BOOK SECOND (continued 3)

“Santo Dio!” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when they see the bookbinder?”

“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.”

The Prince mused a while. “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean the young man you saw at the house—I may tell you, by the way, that it was only the first time he had been there and that the Princess had only seen him once—if you mean the little bookbinder he isn’t dirty, especially what we should call. The people of that kind here are not like our dear Romans. Every one has a sponge as big as your head; you can see them in the shops.”

“They’re full of gin; their faces are awful, are purple,” said the Prince; after which he immediately asked: “If she had only seen him once how could he have come into her drawing-room that way?”

His friend looked at him a little sternly. “Believe at least what I say, my poor friend! Never forget that this was how you spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied. Christina has many faults, but she hasn’t that one; that’s why I can live with her. She’ll speak the truth always.”

It was plainly not agreeable to the Prince to be reminded so sharply of his greatest mistake, and he flushed a little as Madame Grandoni spoke. But he didn’t admit his error and she doubted if he even saw it. At any rate he remarked rather grandly, like a man who has still a good deal to say for himself: “There are things it’s better to conceal.”

“It all depends on whether you’re afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I grant you she’s very perverse, and when the entertainment of watching her, to see how she’ll carry out some of her inspirations, is not stronger than anything else I lose all patience with her. When she doesn’t charm she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since you’re here and I mayn’t see you again for a long time or perhaps ever (at my age—I’m a hundred and twenty!) I may as well give you the key of certain parts of your wife’s conduct. It may make her seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom then of much that she does is the fact that she’s ashamed of having married you.”

“Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring.

“You may say that there can be nothing more extravagant—as even more insane—than that. But you know—or if not it isn’t for want of her having told you—how the Princess considers that in the darkest hour of her life she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as such a horrible piece of frivolity that she can’t for the rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it.”

“Yes, I know she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she’s so serious now?”

“The young man you saw the other day thinks so,” the old woman smiled. “Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has thrown herself with passion into being ‘modern.’ That sums up the greatest number of things that you and your family are not.”

“Yes, we’re not anything of that low sort, thank God! Dio mio, Dio mio!” groaned the Prince. He seemed so exhausted by his reflexions that he remained sitting in his chair after his companion, lifting her crumpled corpulence out of her own, had proposed that they should walk about a little. She had no ill-nature, but she had already noticed that whenever she was with Christina’s husband the current of conversation made her, as she phrased it, bump against him. After administering these small shocks she always steered away, and now, the Prince having at last got up and offered her his arm, she tried again to talk with him of things he could consider without bitterness. She asked him about the health and habits of his uncles, and he replied for the moment with the minuteness he had been taught that in such a case courtesy demanded; but by the time that at her request they had returned to the gate nearest South Street (she wished him to come no further) he had prepared a question to which she had not opened the way. “And who and what then is this English captain? About him there’s a great deal said.”

“This English captain?”

“Godfrey Gerald Cholto—you see I know a good deal about him,” said the Prince, articulating the English names with difficulty.

They had stopped near the gate, on the edge of Park Lane, and a couple of predatory hansoms dashed at them from opposite quarters. “I thought that was coming, and at bottom it’s he who has occupied you most!” Madame Grandoni exclaimed with a sigh. “But in reality he’s the last one you need trouble about. He doesn’t count the least little bit.”

“Why doesn’t he count?”

“I can’t tell you—except that some people don’t, you know. He doesn’t even think he does.”

“Why not, when she receives him always—lets him go wherever she goes?”

“Perhaps that’s just the reason. When people give her a chance to get tired of them she takes it rather easily. At any rate you needn’t be any more jealous of him than you are of me. He’s a convenience, a factotum, but he works without wages.”

“Isn’t he then in love with her?”

“Naturally. He has, however, no hope.”

“Ah, poor gentleman!” said the Prince lugubriously.

“He accepts the situation better than you. He occupies himself—as she has strongly recommended him in my hearing to do—with other women!”

“Oh the brute!” the Prince exclaimed. “At all events he sees her.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t see him!” laughed Madame Grandoni as she turned away.

XIX

The pink dressing-gown that Pinnie had engaged to make for Rose Muniment became in Lomax Place a conspicuous object, supplying poor Amanda with a constant theme for reference to one of the great occasions of her life—her visit to Belgrave Square with Lady Aurora after their meeting at Rosy’s bedside. She detailed this episode minutely to her companion, repeating a thousand times that her ladyship’s affability was beyond anything she could have expected. The grandeur of the house in Belgrave Square figured in her recital as something oppressive and fabulous, tempered though it had been by shrouds of brown holland and the nudity of staircases and saloons of which the trappings had been put away. “If it’s so noble when they’re out of town what can it be when they’re all there together and everything’s out?” she inquired suggestively; and she permitted herself to be restrictive only on two points, one of which was the state of Lady Aurora’s gloves and bonnet-strings. If she hadn’t been afraid to appear to notice the disrepair of these objects she should have been so happy to offer to do any little mending. “If she’d only come to me every week or two I’d keep up her rank for her,” said Pinnie, who had visions of a needle that positively flashed in the disinterested service of the aristocracy. She added that her ladyship got all dragged out with her long expeditions to Camberwell; she might be in tatters for all they could do to help her, at the top of those dreadful stairs, with that strange sick creature (she was too unnatural) thinking only of her own finery and talking about her complexion. If she wanted pink she should have pink; but to Pinnie there was something almost unholy in it, like decking out a corpse or dressing up the cat. This was the second perversity that left Miss Pynsent cold; it couldn’t be other than difficult for her to enter into the importance her ladyship appeared to attach to those pushing people. The girl was unfortunate certainly, stuck up there like a puppy on a shelf, but in her ladyship’s place she would have found some topic more in keeping while they walked about under those tremendous gilded ceilings. Lady Aurora, seeing how she was struck, showed her all over the house, carrying the lamp herself and telling an old woman who was there—a “confidential” housekeeper, a person with ribbons in her cap who would have pushed Pinnie out if you could push with your eyes—that they would do very well without her. If the pink dressing-gown, in its successive stages of development, filled up the little brown parlour (it was terribly long on the stocks), making such a pervasive rose-coloured presence as had not been seen there for many a day, this was evidently because it was associated with Lady Aurora, not because it was dedicated to her humble friend.

One day when Hyacinth came home Pinnie at once announced to him that her ladyship had been there to look at it—to pass judgement before the last touches were conferred. The dressmaker intimated that in such a case as that her judgement was rather wild and she seemed to have embarrassing ideas about pockets. Whatever could poor Miss Muniment want of pockets and what had she to put in them? But Lady Aurora had evidently found the garment far beyond anything she expected, and she had been more affable than ever and had wanted to know about every one in the “Plice”: not in a meddling, prying way, either, like some of those condescending swells, but quite as if the poor people were the high ones and she was afraid her curiosity might be “presumptious.” It was in the same discreet spirit that she had invited Amanda to relate her whole history and had expressed an interest in the career of her young friend.

“She said you had charming manners,” Miss Pynsent hastened to remark; “but on my life, Hyacinth Robinson, I never mentioned a scrap that it could give you pain that any one should talk about.” There was an heroic explicitness in this, on Pinnie’s part, for she knew in advance just how Hyacinth would look at her—fixedly, silently, hopelessly, as if she were still capable of tattling horribly (with the idea that her revelations would increase her importance) and putting forward this hollow theory of her supreme discretion to cover it up. His eyes seemed to say it all: “How can I believe you, and yet how can I prove you’re lying? I’m very helpless, for I can’t prove that without applying to the person to whom your incorrigible folly has probably led you to brag, to throw out mysterious and tantalising hints. You know of course that I’d never condescend to that.” Pinnie suffered acutely from this imputation, yet exposed herself to it often, because she could never deny herself the pleasure, keener still than her pain, of letting Hyacinth know he was appreciated, admired and, for those “charming manners” commended by Lady Aurora, even all but wondered at in so many words; and this kind of interest always appeared to imply a suspicion of his secret—something which, when he expressed to himself the sense of it, he called, resenting it at once and finding a certain softness in it, “a beastly attendrissement.” When Pinnie went on to say to him that Lady Aurora appeared to feel a certain surprise at his never yet having come to Belgrave Square for the famous books he reflected that he must really wait upon her without more delay if he wished to keep up his reputation as a man of the world; and meanwhile he considered much the extreme oddity of this new phase of his life which had opened so suddenly from one day to the other: a phase in which his society should have become indispensable to ladies of high rank and the obscurity of his condition only an attraction the more. They were taking him up then one after the other and were even taking up poor Pinnie as a means of getting at him; so that he wondered with gaiety and irony if it meant that his destiny was really seeking him out—that the aristocracy, recognising a mysterious affinity (with that fineness of flair for which they were remarkable), were coming to him to save him the trouble of coming to them.

