d say to them without hesitation: “The world is wisest. Go the way of the world and do as the world does. Don’t waste your life as I’ve wasted mine. Work for the common, vulgar, low, personal aims — money, position, fame, power. Those alone are solid. Those alone are substantial. Those alone make your life worth having to yourself. All the rest is empty, empty, empty, empty. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, except the vain things mean men wisely and meanly strive for.”’

  There was a long pause, and no one said anything. That awful cry of a bruised and broken spirit took their hearts by surprise. But through the closed door, the murmur of Psyche’s voice in the drawing-room could be heard distinctly. The old man listened to it and smiled serenely. The cloud that had brooded over his forehead cleared away. Then he rose, and going to a hanging cupboard above the mantelshelf, took out a small round box, and from it brought forth a little silver-coated pellet.

  ‘It excites my nerves when I talk this way,’ he said apologetically, as he washed the medicine down with half a glass of claret. ‘I always require something to still my brain after speaking on these purely personal matters — they rouse the glands to unnatural activity. Mansel, will you have another glass of wine? No? Then suppose we join your wife and Psyche?’

  CHAPTER VI.

  A SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING.

  Linnell went home to the Red Lion well content that evening: for Haviland Dumaresq had poured out his full heart to him; and Psyche had given him her faithful promise to sit to him in Arab costume for his projected picture. Not that as yet he was in love with Psyche; love at first sight was alien to the artist’s timid and shrinking nature; but he had recognised from the very first moment he saw her that he would be more capable of conceiving a grand passion for that beautiful girl than for any other woman he had ever met in the course of his wandering
s. To begin with, was she not Haviland Dumaresq’s daughter? and Linnell’s reverence for the great thinker, in his solitude and poverty, was so profound and intense that that fact alone prepossessed him immensely from the very first in Psyche’s favour. But even had she been the daughter of a Mrs. Maitland or a village inn-keeper, Linnell could hardly have helped being interested in the pink-and-white maiden. He had sat and talked with her all the evening long in a convenient corner; he had drawn her out slowly, bit by bit; her shyness and reserve had made him almost forget his own; her innocent pleasure at the attention he paid her had flattered and delighted his sensitive spirit. Though Haviland Dumaresq had honoured him with his confidence, it was of Psyche he thought all the small-hours through; it was Psyche’s voice, not the great philosopher’s, that rang in his ears as he lay awake and hugged himself; it was Psyche’s eyes that made his heart flutter with unwonted excitement through the night-watches.