Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  We had a lovely afternoon in the studio. Mrs. Mallory made me give some of my little dramatic sketches, my parts varying from Miranda to Miss Westmacott. My guardian looked grave at the last impersonation. “You should not laugh, Linda,” he said, making his collar still more rigid. “Miss Westmacott is placed in authority over Rosalba. ‘T is a dangerous gift, the gift of mimicry.”

  “Dear good Miss Westmacott!” I murmured penitently. “She has all the virtues — and a Roman nose.”

  Meantime Arthur Wingham and Mrs. Mallory made flying studies of me in my various characters, while John Stodmarsh stood by, his thumbs in his armholes, criticising impartially both painters and sitter.

  Arthur Wingham was most amusing company. He said many good things, which set us all laughing, and he gave John Stodmarsh sly digs which John hardly perceived, but which kept Mrs. Mallory and me in a constant state of suppressed convulsions. About seven, John left: “So sorry to go; but I have an appointment to dine” — his voice became impressive, almost awesome—” with the wife of a Cabinet Minister.”

  As he closed the door, Arthur Wingham expanded his chest, and made a pantomimic movement of breathing more freely. “The incubus of prospective greatness is removed,” he muttered.

  “Arthur!” Mrs. Mallory put in with a quick glance of warning.

  “Yes, I know it is wrong — very wrong,” he answered penitently. He was a creature of moods. “I ought to say polite and appreciative things about him, of course — especially, I admit, in this present company. But then, our dear friend Stodmarsh is himself so perfectly capable of impressing everyone else with a due sense of his own merits that he hardly needs — Dining with a Cabinet Minister, indeed! Why, he is certain to be in the Cabinet himself before he’s fifty.”

  “You must feel it most improper, Wingham,” I began, in John Stodmarsh’s own voice and manner, “to make remarks before this child derogatory to her guardian. Recollect his station. Jocularity may be ill-timed.”

  “Oh, how killingly like him!” Arthur Wingham cried. “Isn’t it, Linda?”

  Mrs. Mallory tried to keep her countenance. “I shall not ask you here again when Rosalba is coming.”

  “What a deadly threat! Now you apply thumb-screws. If that is to be my penalty—”

  “Do talk sense, Mr. Wingham!” I broke in.

  “Mr. Wingham? Why this mister? Mister me no mystery, if you please, my dear little lady. Are we not old friends? and for auld lang syne’s sake shall it not be Arthur?”

  “As you like it,” I answered.

  “And your name is Rosalba.”

  “But I did not give you leave to call me by it.”

  “No, certainly not. Nor will I. Without Stodmarsh’s consent — he is your guardian, you know — I feel I ought not to venture on that liberty. Besides, I don’t like the name Rosalba. It isn’t half dainty enough for you.”

  “I have no other.”

  “Then I shall call you Drusilla — in order not to infringe John Stodmarsh’s rights.”

  “Why Drusilla?” I asked, wondering.

  “Because I like the name; and because, as Dick Swiveller said to the Marchioness, ‘it is more real and agreeable.’ I shall make it Dru for short Dick Swiveller, after all, was a true idealist. To him, the ideal was more real than the actual. Don’t you think he was right, Dru?”

  “What nonsense you do talk to the child, Arthur!” Mrs. Mallory put in, moving her foot impatiently.

  “Yes; because I am happy. I talk mountains of nonsense whenever I am enjoying myself. This is an old friend, you know, Linda — an old friend often remembered (who could forget those reticent eyes?) — and another old friend, Horace by name, tells us it is delightful to play the fool with a friend recovered.”

  Mrs. Mallory’s face grew grave. “You are following out Horace’s prescription to the letter,” she answered, making a mouth at him.

  He sobered himself in turn. “Do you think so?” he answered, changing his tone of a sudden. “Well, I am sorry for that; for there are persons and subjects it is sacrilege to trifle with.”

  CHAPTER XV

  I TAKE TO AUTHORSHIP

  I SPENT three years at Miss Westmacott’s.