It was late in the day (the beginning of an October evening) and Lady Aurora was at home. Hyacinth had made a mental calculation of the time at which she would have risen from dinner; the operation of “rising from dinner” having always been, in his imagination, for some reason or other, highly characteristic of the nobility. He was ignorant of the fact that Lady Aurora’s principal meal consisted of a scrap of fish and a cup of tea served on a little stand in the dismantled breakfast-parlour. The door was opened for Hyacinth by the invidious old lady whom Pinnie had described and who listened to his appeal, conducted him through the house and ushered him into her ladyship’s presence without the smallest relaxation of a pair of tightly-closed lips. His good hostess was seated in the little breakfast-parlour by the light of a couple of candles and apparently immersed in a collection of crumpled papers and account-books. She was ciphering, consulting memoranda, taking notes; she had had her head in her hands and the silky entanglement of her hair resisted the rapid effort she made to smooth herself down as she saw the little bookbinder come in. The impression of her fingers remained in little rosy streaks on her pink skin. She exclaimed instantly, “Oh, you’ve come about the books—it’s so very kind of you”; and she hurried him off to another room, to which, as she explained, she had had them brought down for him to choose from. The effect of this precipitation was to make him suppose at first that she might wish him to execute his errand as quickly as possible and take himself off; but he presently noted that her nervousness and her shyness were of an order that would always give false ideas. She wanted him to stay, she wanted to talk with him and she had rushed with him at the books in order to gain time and composure for exercising some subtler art. Hyacinth, staying half an hour, became more and more convinced that her ladyship was, as he had ventured to pronounce her on the occasion of their last meeting, a regular saint. He was privately a little disappointed in the books, though he selected three or four, as many as he could carry, and promised to come back for others: they denoted on Lady Aurora’s part a limited acquaintance with French literature and even a certain puerility of taste. There were several volumes of Lamartine and a set of the spurious memoirs of the Marquise de Créqui; but for the rest the little library consisted mainly of Marmontel and Madame de Genlis, Le Récit d’une Sœur and the tales of M. J. T. de Saint-Germain. There were certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and consistent realists of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long desired to put his hand; but evidently none of them had ever stumbled into Lady Aurora’s candid collection, though she did possess a couple of Balzac’s novels, which by ill luck happened to be just those our young man had read more than once.

There was nevertheless something very agreeable to him in the moments he passed in the big, dim, cool, empty house, where, at intervals, monumental pieces of furniture—not crowded and miscellaneous, as he had seen the appurtenances of the Princess—loomed and gleamed, and Lady Aurora’s fantastic intonations awakened echoes which gave him a sense of privilege, of rioting, decently, in the absence of prohibitory presences. She spoke again of the poor people in the south of London and of the Muniments in particular; evidently the only fault she had to find with these latter was that they were not poor enough—not sufficiently exposed to dangers and privations against which she could step in. Hyacinth liked her for this, even though he wished she would talk of something else—he hardly knew what, unless it was that, like Rose Muniment, he wanted to hear more about Inglefield. He didn’t mind, with the poor, going into questions of their state—it even gave him at times a strange savage satisfaction; but he saw that in discussing them with the rich the interest must inevitably be less: the rich couldn’t consider poverty in the light of experience. Their mistakes and illusions, their thinking they had got hold of the sensations of want and dirt when they hadn’t at all, would always be more or less irritating. It came over Hyacinth that if he found this deficient perspective in Lady Aurora’s deep conscientiousness it would be a queer enough business when he should come to pretending to hold the candlestick for the Princess Casamassima.

His present hostess said no word to him about Pinnie, and he guessed she must have wished to place him on the footing on which people don’t express approbation or surprise at the decency or good-breeding of each other’s relatives. He saw how she would always treat him as a gentleman and that even if he should be basely ungrateful she would never call his attention to the fact that she had done so. He shouldn’t have occasion to say to her, as he had said to the Princess, that she regarded him as a curious animal; and it gave him at once the sense of learning more about life, a sense always delightful to him, to perceive there were such different ways (which implied still a good many more) of being a lady of rank. The manner in which Lady Aurora appeared to wish to confer with him on the great problems of pauperism and reform might have implied he was a benevolent nobleman (of the type of Lord Shaftesbury) who had endowed many charities and was noted, in philanthropic schemes, for the breadth of his views. It was not less present to him that Pinnie might have tattled, put forward his claims to high consanguinity, than it had been when the dressmaker herself descanted on her ladyship’s condescensions; but he remembered now that he too had only just escaped being asinine when, the other day, he flashed out an allusion to his accursed origin. At all events he was much touched by the delicacy with which the earl’s daughter comported herself, simply assuming that he was “one of themselves”; and he reflected that if she did know his history (he was sure he might pass twenty years in her society without discovering if she did) this shade of courtesy, this natural tact, coexisting even with extreme awkwardness, illustrated that “best breeding” which he had seen alluded to in novels portraying the aristocracy. The only remark on Lady Aurora’s part that savoured in the least of looking down at him from a height was when she said cheerfully and encouragingly: “I suppose one of these days you’ll be setting up in business for yourself.” This was not so cruelly patronising that he couldn’t reply with a smile equally free from any sort of impertinence: “Oh dear, no, I shall never do that. I should make a great mess of any attempt to carry on a business. I’ve no turn at all for that sort of thing.”

Lady Aurora looked a little surprised. “Oh, I see; you don’t like—you don’t like—!” She hesitated: he saw she was going to say he didn’t like the idea of going in to that extent for a trade; but he stopped her in time from imputing to him a sentiment so foolish and declared what he meant to be simply that his one faculty was the faculty of doing his little piece of work, whatever it was, of liking to do it skilfully and prettily, and of liking still better to get his money for it when done. His conception of “business” or of rising in the world didn’t go beyond that. “Oh yes, I can fancy!” her ladyship exclaimed; but she looked at him a moment with eyes which showed that he puzzled her, that she didn’t quite understand his tone. Before he left her she asked him abruptly (nothing had led up to it) what he thought of Captain Sholto, whom she had seen that other evening in Audley Court. Didn’t he think him a very odd sort of person? Hyacinth confessed to this impression; whereupon Lady Aurora went on anxiously, eagerly: “Don’t you consider him decidedly vulgar?”

“How can I know?”

“You can know perfectly—as well as any one!” Then she added: “I think it’s a pity they should form relations with any one of that kind.”

“They” of course meant Paul Muniment and his sister. “With a person who may be vulgar?”—Hyacinth regarded this solicitude as exquisite. “But think of the people they know—think of those they’re surrounded with—think of all Audley Court!”

“The poor, the unhappy, the labouring classes? Oh, I don’t call them vulgar!” cried her ladyship with radiant eyes. The young man, lying awake a good deal that night, laughed to himself, on his pillow, not unkindly, at her fear that he and his friends would be contaminated by the familiar of a princess. He even wondered if she wouldn’t find the Princess herself a bit vulgar.

XX

It must not be supposed that his relations with Millicent had remained unaffected by the remarkable incident that had brushed her with its wing at the theatre. The whole occurrence had made a great impression on the young lady from Pimlico; he never saw her, for weeks afterwards, that she had not an immense deal to say about it; and though it suited her to cultivate the shocked state at the crudity of such proceedings and to denounce the Princess for a bold-faced foreigner, of a kind to which any one who knew anything of what could go on in London would give a wide berth, it was easy to see she enjoyed having rubbed shoulders across the house with a person so splendid and having found her own critical estimate of her friend confirmed in such high quarters. She professed to draw her warrant for her low opinion of the lady in the box from information given her by Captain Sholto as he sat beside her—information of which at different moments she gave a different version; her notes of it having nothing in common save that they were alike unflattering to the Princess. Hyacinth had many doubts of the Captain’s having talked indiscreetly; it would be in such a case such a very unnatural thing for him to do. He was unnatural—that was true—and he might have told Millicent, who was capable of having plied him with questions, that his distinguished friend was separated from her husband; but, for the rest, it was more probable that the girl had given the rein to a fine faculty of free invention of which he had had frequent glimpses, under pressure of her primitive half-childish, half-plebeian impulse of destruction, the instinct of pulling down what was above her, the reckless energy that would, precisely, make her so effective in revolutionary scenes. Hyacinth (it has been mentioned) didn’t consider that Millicent was false, and it struck him as a proof of positive candour that she should make up absurd, abusive stories about a person as to whom she only knew that she disliked her and could hope for no esteem, and indeed for no recognition of any kind, in return. When people were fully false you didn’t know where you stood with them, and on such a point as this Miss Henning could never be accused of leaving you in obscurity. She said little else about the Captain and didn’t pretend to repeat the remainder of his conversation, taking on her air of grand indifference when Hyacinth amused himself with repaying her criticism of his new acquaintance by drawing a sufficiently derisive portrait of hers.

