by Grant Allen
As soon as Herminia had closed the door, she sat down to her writing-table and began to write. Her pen moved of itself. And this was her letter: —
“MY DARLING DAUGHTER, — By the time you read these words, I shall be no longer in the way, to interfere with your perfect freedom of action. I had but one task left in life — to make you happy. Now I find I only stand in the way of that object, no reason remains why I should endure any longer the misfortune of living.
“My child, my child, you must see, when you come to think it over at leisure, that all I ever did was done, up to my lights, to serve and bless you. I thought, by giving you the father and the birth I did, I was giving you the best any mother on earth had ever yet given her dearest daughter. I believe it still; but I see I should never succeed in making YOU feel it. Accept this reparation. For all the wrong I may have done, all the mistakes I may have made, I sincerely and earnestly implore your forgiveness. I could not have had it while I lived; I beseech and pray you to grant me dead what you would never have been able to grant me living.
“My darling, I thought you would grow up to feel as I did; I thought you would thank me for leading you to see such things as the blind world is incapable of seeing. There I made a mistake; and sorely am I punished for it. Don’t visit it upon my head in your recollections when I can no longer defend myself.
“I set out in life with the earnest determination to be a martyr to the cause of truth and righteousness, as I myself understood them. But I didn’t foresee this last pang of martyrdom. No soul can tell beforehand to what particular cross the blind chances of the universe will finally nail it. But I am ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is close at hand. I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith I started in life with. Nothing now remains for me but the crown of martyrdom. My darling, it is indeed a very bitter cup to me that you should wish me dead; but ’tis a small thing to die, above all for the sake of those we love. I die for you gladly, knowing that by doing so I can easily relieve my own dear little girl of one trouble in life, and make her course lie henceforth through smoother waters. Be happy! be happy! Good-by, my Dolly! Your mother’s love go forever through life with you!
“Burn this blurred note the moment you have read it. I inclose a more formal one, giving reasons for my act on other grounds, to be put in, if need be, at the coroner’s inquest. Good-night, my heart’s darling. Your truly devoted and affectionate
MOTHER.
“Oh, Dolly, my Dolly, you never will know with what love I loved you.”
When she had finished that note, and folded it reverently with kisses and tears, she wrote the second one in a firm hand for the formal evidence. Then she put on a fresh white dress, as pure as her own soul, like the one she had worn on the night of her self-made bridal with Alan Merrick. In her bosom she fastened two innocent white roses from Walter Brydges’s bouquet, arranging them with studious care very daintily before her mirror. She was always a woman. “Perhaps,” she thought to herself, “for her lover’s sake, my Dolly will kiss them. When she finds them lying on her dead mother’s breast, my Dolly may kiss them.” Then she cried a few minutes very softly to herself; for no one can die without some little regret, some consciousness of the unique solemnity of the occasion.
At last she rose and moved over to her desk. Out of it she took a small glass-stoppered phial, that a scientific friend had given her long ago for use in case of extreme emergency. It contained prussic acid. She poured the contents into a glass and drank it off. Then she lay upon her bed and waited for the only friend she had left in the world, with hands folded on her breast, like some saint of the middle ages.
Not for nothing does blind fate vouchsafe such martyrs to humanity. From their graves shall spring glorious the church of the future.
When Dolores came in next morning to say good-by, she found her mother’s body cold and stiff upon the bed, in a pure white dress, with two crushed white roses just peeping from her bodice.
Herminia Barton’s stainless soul had ceased to exist forever.
THE END
The British Barbarians
A HILL-TOP NOVEL
First published in 1895, this science-fiction novel concerns a mysterious stranger, Bertram Ingledew, who turns up in an old-fashioned English village and proceeds to analyse the customs and taboos of the inhabitants, judging them as members of a savage tribe. He succeeds in converting Frida Monteith, the wife of a boorish Scotch businessman, to his point of view — that social philosophy is all. They decide to run away together and enjoy an idyllic few days on the breezy uplands. They are soon hunted down by Monteith, who shoots the stranger dead for stealing away his wife. His body evaporates into the ether, leaving only a pleasant smell: he is revealed to be an anthropology student from the 25th century. The novel is an amusing and perceptive satirical squib about cultural relativities, dramatising the author’s radical views. Economically written, the narrative suits Allen’s powers of irony and style.
The first edition
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
The first edition’s title page
INTRODUCTION
Which every reader of this book is requested to read before beginning the story.
This is a Hill-top Novel. I dedicate it to all who have heart enough, brain enough, and soul enough to understand it.
What do I mean by a Hill-top Novel? Well, of late we have been flooded with stories of evil tendencies: a Hill-top Novel is one which raises a protest in favour of purity.