  The events of those three years I cannot “reduce to chronological order” (as John Stodmarsh would say) quite so well as those of my early wanderings. They were so monotonous, you see, and had so much less plot interest! I learned many things; I “toned down,” Miss Westmacott said — alas, too truly! — and I acquired the English passion for the bath. But that was all. My life was at a standstill. So I shall only try to recall a few stray episodes.

  My guardian was generous to me. I cannot speak too highly of his kindness. He allowed me ample pocket-money. Most of my holidays I spent at Mrs. Mallory’s cottage in the country. While there, I saw much of Sir Hugh Tachbrook, who cherished an unrequited affection for my dear Auntie, as I had learned to call her; much, too, of my guardian — and something of Arthur Wingham.

  When I was about sixteen, a birthday present arrived for me. I phrase it thus dubiously, “about sixteen,” not as a concession to my mother’s Irish blood, but because I did not really know my own birthday. We take small count of birthdays in Italy, thinking more of our festa, which is the day of our patron saint; but, as I found it advantageous to have a birthday in England, like other people, I adopted for the purpose the 1st of August. It fell conveniently in the middle of the summer holidays, when I was with Mrs. Mallory, and near Sir Hugh, who disapproved of me on principle (as an Italian upstart raised above the position which Providence designed), but for my Auntie’s sake always gave me a present. The particular object in question just now, however, did not come from Sir Hugh. A railway van conveyed it. I rushed down to the door, when Ellen informed me of this great event, and to my utter joy beheld — a bicycle!

  I screamed with delight. John, who was behind me — I called him simply John now, by request — looked his mild displeasure; he did not wholly approve of women bicycling (political economy demarcates the spheres of the sexes); but he did not forbid it. “She is a high-spirited girl,” he said aside to Auntie, “and I suppose she must do as other high-spirited girls do nowadays; though ‘t is certainly not the gift I should have selected for her by preference.”

  Auntie shook her head at him and answered very low, “John, don’t be ridiculous!”

  I turned to the label. “With best wishes for many happy returns of the day — for Dru — from Arthur Wingham.”

  Poor Arthur! I was almost sorry; for he was a very moderately successful artist. And machines cost money. But ‘t was a lovely bicycle!

  I rode it by nature. I have supple limbs and had danced so much. Besides, the art of balance came to me of itself. That is one of the many traits I inherit in full measure from my arboreal ancestry. The bicycle emancipated me; it is the great emancipator. It put me back at one bound from the bonds of school to something like the old freedom I remembered and sighed for. And it took me once more to country roads. I hate London. I am of Arcady.

  In some respects, indeed, I admit, school had made me younger again. I lost a little of the precocious wisdom of my days on the road — what Arthur Wingham called my “artless shrewdness” — and grew simpler and more childish. Perhaps it was in part the woman awakening within me; that has always a strange softening effect on the tomboy nature. And though I was never a tomboy, I had been wild enough and wayward enough when I strolled the road with the One-eyed Calender and the First Murderer.

  Once mounted on a bicycle, however, I was free once more to roam the highways of England, unaccompanied and unchaperoned, except on Sundays — when Arthur himself most often accompanied me. He liked to see how I was getting on with my riding, he said; and besides, when I was alone with him, I let my little devil loose to peep out more frequently than before Linda and Stodmarsh. He admired that little devil, he told me — one of the nicest small imps sent forth from the Inferno. I tore down country lanes with him, or through folds in th
e downs, my loose black hair flying comet-wise behind me. My hair is an anarchist: it despises the governmental restraint of hairpins. Prim and trim at the start, it bursts its iron bonds before the second milestone. Arthur loved to see it so. “That suits you best,” he used to say, after I had reached the mystic age of “putting it up,” and nature tore it down again. “Rules are not for you, Dru. You are a lawlessness unto yourself; and the lawlessness pleases.”

  John did not bicycle; his particular vanity was golf, the most soberly diplomatic and judicial of games; a Lord Chancellor might play at it, or even an Archbishop. Still, to prove to me that he rose superior to prejudice, he gave me a cyclometer. “Does it go well?” he asked me when I returned from my ride, all dusty and panting, on the first day I used it.