His line was that Sholto’s admiration for the high-coloured beauty in the second balcony had been at the bottom of the whole episode: he had persuaded the Princess to pretend she was a revolutionist and should like therefore to confer with the little firebrand above in order that he might slip into the seat of this too easily deluded youth. At the same time it never occurred to our young man to conceal the fact that the lady in the box had followed him up; he contented himself with saying that this had been no part of the original plot, but a simple result—not unnatural after all—of his showing so much more charm than might have been expected. He described with sportive variations his visit in South Street, conscious that he would never feel the need, with his childhood’s friend, of glossing over that sort of experience. She might make him a scene of jealousy and welcome—there were things that would have much more terror for him than that; her jealousy, with its violence, its energy, even a certain inconsequent, dare-devil humour that played through it, entertained him, emphasised the frankness, the passion and pluck he admired her for. He should never be on the footing of sparing Miss Henning’s susceptibilities; how fond she might really be of him he couldn’t take upon himself to say, but her affection would never assume the form of that sort of delicacy, and their intercourse was plainly foredoomed to be an exchange of thumps and concussions, of sarcastic shouts and mutual défis. He liked her, at bottom, strangely, absurdly; but after all it was only well enough to torment her—she could bear so much—not well enough to spare her. Of any actual ground for the girl’s jealousy of the Princess he never thought; it couldn’t occur to him to weigh against each other the sentiments he might excite in such opposed bosoms or those that the spectacle of either emotion might have kindled in his own. He had no doubt his share of fatuity, but he found himself unable to associate mentally a great lady and a bouncing shop-girl in a contest for a prize which should have anything of his figure. How could they show the least common mark—even so small a one as a desire to possess themselves of Hyacinth Robinson? A fact he didn’t impart to Millicent and could have no wish to impart to her was the different matter of his pilgrimage to Belgrave Square. He might be in love with the Princess (how could he qualify as yet the bewildered emotion she had produced in him?) and he certainly never would conceive a passion for poor Lady Aurora; yet it would have given him pain much greater than any he felt in the other case to hear Milly make free with the ministering angel of Audley Court. The distinction was perhaps somehow in her appearing really not to touch or arrive at the Princess at all, whereas Lady Aurora was within her range and compass.

After paying him that visit at his rooms Hyacinth lost sight of Captain Sholto, who had not again reappeared at the “Sun and Moon,” the little tavern which presented so common and casual a face to the world, but offered in its unsuspected rear a security still unimpugned to machinations going down to the very bottom of things. Nothing was more natural than that the Captain should be engaged at this season in the recreations of his class; and our young man took for granted that if he were not hanging about the Princess on that queer footing as to which one had a secret hope one should some day command more light, he was probably buffeting breezy northern seas on a yacht or creeping after stags in the Highlands; our hero’s acquaintance with the light literature of his country being such as to assure him that in one or other of these occupations people of leisure, during the autumn, were necessarily immersed. If the Captain were giving his attention to neither he must have started for Albania, or at least for Paris. Happy Captain, Hyacinth mused, while his imagination followed him through vivid exotic episodes and his restless young feet continued to tread, through the stale flat weeks of September and October, the familiar pavements of Soho, Islington and Pentonville, and the shabby sinuous ways that unite these regions of labour. He had told the Princess he sometimes had a holiday at this period and that there was a chance of his escorting his respectable companion to the seaside; but as it turned out at present the spare cash for such an excursion was wanting. Hyacinth had indeed for the moment an exceptionally keen sense of the lack of this convenience and was forcibly reminded that the society of agreeable women was a direct and constant appeal to the pocket. He not only hadn’t a penny, but was much in debt, owed pence and shillings, as he would have largely put it, all over the place, and the explanation of his pinched feeling was in a vague half-remorseful, half-resigned reference to the numerous occasions when he had had not to fail of funds under penalty of disappointing a young lady whose needs were positive, and especially to a certain high crisis (as it might prove to be) in his destiny when it had come over him that one couldn’t call on a princess just as one was. So this year he didn’t ask old Crook for the week which some of the other men took—Eustache Poupin, who had never quitted London since his arrival, launched himself precisely that summer, supported by his brave wife, into the British unknown on the strength of a return ticket to Worthing—simply because he shouldn’t know what to do with it. The best way not to spend money, though no doubt not the best in the world to make it, was still to take one’s daily course to the old familiar shabby shop, where, as the days shortened and November thickened the air to a livid yellow, the uncovered flame of the gas, burning often from the morning on, lighted up the ugliness in which the hand of practice endeavoured to disengage a little beauty—the ugliness of a dingy belittered interior, of battered dispapered walls, of work-tables stained and hacked, of windows opening into a foul drizzling street, of the bared arms, the sordid waistcoat-backs, the smeared aprons, the personal odour, the patient obstinate irritating shoulders and vulgar narrow inevitable faces of his fellow-labourers. Our young friend’s relations with his comrades would form a chapter by itself, but all that may be said of the matter here is that the clever little operator from Lomax Place had in a manner a double identity and that much as he lived in Mr. Crookenden’s establishment he lived out of it still more. In this busy, pasty, sticky, leathery little world, where wages and beer were the main objects of consideration, he played his part in a way that marked him as a queer lot, but capable of queerness in the line of equanimity too. He hadn’t made good his place there without discovering that the British workman, when animated by the spirit of mirth, has rather a heavy hand, and he tasted of the practical joke in every degree of violence. During his first year he dreamed, with secret passion and suppressed tears, of a day of bliss when at last they would let him alone—a day which arrived in time, for it is always an advantage to be clever if one be only clever enough. Hyacinth was sufficiently so to have invented a modus vivendi in respect to which M. Poupin said to him, “Enfin vous voilà ferme!” (the Frenchman himself, terribly éprouvé at the beginning, had always bristled with firmness and opposed to insular grossness a refined dignity) and under the influence of which the scenery of Soho figured a daily dusky exhibition of projected shadows, confined to the passive part of life and giving no hostages to reality, or at least to ambition, save an insufficient number of shillings on Saturday night and stray spasmodic reminiscences of delicate work that might have been more delicate still, as well as of such applications of the tool as he flattered himself unsurpassed unless by the supreme Eustache.

One evening in November he had after discharging himself of a considerable indebtedness to Pinnie still a sovereign in his pocket—a sovereign that seemed to spin there under the equal breath of a dozen different lively uses. He had come out for a walk with a vague intention of pushing as far as Audley Court; and lurking within this nebulous design, on which the damp breath of the streets, making objects seem that night particularly dim and places particularly far, had blown a certain chill, was a sense of how nice it would be to take something to Rose Muniment, who delighted in a sixpenny present and to whom he hadn’t for some time rendered any such homage. At last, after he had wandered a while, hesitating between the pilgrimage to Lambeth and the possibility of still associating the two or three hours with those perhaps in some lucky way or other at Millicent Henning’s disposal, he reflected that if a sovereign was to be pulled to pieces it was a simplification to get it changed. He had struck through the region of Mayfair, partly with the preoccupation of a short cut and partly from an instinct of self-defence; if one was in danger of spending one’s money with a rush it was so much gained to plunge into a quarter where, at that hour especially, there were no shops for little bookbinders. Hyacinth’s victory, however, was imperfect when it occurred to him to turn into a public-house in order to convert his gold into convenient silver. When it was a question of entering these establishments he selected in preference the most decent; he never knew what unpleasant people he might find on the other side of the swinging door. Those which glitter at intervals amid the residential gloom of the large district abutting on Grosvenor Square partake of the general gentility of the neighbourhood, so that our friend was not surprised (he had passed into the compartment marked “private bar”) to see but a single drinker leaning against the counter on which, with his request very civilly enunciated, he put down his sovereign. He was surprised on the other hand when, glancing up again, he became aware that this lonely reveller was Captain Godfrey Sholto.

“Why, my dear boy, what a remarkable coincidence!” the Captain exclaimed. “For once in five years that I come into a place like this!”

“I don’t come in often myself. I thought you were in Madagascar,” Hyacinth said.