Why have not novelists raised the protest earlier? For this reason. Hitherto, owing to the stern necessity laid upon the modern seer for earning his bread, and, incidentally, for finding a publisher to assist him in promulgating his prophetic opinions, it has seldom happened that writers of exceptional aims have been able to proclaim to the world at large the things which they conceived to be best worth their telling it. Especially has this been the case in the province of fiction. Let me explain the situation. Most novels nowadays have to run as serials through magazines or newspapers; and the editors of these periodicals are timid to a degree which outsiders would hardly believe with regard to the fiction they admit into their pages. Endless spells surround them. This story or episode would annoy their Catholic readers; that one would repel their Wesleyan Methodist subscribers; such an incident is unfit for the perusal of the young person; such another would drive away the offended British matron. I do not myself believe there is any real ground for this excessive and, to be quite frank, somewhat ridiculous timidity. Incredible as it may seem to the ordinary editor, I am of opinion that it would be possible to tell the truth, and yet preserve the circulation. A first-class journal does not really suffer because two or three formalists or two or three bigots among its thousands of subscribers give it up for six weeks in a pet of ill-temper — and then take it on again. Still, the effect remains: it is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any grounds whatever, religious, political, social, moral, or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to the average editor must say or hint at nothing at all that is not universally believed and received by everybody everywhere in this realm of Britain. But literature, as Thomas Hardy says with truth, is mainly the expression of souls in revolt. Hence the antagonism between literature and journalism.
Why, then, publish one’s novels serially at all? Why not appeal at once to the outside public, which has few such prejudices? Why not deliver one’s message direct to those who are ready to consider it or at least to hear it? Because, unfortunately, the serial rights of a novel at the present day are three times as valuable, in
money worth, as the final book rights. A man who elects to publish direct, instead of running his story through the columns of a newspaper, is forfeiting, in other words, three-quarters of his income. This loss the prophet who cares for his mission could cheerfully endure, of course, if only the diminished income were enough for him to live upon. But in order to write, he must first eat. In my own case, for example, up till the time when I published The Woman who Did, I could never live on the proceeds of direct publication; nor could I even secure a publisher who would consent to aid me in introducing to the world what I thought most important for it. Having now found such a publisher — having secured my mountain — I am prepared to go on delivering my message from its top, as long as the world will consent to hear it. I will willingly forgo the serial value of my novels, and forfeit three-quarters of the amount I might otherwise earn, for the sake of uttering the truth that is in me, boldly and openly, to a perverse generation.
For this reason, and in order to mark the distinction between these books which are really mine — my own in thought, in spirit, in teaching — and those which I have produced, sorely against my will, to satisfy editors, I propose in future to add the words, “A Hill-top Novel,” to every one of my stories which I write of my own accord, simply and solely for the sake of embodying and enforcing my own opinions.
Not that, as critics have sometimes supposed me to mean, I ever wrote a line, even in fiction, contrary to my own profound beliefs. I have never said a thing I did not think: but I have sometimes had to abstain from saying many things I did think. When I wished to purvey strong meat for men, I was condemned to provide milk for babes. In the Hill-top Novels, I hope to reverse all that — to say my say in my own way, representing the world as it appears to me, not as editors and formalists would like me to represent it.
The Hill-top Novels, however, will not constitute, in the ordinary sense, a series. I shall add the name, as a Trade Mark, to any story, by whomsoever published, which I have written as the expression of my own individuality. Nor will they necessarily appear in the first instance in volume form. If ever I should be lucky enough to find an editor sufficiently bold and sufficiently righteous to venture upon running a Hill-top Novel as a serial through his columns, I will gladly embrace that mode of publication. But while editors remain as pusillanimous and as careless of moral progress as they are at present, I have little hope that I shall persuade any one of them to accept a work written with a single eye to the enlightenment and bettering of humanity.
Whenever, therefore, in future, the words “A Hill-top Novel” appear upon the title-page of a book by me, the reader who cares for truth and righteousness may take it for granted that the book represents my own original thinking, whether good or bad, on some important point in human society or human evolution.
Not, again, that any one of these novels will deliberately attempt to PROVE anything. I have been amused at the allegations brought by certain critics against The Woman who Did that it “failed to prove” the practicability of unions such as Herminia’s and Alan’s. The famous Scotsman, in the same spirit, objected to Paradise Lost that it “proved naething”: but his criticism has not been generally endorsed as valid. To say the truth, it is absurd to suppose a work of imagination can prove or disprove anything. The author holds the strings of all his puppets, and can pull them as he likes, for good or evil: he can make his experiments turn out well or ill: he can contrive that his unions should end happily or miserably: how, then, can his story be said to PROVE anything? A novel is not a proposition in Euclid. I give due notice beforehand to reviewers in general, that if any principle at all is “proved” by any of my Hill-top Novels, it will be simply this: “Act as I think right, for the highest good of human kind, and you will infallibly and inevitably come to a bad end for it.”