  “Capitally,” I answered, pinning my hair in a knot. “I tried it with several measured miles, and it keeps splendid space.”

  “Keeps what?” he asked, looking puzzled.

  “Splendid space,” I answered, giving the pedals a quick twirl. “You say of a watch that it keeps splendid time, John; so, by parity of reasoning” (it was his own pet phrase), “I suppose to keep splendid space is the proper virtue of a cyclometer.”

  He stroked a dubious chin with deliberative finger and thumb. “What odd expressions you use, Rosalba!” he remarked at last, in a half-remonstrant voice. “You should purify your style — by reading Dryden.”

  “Dryden says nothing about bicycles,” I replied, caressing my little steed as if it were a pet mare, and stroking the saddle fondly. We were in front of Sir Hugh’s grass-plot — the conventional green oval which carriages sweep round.

  “I am not quite sure that the world was not better without them,” he mused on. “I agree with Bowles that I do not care to ride ironmongery. And many of the women who bestride bicycles nowadays are of such an ungraceful type. Just look at that angular Miss Fitzroy, who is leaning on her machine over there, talking to Linda! So different from Linda’s flowing carriage! And her feet — how unwomanly!”

  “They must be cubic feet,” I exclaimed, glancing across at them.

  “My dear Rosalba! A cubic foot is not larger than other feet; it is a square foot in three dimensions. Ask Miss Westmacott to make this clear to you. On the literary side, you are not without culture; what you want is mathematical and scientific training.”

  Arthur had strolled up meanwhile. “And what you want, Stodmarsh,” he broke in, laying his hand on the saddle, “is a sense of humour. Get Dru to supply you with some of her surplus stock.”

  John looked decidedly black. He was serene as a rule in his placid consciousness of his own superiority to the rest of the race; but if there is one imputation which no human being, young or old, can endure with equanimity, it is the imputation of a lack of humour.

  So, to turn the subject, he drew me aside half paternally with one arm round my neck. It was the first time he had ventured on that familiarity, and it jarred. “How pretty those flower-beds are!” he said, making the easiest remark that occurred to him in his confusion. “Sir Hugh has really a first-rate gardener. The place is kept perfectly.”

  “My dear John!” I cried. “Those stiff regular circles! Concentric rows! Scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, yellow calceolaria! The very beggary of taste — the refuge of the incompetent! You can’t mean to tell me you really like them. I call them vulgar.”

  John was quite huffy. He drew himself up very straight and expanded his chest beneath the spotless white waistcoat. His fingers toyed almost nervously — if John could be nervous — with the seals on his watch-chain. “My child,” he said, in a crushingly authoritative voice, “I am head of a department in a Government office, and fellow of an Oxford college. I think I ought to know what is vulgar as well as you do.”

  I saw I had hurt him, and I drew back at once. “Yes, John,” I answered meekly. He was really very good and kind and generous — and — a bargain is a bargain. Besides, I felt grateful to him for one piece of good taste which I detected in the inflection of his voice as he spoke his last sentence. He was just going to imply that while he was the fellow of an Oxford college, I was only a poor waif and stray, of doubtful Italian origin, picked up on the highroad. But his better nature intervened in time, and he checked his tongue before even his tone suggested anything to hurt me unnecessarily. I noted the altered tinge and gave him due credit for it.

  But at the same time I felt — well, scarlet geraniums, you know! And I a born Italian, with an eye for colour!

  Arthur Wingham respected my faculty in that respect, and so did Auntie. She took me often to Arthur’s rooms, and there he consulted me at times about the arrangement of the folds and shadows in draperies. So much depends upon the tone in the shadows. You make or mar a picture by one pleat or wrinkle too few or too many.

  Auntie and Arthur also encouraged me in another small fad of mine — they read or listened to my first literary efforts. Oh, those stiff little tales — so crude, so amateurish! I keep them still, and die of laughing at them. John did not quite approve of these girlish attempts of mine to write stories. “They are an endeavour on the part of an immature mind,” he said, in his austere way, “to do that which only mature minds are fitted to accomplish.”