“Ah, because I’ve not been at the ‘Sun and Moon’? Well, I’ve been constantly out of town, you know. And then—don’t you see what I mean?—I want to be tremendously careful. That’s the way to get on, isn’t it? But I daresay you don’t believe in my discretion!” Sholto laughed. “What shall I do to make you understand? I say, have a brandy and soda,” he continued as if this might assist Hyacinth’s comprehension. He seemed a trifle flurried and, were it possible to imagine such a thing of so independent and whimsical a personage, the least bit abashed or uneasy at having been found in such a low place. Yet it was not any lower than the “Sun and Moon.” He was dressed on this occasion according to his station, without the pot-hat and the shabby jacket, and Hyacinth looked at him with the pang of the felt charm that a good tailor would add to life. Our hero was struck more than ever before with his being the type of man whom, as he strolled about observing people, he had so often regarded with wonder and envy—the sort of man of whom one said to one’s self that he was the “finest white,” feeling that he and his like had the world in their pocket. Sholto requested the barmaid to please not dawdle in preparing the brandy and soda Hyacinth had thought to ease off the situation by accepting: this indeed was perhaps what the finest white would naturally do. And when the young man had taken the glass from the counter didn’t he appear to encourage him not to linger as he drank it and to smile down at him very kindly and amusedly, as if the combination of so small a bookbinder and so big a tumbler were sufficiently droll? The Captain took time, however, to ask how he had spent his autumn and what was the news in Bloomsbury; he further inquired about those jolly people across the river. “I can’t tell you what an impression they made on me—that evening you know.” After this he went on suddenly and irrelevantly: “And so you’re just going to stay on for the winter quietly?” Our hero stared: he wondered what other high course could be imputed to him; he couldn’t reflect immediately that this was the sort of thing the finest whites said to each other when they met after their fashionable dispersals, and that his friend had only been guilty of a momentary inadvertence. In point of fact the Captain recovered himself. “Oh, of course you’ve got your work, and that sort of thing”; and as Hyacinth didn’t succeed in swallowing at a gulp the contents of his big tumbler he asked him presently if he had heard anything from the Princess. Our youth replied that he could have no news except what the Captain might be good enough to give him; but he added that he had been to see her just before she left town.

“Ah, you did go? That was quite right—jolly right.”

“I went because she very kindly wrote me to come.”

“Ah, she wrote to you to come?” The Captain fixed him a moment with his curious colourless eyes. “Do you know you’re a devilish privileged mortal?”

“Certainly I know it.” Hyacinth blushed and felt foolish; the barmaid, who had heard this odd couple talking of a princess, was staring at him too with her elbows on the counter.

“Do you know there are people who’d give their heads that she should write them to come?”

“I’ve no doubt of it whatever!”—and he took refuge in a laugh that sounded less natural than he would have liked, and wondered if his interlocutor weren’t precisely one of these people. In this case the barmaid might well stare; for deeply convinced as our young man might be that he was the son of Lord Frederick Purvis, there was really no end to the oddity of his being preferred—and by a princess—to Captain Sholto. If anything could have re-enforced at that moment his sense of this anomaly it would have been the indescribably gentlemanly way, implying all sorts of common initiations, in which his companion went on.

“Ah well, I see you know how to take it! And if you’re in correspondence with her why do you say you can hear from her only through me? My dear fellow, I’m not in correspondence with her. You might think I’d naturally be, but I’m not.” He subjoined as Hyacinth had laughed again in a manner that might have passed for ambiguous: “So much the worse for me—is that what you mean?” Hyacinth replied that he himself had had the honour of hearing from the Princess but once, and mentioned her having told him how her letter-writing came on only in fits, when it was sometimes very profuse: there were months together that she didn’t touch a pen. “Oh, I can imagine what she told you!” the Captain knowingly returned. “Look out for the next fit! She’s visiting about, you know—at a lot of great houses. It’s a great thing to be somewhere with her—an immense comedy.” He remarked that he had heard, now he remembered, that she either had taken or was thinking of taking a place in the country for a few months, and he added that if Hyacinth didn’t propose to finish his brandy and soda they might as well turn out. Hyacinth’s thirst had been very superficial, and as they turned out the Captain observed by way of explanation of his having been found in a public-house (it was the only attempt of this kind he made) that any friend of his would always know him by his love of rum out-of-the-way nooks. “You must have noticed that,” he said—“my taste for exploration. If I hadn’t explored I never should have known you, should I? That was rather a nice little girl in there; did you twig her good bust? It’s a pity they always have such beastly hands.” Hyacinth had instinctively made a motion to go southward, but Sholto, passing a hand into his arm, led him the other way. The house they had quitted was near a corner, which they rounded, the Captain pushing forward as if there were some reason for haste. His haste was checked, however, by a prompt encounter with a young woman who, coming in the opposite direction, turned the angle as briskly as themselves. At this moment he gave his friend a great jerk, but not before Hyacinth had caught a glimpse of the young woman’s face—it seemed to flash upon him out of the dusk—and given quick voice to his surprise.

“Hullo, Millicent!” This was the simple cry that escaped from his lips while the Captain, still going on, but threw off, “What’s the matter? Who’s your pretty friend?” Hyacinth declined to go on and repeated Miss Henning’s baptismal name so loudly that the young woman, who had passed them without looking back, was obliged to stop. Then he saw he was not mistaken, though Millicent gave no audible response. She stood looking at him with her head very high, and he approached her, disengaging himself from Sholto, who, however, hung back only an instant before joining them. Hyacinth’s heart had suddenly begun to beat very fast; there was a sharp shock in the girl’s turning up just in that place at that moment. Yet when she began to laugh, and with violence, and to ask him why he should look at her as if she were a kicking horse, he recognised that there was nothing so very extraordinary, after all, in a casual meeting between persons who were such frequenters of the London streets. Millicent had never concealed the fact that she “trotted about” on various errands at night; and once when he had said to her that the less a respectable young woman took the evening air alone the better for her respectability she had asked how respectable he thought she pretended to be and had remarked that if he would make her a present of a brougham or even call for her three or four times a week in a cab she would doubtless preserve more of her social purity. She could turn the tables quickly enough and she exclaimed now, professing on her own side great astonishment:

“Whatever are you prowling about here for? You’re after no good, I’ll be bound!”

“Good evening, Miss Henning; what a jolly meeting!” said the Captain, removing his hat with a humorous flourish.

“Oh, how d’ye do?” Millicent returned as if not at once placing him.

“Where were you going so fast? What are you doing?” asked Hyacinth, who had looked from one to the other.

“Well, I never did see such a manner—from one that knocks about like you!” cried Miss Henning. “I’m going to see a friend of mine—a lady’s-maid in Curzon Street. Have you anything to say to that?”

“Don’t tell us—don’t tell us!” Sholto interposed after she had spoken—and she had not, however slightly, hesitated. “I at least disavow the indiscretion. Where may not a charming woman be going when she trips with a light foot through the deepening dusk?”

“I say, what are you talking about?” the girl demanded with dignity of Hyacinth’s companion. She spoke as if with a resentful suspicion that her foot had not really been felt to be light.

“On what errand of mercy, on what secret ministration?” the Captain laughed.

“Secret yourself!” cried Millicent. “Do you two always hunt in couples?”

“All right, we’ll turn round and go with you as far as your friend’s,” Hyacinth said.

“All right,” Millicent replied.

“All right,” the Captain added; and the three took their way together in the direction of Curzon Street. They walked for a few moments in silence, though the Captain whistled, and then Millicent suddenly turned to Hyacinth.

“You haven’t told me where you were going yet, you know.”

“We met in that public-house,” the Captain said, “and were each so ashamed of being found in such a place by the other that we tumbled out together without much thinking what we should do with ourselves.”

“When he’s out with me he pretends he can’t abide them houses,” Miss Henning declared. “I wish I had looked in that one to see who was there.”

“Well, she’s rather nice,” the Captain went on. “She told me her name was Georgiana.”

“I went to get a piece of money changed,” Hyacinth said with the sense of a certain dishonesty in the air and glad he at least could afford to speak the truth.

“To get your grandmother’s nightcap changed! I recommend you to keep your money together—you’ve none too much of it!” Millicent exclaimed.

“Is that the reason you’re playing me false?” Hyacinth flashed out. He had been thinking with still intentness as they walked; at once nursing and strangling a kindled suspicion. He was pale with the idea that he had been bamboozled, yet was able to say to himself that one must allow in life, thank goodness, for the element of coincidence, and that he might easily put himself immensely in the wrong by making a groundless charge. It was only later that he pieced his impressions together and saw them—as it appeared—justify each other; at present, as soon as he had uttered it, he was almost ashamed of his quick retort to Millicent’s taunt. He ought at least to have waited to see what Curzon Street would bring forth.