Not to prove anything, but to suggest ideas, to arouse emotions, is, I take it, the true function of fiction. One wishes to make one’s readers THINK about problems they have never considered, FEEL with sentiments they have disliked or hated. The novelist as prophet has his duty defined for him in those divine words of Shelley’s:
“Singing songs unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
That, too, is the reason that impels me to embody such views as these in romantic fiction, not in deliberate treatises. “Why sow your ideas broadcast,” many honest critics say, “in novels where mere boys and girls can read them? Why not formulate them in serious and argumentative books, where wise men alone will come across them?” The answer is, because wise men are wise already: it is the boys and girls of a community who stand most in need of suggestion and instruction. Women, in particular, are the chief readers of fiction; and it is women whom one mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems by the aid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such living interest while they are still young and plastic, before they have crystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite society. Make them think while they are young: make them feel while they are sensitive: it is then alone that they will think and feel, if ever. I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on this subject by a little apologue which I have somewhere read, or heard, — or invented.
A Revolutionist desired to issue an Election Address to the Working Men of Bermondsey. The Rector of the Parish saw it at the printer’s, and came to him, much perturbed. “Why write it in English?” he asked. “It will only inflame the minds of the lower orders. Why not allow me to translate it into Ciceronian Latin? It would then be comprehensible to all University men; your logic would be duly and deliberately weighed: and the tanners and tinkers, who are so very impressionable, would not be poisoned by it.” “My friend,” said the Revolutionist, “it is the tanners and tinkers I want to get at. My object is, to win this election; University graduates will not help me to win it.”
The business of the preacher is above all things to preach; but in order to preach, he must first reach his audience. The audience in this case consists in large part of women and girls, who are most simply and easily reached by fiction. Therefore, fiction is today the best medium for the preacher of righteousness who addresses humanity.
Why, once more, this particular name, “A Hill-top Novel”? For something like this reason.
I am writing in my study on a heather-clad hill-top. When I raise my eye from my sheet of foolscap, it falls upon miles and miles of broad open moorland. My window looks out upon unsullied nature. Everything around is fresh and pure and wholesome. Through the open casement, the scent of the pines blows in with the breeze from the neighbouring firwood. Keen airs sigh through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles of bracken. The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain in summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonously passionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the wind-swept larch that crowns the upland. But away below in the valley, as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon. It marks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers. Up here on the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon us, limpid and clear from a thousand leagues of open ocean; down there in the crowded town, it stagnates and ferments, polluted with the diseases and vices of centuries.
This is an urban age. The men of the villages, alas, are leaving behind them the green fields and purple moors of their childhood, are foolishly crowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities. Strange decadent sins and morbid pleasures entice them thither. But I desire in these books to utter a word once more in favour of higher and purer ideals of life and art. Those who sicken of the foul air and lurid light of towns may still wander side by side with me on these heathery highlands. Far, far below, the theatre and the music-hall spread their garish gas-lamps. Let who will heed them. But here on the open hill-top we know fresher and more wholesome delights. Those feverish joys allure us not. O decadents of the town, we have seen your sham idyls,
your tinsel Arcadias. We have tired of their stuffy atmosphere, their dazzling jets, their weary ways, their gaudy dresses; we shun the sunken cheeks, the lack-lustre eyes, the heart-sick souls of your painted goddesses. We love not the fetid air, thick and hot with human breath, and reeking with tobacco smoke, of your modern Parnassus — a Parnassus whose crags were reared and shaped by the hands of the stage-carpenter! Your studied dalliance with your venal muses is little to our taste. Your halls are too stifling with carbonic acid gas; for us, we breathe oxygen.
And the oxygen of the hill-tops is purer, keener, rarer, more ethereal. It is rich in ozone. Now, ozone stands to common oxygen itself as the clean-cut metal to the dull and leaden exposed surface. Nascent and ever renascent, it has electrical attraction; it leaps to the embrace of the atom it selects, but only under the influence of powerful affinities; and what it clasps once, it clasps for ever. That is the pure air which we drink in on the heather-clad heights — not the venomous air of the crowded casino, nor even the close air of the middle-class parlour. It thrills and nerves us. How we smile, we who live here, when some dweller in the mists and smoke of the valley confounds our delicate atmosphere, redolent of honey and echoing the manifold murmur of bees, with that stifling miasma of the gambling hell and the dancing saloon! Trust me, dear friend, the moorland air is far other than you fancy. You can wander up here along the purple ridges, hand locked in hand with those you love, without fear of harm to yourself or your comrade. No Bloom of Ninon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach-blossom where the sun has kissed it: no casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, but life-long saturation of your own heart’s desire in your own heart’s innocence. Ozone is better than all the champagne in the Strand or Piccadilly. If only you will believe it, it is purity and life and sympathy and vigour. Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youth keep your age from withering. It crimsons the sunset and lives in the afterglow. If these delights thy mind may move, leave, oh, leave the meretricious town, and come to the airy peaks. Such joy is ours, unknown to the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet’s silver Thames runs dull and leaden.