  “But surely, John,” Auntie cried, “it must be good for her — as practice.”

  “You wrote Latin verse at school yourself, you know,” Arthur suggested, for they had been at Rugby together, “M ‘yes. That was different,” John replied, snapping his mouth down firmly. “We wrote them as an exercise, under proper supervision, and with critical correction of our errors by our elders. I have always considered that part of my success as a writer of State Papers” — he never alluded to his dispatches except as State Papers; it sounded so important—” has been due to the excellent training I received in Latin prose under Jex-Blake at Rugby. Mind, I say part only,” he added as an afterthought; “for much, of course, must always be attributed to the individual bent of mind. The statesman may be trained; but he is born, not manufactured.” And he folded his umbrella tight, as was ever his wont when he reflected on the seriousness of his own position. John seldom appeared in public without an umbrella, rolled as small as possible; ‘t was an element of religion with him; he would have carried it in Sahara.

  In spite of John, however, the impulse to write was in me, and, well or ill, I wrote accordingly. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and no man can hinder it. High or low it blows; for honour or dishonour. Arthur Wingham took a great interest in these my early little efforts. He kindly gave them that critical correction of an elder mind to which John attached such immense importance. It was he, indeed, who first suggested to me the existence of style. My own small tales were as wholly improvised as my childish plays on the highway. I showed them to him or read them aloud, and he pointed out to me the commonplace rawness of their workaday wording. Not a sentence or a thought struck out with a flash of light, like sparks from a flinty road: all plain and colourless. “Recollect,” he said, “it is not literature to write down events or ideas in the chance form that first happens to occur to you; ‘t is studious care of the phrase, the epithet, the emotional atmosphere of words, that gives literary value.”

  “But surely, Dudu,” I objected — he made me call him Dudu—” the great poets were inspired; they spoke the visions that occurred to them in the words that nature and their own genius supplied.”

  “I think not,” he answered; and I always felt Arthur was a fine critic — indeed, I believe he would have succeeded better in literature than in art had it not been for his modesty.

  “If you read your Shakespeare with open eyes you will see for yourself with what consummate skill the phrase is varied, with what elaborate care the sentence is built up and the image perfected. His vocabulary alone betrays years of accumulation. Most readers fancy that Shakespeare trilled forth his native wood-notes wild as spontaneously as a thrush or a linnet. I cannot agree with them. No man had ever a brain so astounding that it cou
ld spin out those endless felicities of phrase with a running pen. That is art, not nature.”

  “But in your own art,” I cried, “see how certainly, Dudu, you and Auntie can draw a figure, perfect in line from the first, with absolute knowledge. It needs no alteration; it is right from the beginning.”

  “That is true of Linda’s work — yes; and of all consummate artists. But why? Because long study has taught them how to see the true line before they set pencil to paper. Skill like that comes not by nature, but by long study, long observation, long practice.”

  “And may not the artist in words,’ I asked, “attain in time a like mastery of his craft? We beginners need to mend and tinker our sentences; a Ruskin or a Meredith smites out at one blow the perfect image.”

  “That is true too,” he answered; “but why? Because they have learnt their art. You must be an apprentice first before you become a master-craftsman.”

  I do not know that I agreed with him; I do not know that I agree with him even now. I am by no means sure that the truest literature is not that which wells up spontaneous like a limpid spring from the soul of the writer. Erasures, afterthoughts, seem to me treason to your individuality. Even in Dudu’s own art, it was his own large insight, his strong virility, his first broad conception, that I admired, not his individual touches. I dislike niggling. But I saw that so far as this age at least is concerned, his view was the sound one. The world demands from us now not so much great torsos as finished cameos. I set to work to curb and correct my poor little style — if I have one; I tamed my wild zebra; I taught him to trot laboriously in harness like the neatly docked and trimmed Parisian carriage-horses he set before me as models. So far, that is to say, as my native intelligence permitted me to follow them; for I am a mountain foal; I submit ill to the bit, and long at every turn to take it between my teeth and bolt for freedom.