The girl broke out on him immediately, repeating “False, false?” with high derision and wanting to know whether that was the way to knock a lady about in public. She had stopped short on the edge of a crossing and she went on with a voice so uplifted that he was glad they were in a street apt to be empty at such an hour: “You’re a pretty one to talk about falsity when a woman has only to leer at you out of an opera-box!”

“Don’t say anything about her,” the young man interposed, trembling.

“And pray why not about ‘her,’ I should like to know? You don’t pretend she’s a decent woman, I suppose?” Millicent’s laughter rang through the quiet neighbourhood.

“My dear fellow, you know you have been to her,” Captain Sholto wonderfully smiled.

Hyacinth turned on him staring and at once provoked and baffled by his ambiguous part in an incident it was doubtless possible to magnify but not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly I’ve been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and pressed me to go, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil are you, anyway, and what do you want of me?” our hero cried—his mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled and worried and escaped him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot everything that had beguiled.

“My dear fellow, whatever I am I’m not an ass,” this gentleman replied with imperturbable good-humour. “I don’t reproach you with anything. I only wanted to put in a word as a peacemaker. My good friends—my good friends,” and he laid a hand in his practised way on Hyacinth’s shoulder while with the other pressed to his heart he bent on the girl a face of gallantry which had something paternal in it: “I’m determined this absurd misunderstanding shall end as lovers’ quarrels ought always to end.”

Hyacinth withdrew himself from the Captain’s touch and said to Millicent: “You’re not really jealous of—of any one. You pretend that only to throw dust in my eyes.”

To this sally Miss Henning returned him an answer which promised to be lively, but the Captain swept it away in the profusion of his protests. He declared them a dear delightful abominable pair; he pronounced it rarely interesting to see how in people of their sort the prime passions lay near the surface; he almost pushed them into each other’s arms and then wound up with proposing that they should all terminate their little differences by proceeding together to the Pavilion music-hall, the nearest place of entertainment in that neighbourhood, leaving the lady’s-maid in Curzon Street to dress her mistress’s wig in peace. He has been presented to the reader as an accomplished man, and it will doubtless be felt that the picture is justified by his having eventually placed this idea in so attractive a light that his companions entered a hansom with him and rattled toward the haunt of pleasure, Hyacinth sandwiched, on the edge of the seat, between the others. Two or three times our young man’s ears burned; he felt that if there was an understanding between them they had now, behind him, a rare opportunity for carrying it out. If this understanding flourished at his expense the whole evening constituted for them indeed an opportunity, and that thought rendered his diversion but scantly absorbing, though at the Pavilion the Captain engaged a big private box and ordered ices brought in. Hyacinth cared so little for his little pink pyramid that he suffered Millicent to consume it after she had disposed of her own. It was present to him, however, that if he should make a fool of himself the folly would be of a very gross kind, and this is why he withheld a question repeatedly on his lips—the impulse to demand of his entertainer why the mischief he had hurried him so out of the public-house if he had not been waiting there preconcertedly for Millicent. We know that in Hyacinth’s eyes one of this young lady’s compensatory merits had been that she was not deceitful, and he asked himself if a girl could change that way from one month to the other. This was optimistic, but, all the same, before leaving the Pavilion he decided with one of his highest flights of intelligence that he could quite well see what Lady Aurora had meant by calling Captain Sholto vulgar.

XXI

Paul Muniment had fits of silence while the others were talking; but on this occasion he had not opened his lips for half an hour. When he talked Hyacinth listened almost to the retention of breath, and when he said nothing watched him fixedly, listening to the others only through the medium of his candid countenance. At the “Sun and Moon” Muniment paid very little attention to his young friend, doing nothing that should cause it to be perceived they were particular pals; and Hyacinth even divined him at moments bored or irritated by the serious manner in which his small worrying bookbinder couldn’t conceal from the world that he regarded him. He wondered if this were a system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a manifestation of the superior brutality latent in his composition and which, without an intention of direct harshness, was naturally impatient of palaver. There was plenty of palaver at the “Sun and Moon”; there were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much crude fatuity and flat-faced vanity. Then every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying, “Them was my words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to—what I say I stick to”; and others who perpetually inquired of the company, “And what the plague am I to do with seventeen bob—with seventeen bloody bob? What am I to do with them—will ye tell me that?” an interrogation which in truth usually ended by producing a ribald reply. There were still others who remarked to satiety that if it was not done to-day it would have to be done to-morrow, and several who constantly proclaimed their opinion that the only way was to pull up the Park rails again, just to haul ’em straight up. A little shoemaker with red eyes and a greyish face, whose appearance Hyacinth deplored, scarcely ever expressed himself but in the same form of words: “Well, are we in earnest or ain’t we in earnest?—that’s the thing I want to know.” He was terribly in earnest himself, but this was almost the only way he had of showing it; and he had much in common (though they were always squabbling) with a large red-faced man, of uncertain attributes and stertorous breathing, who was understood to know a good deal about dogs, had fat hands and wore on his forefinger a big silver ring containing some one’s hair—Hyacinth believed it to be that of a terrier snappish in life. He had always the same refrain: “Well now are we just starving or ain’t we just starving? I should like the v’ice of the company on that question.”

When the tone fell as low as this Paul Muniment held his peace save for whistling a little and leaning back with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the table. Hyacinth often supposed him to be on the point of breaking out and letting the company know what he thought of them—he had a perfectly clear vision of what he must think: but Muniment never compromised his popularity to that degree; he judged it—this he once told his young comrade—too valuable a weapon, so that he cultivated the faculty of patience, which had the advantage of showing one more and more that one must do one’s thinking for one’s self. His popularity indeed struck Hyacinth as rather an uncertain amount, and the only mistake he had seen a symptom of on his friend’s part was a tendency to overestimate it. Muniment thought many of their colleagues asinine, but it was Hyacinth’s belief that he himself knew still better how asinine they were; and this inadequate conception supported in some degree on Paul’s part his theory of his influence—an influence that would be stronger than any other on the day he should choose to exert it. Hyacinth only wished that day would come; it wouldn’t be till then, he was sure, that they would all know where they were and that the good they were striving for, blindly, obstructedly, in a kind of eternal dirty intellectual fog, would pass from the stage of crude discussion and mere sore, sharp, tantalising desirableness into that of solid, seated reality. Muniment was listened to unanimously when he spoke and much talked about, usually with a knowing, implicit allusiveness, when he was absent; it was generally admitted he could see further than most. But it was suspected he wanted to see further than was necessary; as one of the most inveterate frequenters of the club remarked one evening, if a man could see as far as he could ’eave a brick this was far enough. There was an idea he had nothing particular to complain of personally, or perhaps that if he had he didn’t complain of it—an attitude which could only contain the germs of a latent disaffection. Hyacinth was aware of being himself exposed to the same imputation; but he couldn’t help it—it would have been impossible to him to keep up his character for sincerity by revealing at the “Sun and Moon” the condition of his wardrobe or by announcing that he hadn’t had a penn’orth of bacon for six months. There were members of the club who were apparently always in the enjoyment of involuntary leisure—narrating the vainest peregrinations in search of a job, the cruellest rebuffs, the most vivid anecdotes of the insolence of office. They made Hyacinth uncomfortably conscious at times that if he should be out of work it would be wholly by his own fault; that he held in his hand a fine bread-winning tool on which he might absolutely count. He was also not unadvised, however, that his position in this little band of malcontents (it was small only if measured by the numbers gathered on any one occasion; he liked to think it large in its latent possibilities, its mysterious ramifications and affiliations) was peculiar and distinguished: it would be favourable if he should develop the kind of energy and assurance that would help him to make use of it. He had an intimate conviction—the proof of it was in the air, in the sensible facility of his footing at the “Sun and Moon”—that Eustache Poupin had taken on himself to disseminate the anecdote of his origin, of his mother’s disaster; in consequence of which, as the victim of social infamy, of heinous laws, it was conceded to him that he had a larger account to settle even than most. He was ab ovo a revolutionist, and that balanced against his smart neckties, a certain suspicious security that was perceived in him as to the h (he had had from his earliest years a natural command of it) and the fact that he possessed the sort of hand on which there is always a premium—an accident somehow to be guarded against in a thorough-going system of equality. He never challenged Poupin on the subject, for he owed the Frenchman too much to reproach him with any officious step that was meant in kindness; and, moreover, his fellow-labourer at old Crook’s had said to him, as if to anticipate such an impugnment of his discretion: “Remember, my child, that I’m incapable of drawing aside any veil that you may have preferred to drop over your lacerated personality. Your moral dignity will always be safe with me. But remember at the same time that among the disinherited there’s a mystic language which dispenses with proofs—a freemasonry, a reciprocal divination: they understand each other at half a word.” It was at half a word then in Bloomsbury that Hyacinth had been understood; but there was a certain delicacy in him that forbade him to push his advantage, to treat implications of sympathy, none the less definite for being awkward and obscure, as steps in the ladder of success. He had no wish to be a leader because his mother had murdered her lover and died in penal servitude: these circumstances recommended intentness, but they also imposed modesty. When the gathering at the “Sun and Moon” was at its best and its temper seemed really an earnest of what was the basis of all its calculations—that the people was only a sleeping lion, already breathing shorter and beginning to stretch its limbs and stiffen its claws—at these hours, some of them thrilling enough, Hyacinth waited for the voice that should allot him the particular part he was to play. His ambition was to play it with brilliancy, to offer an example—an example even that might survive him—of pure youthful, almost juvenile, consecration. He was conscious of no commission to give the promises, to assume the responsibilities, of a redeemer, and he had no envy of the man on whom this burden should rest. Muniment indeed might carry it, and it was the first article of his faith that to help him to carry it the better he himself was ready for any sacrifice. Then it was—on these nights of intenser vibration—that he waited for the sacred sign.

They came oftener this second winter, for the season was terribly hard; and as in that lower world one walked with one’s ear nearer the ground the deep perpetual groan of London misery seemed to swell and swell and form the whole undertone of life. The filthy air reached the place in the damp coats of silent men and hung there till it was brewed to a nauseous warmth, and ugly serious faces squared themselves through it, and strong-smelling pipes contributed their element in a fierce dogged manner which appeared to say that it now had to stand for everything—for bread and meat and beer, for shoes and blankets and the poor things at the pawnbroker’s and the smokeless chimney at home. Hyacinth’s colleagues affected him as wiser then, as more richly permeated with intentions boding ill to the satisfied classes; and though the note of popularity was still most effectively struck by the man who could demand oftenest, unpractically, “What the hell am I to do with half a quid?” it was brought home to our hero on more than one occasion that revolution was ripe at last. This was especially the case on the evening I began by referring to, when Eustache Poupin squeezed in and announced, as if it were a great piece of news, that in the east of London that night there were forty thousand men out of work. He looked round the circle with his dilated foreign eye as he took his place: he seemed to address the company individually as well as collectively and to make each man responsible for hearing him. He owed his position at the “Sun and Moon” to the brilliancy with which he represented the political exile, the magnanimous immaculate citizen wrenched out of bed at dead of night, torn from his hearthstone, his loved ones and his profession and hurried across the frontier with only the coat on his back. Poupin had performed in this character now for many years, but had never lost the bloom of the outraged proscript, and the passionate pictures he had often drawn of the bitterness of exile were moving even to those who knew with what success he had set up his household gods in Lisson Grove. He was recognised as suffering everything for his opinions; and his hearers in Bloomsbury, who even in their most infuriated hours felt as Britons, appeared never to have made the subtle reflexion, though they made many others, that there was a want of tact in his calling on them to sympathise with him for being one of themselves. He imposed himself by the eloquence of his assumption that if one were not in the beautiful supreme France one was nowhere worth speaking of, and ended by producing an impression that that country had a quite supernatural charm. Muniment had once said to Hyacinth that he was sure Poupin would be very sorry to be enabled to go home again (as he really might from one week to the other, the Republic being so indulgent and the amnesty to the Communards constantly extended) for over there he couldn’t be a refugee; and however this might be he certainly flourished a good deal in London on the basis of this very fact that he so suffered from it.

“Why do you tell us that as if it was so very striking? Don’t we know it and haven’t we known it always? But you’re right; we behave as if we knew nothing at all,” said Mr. Schinkel, the German cabinet-maker who had originally introduced Captain Sholto to the “Sun and Moon.” He had a long, unhealthy, benevolent face and greasy hair, and constantly wore an untidy bandage round his neck, as if for a local ailment. “You remind us—that’s very well; but we shall forget it in half an hour. We’re not serious.”

“Pardon, pardon; for myself I don’t admit that!” Poupin replied, striking the table with his finger-tips several times, very fast. “If I’m not serious I’m nothing.”

“Oh no, you’re something,” said the German, smoking his monumental pipe with a contemplative air. “We’re all something, but I’m not sure it’s anything very useful.”

“Well, things would be worse without us. I’d jolly rather be in here, in this kind of muck, than outside,” remarked the fat man who understood dogs.

“Certainly, it’s very pleasant, especially if you’ve your beer; but not so pleasant over there at the Docks, where fifty thousand people starve. It’s a very unpleasant night,” the cabinet-maker went on.

“How can it be worse?” Eustache Poupin asked while he looked at the German as to make him responsible for the fat man’s reflexion. “It’s so bad that the imagination recoils, refuses—!”

“Oh, we don’t care for the imagination!” the fat man declared. “We want a compact body in marching order.”

“What do you call a compact body?” the little grey-faced shoemaker demanded. “I daresay you don’t mean your kind of body.”

“Well, I know what I mean,” said the fat man severely.

“That’s a grand thing. Perhaps one of these days you’ll tell us.”

“You’ll see it for yourself perhaps, before that day comes,” the gentleman with the silver ring rejoined. “Perhaps when you do you’ll remember.”

“Well, you know, Schinkel says we don’t,” said the shoemaker, nodding at the cloud-compelling German.

“I don’t care a bloody rap what no man says!” the dog-fancier exclaimed, gazing straight before him.

“They say it’s a bad year—the blockheads in the newspapers,” Mr. Schinkel went on, addressing himself to the company at large. “They say that on purpose—to convey the impression that there are such things as good years. I ask the company, has any gentleman present ever happened to notice that article? The good year’s yet to come: it might begin to-night, if we like: it all depends on our being able to be serious for a few hours. But that’s too much to expect. Mr. Muniment’s very serious; he looks as if he was waiting for the signal, but he doesn’t speak—he never speaks if I want particularly to hear him. He only deliberates very deeply—oh I’m sure. But it’s almost as bad to think without speaking as to speak without thinking.”

Hyacinth always admired the cool, easy way in which Muniment comported himself when the attention of the public was directed at him. These manifestations of curiosity or of hostility would have put him out immensely himself. When a lot of people, especially the kind of people collected at the “Sun and Moon,” looked at him or listened to him all at once, he always blushed and stammered, feeling that if he couldn’t have a million of spectators (which would have been inspiring) he should prefer to have but two or three; there was something rather awful in twenty.

Muniment smiled an instant good-humouredly; then after a moment’s hesitation, looking across at the German and the German only, as if his remark were worth noticing but it didn’t matter if the others didn’t understand the reply, he said simply: “Hoffendahl’s in London.”

“Hoffendahl? Gott in Himmel!” the cabinet-maker exclaimed, taking the pipe out of his mouth. And the two men exchanged a longish glance. Then Mr. Schinkel remarked: “That surprises me, sehr. Are you very sure?”

Muniment continued for a little to look at him. “If I keep quiet half an hour, with so many valuable suggestions flying all round me, you think I say too little. Then if I open my head to give out three words you appear to think I say too much.”

“Ah no, on the contrary—I want you to say three more. If you tell me you’ve seen him I shall be perfectly satisfied.”

“Upon my word I should hope so! Do you think he’s the kind of bloke a fellow says he has seen?”

“Yes, when he hasn’t!” said Eustache Poupin, who had been listening. Every one was listening now.

“It depends on the fellow he says it to. Not even here?” the German asked.

“Oh here!” Paul Muniment exclaimed in a peculiar tone while he resumed his muffled whistle again.

“Take care—take care; you’ll make me think you haven’t!” cried Poupin with his excited expression.

“That’s just what I want,” said Muniment.

“Nun, I understand,” the cabinet-maker remarked, restoring his pipe to his lips after an interval almost as momentous as the stoppage of a steamer in mid-ocean.

“’Ere, ’ere?” repeated the small shoemaker indignantly. “I daresay it’s as good as the place he came from. He might look in and see what he thinks of it.”

“That’s a place you might tell us a little about now,” the fat man suggested as if he had been waiting for his chance.

Before the shoemaker had time to notice this challenge some one inquired with a hoarse petulance who the bloody blazes they were talking about; and Mr. Schinkel took upon himself to reply that they were talking about a man who hadn’t done what he had done by simply exchanging abstract ideas, however valuable, with his friends in a respectable pot-house.

“What the devil has he done then?” some one else demanded; and Muniment replied quietly that he had spent twelve years in a Prussian prison and was consequently still an object of a good deal of interest to the police.

“Well, if you call that very useful I must say I prefer a pot-house!” cried the shoemaker, appealing to all the company and looking, as it appeared to Hyacinth, particularly hideous.

“Doch, doch, it’s useful,” the German remarked philosophically among his yellow clouds.

“Do you mean to say you’re not prepared for that yourself?” Muniment asked of the shoemaker.

“Prepared for that? I thought we were going to smash that sort of shop altogether; I thought that was the main part of the job.”

“They’ll smash best who’ve been inside,” the German said; “unless they’ve only gone bad, like fish too long caught. But Hoffendahl’s all there yet.”

“Ah no; no smashing, no smashing of any valuable property,” Muniment went on. “There are no wrong places—there are only wrong uses for them. We want to keep them standing and even to put up a few more; but the difference will be that we shall put the correct sort into them.”

“I take your idea—that Griffin’s one of the correct sort,” the fat man remarked, indicating the shoemaker.

“I thought we was going to ’ave their ’eads—all that bloomin’ lot!” Mr. Griffin protested; while Eustache Poupin began to enlighten the company as to the great Hoffendahl, one of the purest martyrs of their cause, a man who had been through everything—who had been scarred and branded, tortured, almost flayed, and had never given his would-be butchers the names they wanted. Was it possible they didn’t remember that great combined assault, early in the sixties, which took place in four Continental cities at once and which in spite of every effort to smother it up—there had been editors and journalists transported even for hinting at it—had done more for the social question than anything before or since? “Through ’im being served in the manner you describe?” some one asked with plainness; to which Poupin replied that it was one of those failures that are more glorious than any success. Muniment said that the affair had been only a flash in the pan, but that the great value of it was this—that whereas some forty persons (and of both sexes) had been engaged in it, only one had been seized and had suffered. It had been Hoffendahl himself who was collared. Certainly he had suffered much, he had suffered for every one; but from that point of view—that of the economy of material—the thing had been a rare success.

“Do you know what I call the others? I call ’em bloody sneaks!” the fat man cried; and Eustache Poupin, turning to Muniment, expressed the hope that he didn’t really approve of such a solution—didn’t consider that an economy of heroism was an advantage to any cause. He himself esteemed Hoffendahl’s attempt because it had shaken, more than anything—except of course the Commune—had shaken it since the French Revolution, the rotten fabric of the actual social order, and because that very fact of the impunity, the invisibility of the persons concerned in it had given the predatory classes, had given all Europe, a shudder that had not yet subsided; but for his part, he must regret that some of the associates of the devoted victim had not come forward and insisted on sharing with him his tortures and his captivity.

“Ç’aurait été d’un bel exemple!” said the Frenchman with an impressive moderation of statement which made even those who couldn’t understand him see he was saying something fine; while the cabinet-maker observed that in Hoffendahl’s place any of them would have stood out just the same. He didn’t care if they set it down to self-love (Mr. Schinkel called it “loaf”) but he might say that he himself would have done so if he had been trusted and had been bagged.

“I want to have it all drawn up clear first; then I’ll go in,” said the fat man, who seemed to think it was expected of him to be reassuring.

“Well, who the dickens is to draw it up, eh? That’s what we happen to be talking about,” returned his antagonist the shoemaker.

“A fine example, old man? Is that your idea of a fine example?” Muniment, with his amused face, asked of Poupin. “A fine example of asininity! Are there capable people, in such plenty, about the place?”

“Capable of greatness of soul, I grant you not.”

“Your greatness of soul is usually greatness of blundering. A man’s foremost duty is not to get collared. If you want to show you’re capable, that’s the way.”

At this Hyacinth suddenly felt himself moved to speak. “But some one must be caught always, must he not? Hasn’t some one always been?”

“Oh, I daresay you’ll be if you like it!” Muniment replied without looking at him. “If they succeed in potting you, do as Hoffendahl did, and do it as a matter of course; but if they don’t, make it your supreme duty, make it your religion, to lie close and keep yourself for another go. The world’s full of unclean beasts whom I shall be glad to see shovelled away by the thousand; but when it’s a question of honest men and men of courage I protest against the idea that two should be sacrificed where one will serve.”

“Trop d’arithmétique—trop d’arithmétique!—That’s fearfully English!” Poupin cried.

“No doubt, no doubt; what else should it be? You shall never share my fate if I have a fate and I can prevent it!” Muniment laughed.

Poupin stared at him and his coarse mirth, as if he thought the English frivolous as well as calculating; then he rejoined: “If I suffer I trust it may be for suffering humanity, but I trust it may also be for France.”

“Oh, I hope you ain’t going to suffer any more for France,” said Mr. Griffin. “Hasn’t it done that insatiable old country of yours some good by this time, all you’ve had to put up with?”

“Well, I want to know what Hoffendahl has come over for; it’s very kind of him, I’m sure. What’s he going to do for us?—that’s what I want to know,” brought out in a loud argumentative tone a personage at the end of the table most distant from Muniment’s place. His name was Delancey and he gave himself out as holding a position in a manufactory of soda-water; but Hyacinth had a secret belief that he was really a hairdresser—a belief connected with a high lustrous curl or crest which he wore on the summit of his large head, as well as with the manner in which he thrust over his ear, as if it were a barber’s comb, the pencil addressed to his careful note-taking on the discussions conducted at the “Sun and Moon.” His opinions were distinct and frequently expressed; he had a watery (Muniment had once called it a soda-watery) eye and a personal aversion to a lord. He desired to change everything except religion, of which he approved.

Muniment answered that he was unable to say as yet what the German revolutionist had come to England for, but that he hoped to be able to give some information on the matter the next time they should meet. It was very certain Hoffendahl hadn’t come for nothing, and he would undertake to declare that they would all feel within a short time that he had given a lift to the cause they had at heart. He had had a great experience, which they might very well find it useful to appeal to. If there was a way for them then and there he would be sure to know the way. “I quite agree with the majority of you—as I take it to be,” Muniment went on in his fresh, cheerful, reasonable manner—“I quite agree with you that the time has come to settle upon it and to follow it. I quite agree with you that the actual state of things is”—he paused a moment and then went on in the same pleasant tone—“is infamous and hellish.”

These remarks were received with a differing demonstration: some of the company declaring that if the Dutchman cared to come round and smoke a pipe they’d be glad to see him—perhaps he’d show where the thumbscrews had been put on; others being strongly of the opinion that they didn’t want any more advice—they had already had advice enough to turn a donkey’s stomach. What they wanted was to put forth their might without any more palaver; to do for something or for some one; to go out somewhere and smash something on the spot—why not?—smash it that very night. While they sat still and talked there were about half a million of people in London that didn’t know where the hell the morrow’s meal was to come from; what they wanted to do, unless they were just a collection of pettifogging old women, was to show them where to get it, to take it to them with heaped-up hands. Hyacinth listened, with a divided attention, to interlaced iterations, while the talk blew hot and cold; there was a genuine emotion, a quick pulse of high fever, to-night in the rear of the “Sun and Moon,” and he felt the contagion of excited purpose. But he was following a train of his own; he was wondering what Muniment had in reserve (for certainly Paul but played with the company), and his imagination, quickened by the sense of impending relations with the heroic Hoffendahl and the discussion as to the alternative duty of escaping or of facing one’s fate, had launched itself into possible perils—into the idea of how he might in a given case settle for himself that question of paying for the lot. The loud, contradictory, vain, unpractical babble went on about him, but he was definitely conscious only that the project of breaking into the bakers’ shops was well before the assembly and was receiving a vigorous treatment, and that there was likewise a good deal of reference to the butchers and grocers and even to the fishmongers. He was in a state of inward exaltation, possessed by an intense desire to stand face to face with the sublime Hoffendahl, to hear his voice and touch his mutilated hand. He was ready for anything: he knew he was himself safe to breakfast and dine, if poorly still sufficiently, and that his colleagues were perhaps even more crude and clumsy than usual; but a breath of popular passion had warmed his cheek and his heart, and he seemed to see, immensely magnified, the monstrosity of the great ulcers and sores of London—the sick, eternal misery crying out of the darkness in vain, confronted with granaries and treasure-houses and places of delight where shameless satiety kept guard. In such a mood as this he felt there was no need to consider, to reason: the facts themselves were as imperative as the cry of the drowning, since while pedantry gained time didn’t starvation and anguish gain it too? He knew Muniment disapproved of delay, that he held the day had come for a forcible rectification of horrible inequalities. In the last conversation they had had together his judicious friend had given him a more definite warrant than ever before for numbering him in the party of immediate action, though indeed he remarked on this occasion, once more, that that particular formula the little bookbinder appeared to have taken such a fancy to was mere gibberish. He hated this sort of pretentious label; it was fit only for politicians and amateurs. None the less he had been as plain as possible on the point that their game must be now to frighten society, and frighten it effectually; to make it believe that the swindled classes were at last fairly in league—had really grasped the idea that, closely combined, they would be irresistible. They were not in league and they hadn’t in their totality grasped any idea at all—Muniment was not slow to make that equally plain. All the same society was scareable, and every great scare was a gain for the people. If Hyacinth had needed warrant to-night for a faith transcending logic he would have found it in his recall of this quiet profession; but his friend’s words came back to him mainly to make him wonder what that friend had in his head just now. He took no part in any vociferation; he had called Schinkel to come round and sit beside him, and the two appeared to confer together in honest ease while the brown atmosphere grew denser, the passing to and fro of firebrands more lively and the flush of faces more portentous. What Hyacinth would have liked to know most of all was why Muniment had not mentioned to him first that Hoffendahl was in London and that he had seen him; for he had seen him, though he had dodged Schinkel’s question—of that Hyacinth instantly felt sure. He would ask for more information later; and meanwhile he wished, without resentment, but with a patient conscious ache, that Muniment would treat him with a little more confidence. If there were a secret in regard to Hoffendahl—and there evidently was: Muniment, quite rightly, though he had dropped the announcement of his arrival for a certain effect, had no notion of sharing the rest of what he knew with that raw roomful—if there were something to be silent and devoted about Hyacinth ardently hoped that to him in particular would a chance be given to show how he could practise this superiority. He felt hot and nervous; he got up suddenly and, through the dark tortuous greasy passage communicating with the outer world, went forth into the street. The air was foul and sleety but refreshed him, and he stood in front of the public-house and smoked another pipe. Bedraggled figures passed in and out and a damp tattered wretched man with a spongy purple face, who had been thrust suddenly across the threshold, stood and whimpered in the brutal blaze of the row of lamps. The puddles glittered roundabout and the silent vista of the street, bordered with low black houses, stretched away in the wintry drizzle to right and left, losing itself in the huge tragic city where unmeasured misery lurked beneath the dirty night, ominously, monstrously still, only howling, for its pain, in the heated human cockpit behind him. Ah what could he do? What opportunity would rise? The blundering divided counsels he had been listening to but made the helplessness of every one concerned more abject. If he had a definite wish while he stood there it was that that exalted deluded company should pour itself forth with Muniment at its head and surge through the sleeping world and gather the myriad miserable out of their slums and burrows, should roll into the selfish squares and lift a tremendous hungry voice and awaken the gorged indifferent to a terror that would bring them down. He lingered a quarter of an hour, but this grand treat gave no sign of coming off, and he finally returned to the noisy club-room in a state of tormented wonder as to what better idea than this very bad one (which seemed to our young man to have at the least the merit that it was an idea) Muniment could be revolving in that too-comprehensive brain of his.

As he re-entered the place he saw the meeting was breaking up in disorder, or at all events in confusion, and that certainly no organised attempt at the rescue of any number of victims would take place that night. All the men were on their feet and were turning away amid a shuffle of benches and chairs, a hunch of shabby shoulders, a frugal abatement of flaring gas and a varied vivacity of disgust and resignation. The moment after Hyacinth came in Mr. Delancey, the supposititious hairdresser, jumped upon a chair at the far end of the room and shrieked out an accusation which made every one stop and stare at him.

“Well, I want you all to know what strikes me before we part company. There isn’t a man in the blessed lot of you that isn’t afraid of his bloody skin—afraid, afraid, afraid! I’ll go anywhere with any one, but there isn’t another, by G—, by what I can make out! There isn’t a mother’s son of you that’ll risk his precious bones!”

This little oration affected Hyacinth like a quick blow in the face: it seemed to leap at him personally, as if a three-legged stool or some hideous hob-nailed boot had been shied at him. The room surged round, heaving up and down, while he was conscious of a loud explosion of laughter and scorn, of cries of “Order, order!” of some clear word of Muniment’s, “I say, Delancey, just step down”; of Eustache Poupin shouting out, “Vous insultez le peuple—vous insultez le peuple!” of other retorts not remarkable for refinement. The next moment he found he had himself sprung up on a chair opposite the barber and that at the sight of so prompt a display the commotion had suddenly turned to almost amused suspense. It was the first time he had asked the ear of the company, which was given on the spot. He was sure he looked very white—it was even possible they could see him tremble. He could only hope this didn’t make him ridiculous when he said: “I don’t think it’s right of him to say that. There are others besides him. At all events I want to speak for myself: it may do some good; I can’t help it. I’m not afraid; I’m very sure I’m not. I’m ready to do anything that will do any good; anything, anything—I don’t care a damned rap. In such a cause I should like the idea of danger. I don’t consider my bones precious in the least, compared with some other things. If one’s sure one isn’t afraid, and one’s accused, why shouldn’t one say so?”

It appeared to him he was talking a long time and when it was over he scarcely knew what happened. He felt himself in a moment down almost under the feet of the other men; stamped upon with intentions of applause, of familiarity; laughed over and jeered over, hustled and poked in the ribs. He felt himself also pressed to the bosom of Eustache Poupin, who apparently was sobbing, while he heard some one say, “Did ye hear the little bloody beggar, as bold as a lion?” A trial of personal prowess between him and Mr. Delancey was proposed, but somehow it didn’t take place, and at the end of five minutes the club-room had emptied itself, yet clearly not to be reconstituted outside in a revolutionary procession. Paul Muniment had taken hold of him and said, “I’ll trouble you to stay, you small desperado: I’ll be blowed if I ever expected to see you on the stump!” Muniment remained and M. Poupin and Mr. Schinkel lingered, donning overcoats, beneath a dim surviving gas-burner in the unventilated medium in which at each renewed gathering the Bloomsbury club seemed to recognise itself.

“Upon my life I believe you’re game,” said Muniment, looking down at him with a serious face.

“Of course you think it’s swagger, ‘self-loaf’ as Schinkel says. But it isn’t.” Then Hyacinth asked: “In God’s name why don’t we do something?”

“Ah my child, to whom do you say it?” Eustache Poupin exclaimed, folding his arms despairingly.

“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” said Muniment.

“All the lot of us. There are plenty of them ready.”

“Ready for what? There’s nothing to be done here.”

Hyacinth stared. “Then why the deuce do you come?”

“I daresay I shan’t come much more. It’s a place in which you’ve always seen too much.”

“I wonder if I’ve seen too much in you,” Hyacinth risked, gazing at his friend.

“Don’t say that—he’s going to introduce us to Hoffendahl!” Schinkel exclaimed, putting away his pipe in a receptacle almost as large as a fiddle-case.

“Should you like to see the right man, Robinson, that is the real thing?” Muniment asked with the same rare grave sound.

“The real thing?” Hyacinth looked from one of his companions to the other.

“You’ve never seen it yet—though you think you have.”

“And why haven’t you shown it me before?”

“Because I had never seen you on the stump.” This was more lightly said.

“Bother the stump! I was trusting you.”

“Exactly so. That gave me time.”

“Don’t come unless your mind’s made up, mon petit,” said Poupin.

“Are you going now—and to see Hoffendahl? Is he the right man?” Hyacinth cried.

“Don’t shout it all over the place. He wants a perfect little gentleman, and if you’re not one—!” Muniment went on.

“Is it true? Are we all going?” Hyacinth eagerly went on.

“Yes, these two are in it. They’re not very wise, but they’re decent,” said Muniment, looking at Poupin and Schinkel.

“Are you the real thing, Muniment?” asked Hyacinth, catching this look.

Muniment dropped his eyes on him. “Yes, you’re the lamb of sacrifice he wants. It’s at the other end of London. We must have a growler.”

“Be calm, my child; me voici!” And Poupin led their young friend out.

They all walked away from the “Sun and Moon,” and it was not for some five minutes that they encountered the four-wheeled cab which so deepened and dignified their purpose. After they were seated in it Hyacinth learned that the “right man” was in London but for three days, was liable to hurry away on the morrow, and was accustomed to receive visits at all kinds of queer hours. It was getting to be midnight; the drive seemed interminable to Hyacinth’s impatience and curiosity. He sat next Muniment, who passed a strong arm round him, holding him all the way as if for a tacit sign of indebtedness. This gave Hyacinth pleasure till he began to wonder if it mightn’t represent also the instinct to make sure of him as against possible weak afterthoughts. They all ended by sitting silent as the cab jogged along murky miles, and by the time it stopped our young man had wholly lost, in the drizzling gloom, a sense of their whereabouts.

END OF VOL. I

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