The Newcomes

by William Makepeace Thackeray

dimly round about them; the hurrying noise of crew and officers running

  on their duty; the tramp and song of the men at the capstan-bars; the

  bells ringing, as the hour for departure comes nearer and nearer, as

  mother and son, father and daughter, husband and wife, hold hands yet for

  a little while. We saw Clive and his father talking together by the

  wheel. Then they went below; and a passenger, her husband, asked me to

  give my arm to an almost fainting lady, and to lead her off the ship.

  Bayham followed us, carrying their two children in his arms, as the

  husband turned away and walked aft. The last bell was ringing, and they

  were crying, "Now for the shore." The whole ship had begun to throb ere

  this, and its great wheels to beat the water, and the chimneys had flung

  out their black signals for sailing. We were as yet close on the dock,

  and we saw Clive coming up from below, looking very pale; the plank was

  drawn after him as he stepped on land.

  Then, with three great cheers from the dock, and from the crew in the

  bows, and from the passengers on the quarter-deck, the noble ship strikes

  the first stroke of her destined race, and swims away towards the ocean.

  "There he is, there he is," shouts Fred Bayham, waving his hat. "God

  bless him, God bless him!" I scarce perceived at the ship's side,

  beckoning an adieu, our dear old friend, when the lady, whose husband had

  bidden me to lead her away from the ship, fainted in my arms. Poor soul!

  Her, too, has fate stricken. Ah, pangs of hearts torn asunder, passionate

  regrets, cruel, cruel partings! Shall you not end one day, ere many

  years; when the tears shall be wiped from all eyes, and there shall be

  neither sorrow nor pain?

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Youth and Sunshine

  Although Thomas Newcome was gone back to India in search of more money,

  finding that he could not live upon his income at home, he was

  nevertheless rather a wealthy man; and at the moment of his departure

  from Europe had two lakhs of rupees invested in various Indian

  securities. "A thousand a year," he thought, "more, added to the interest

  accruing from my two lakhs, will enable us to live very comfortably at

  home. I can give Clive ten thousand pounds when he marries, and five

  hundred a year out of my allowances. If he gets a wife with some money,

  they may have every enjoyment of life; and as for his pictures, he can

  paint just as few or as many of those as he pleases." Newcome did not

  seem seriously to believe that his son would live by painting pictures,

  but considered Clive as a young prince who chose to amuse himself with

  painting. The Muse of Painting is a lady whose social station is not

  altogether recognised with us as yet. The polite world permits a

  gentleman to amuse himself with her; but to take her for better or for

  worse! forsake all other chances and cleave unto her! to assume her name!

  Many a respectable person would be as much shocked at the notion, as if

  his son had married an opera-dancer.

  Newcome left a hundred a year in England, of which the principal sum was

  to be transferred to his boy as soon as he came of age. He endowed Clive

  further with a considerable annual sum, which his London bankers would

  pay: "And if these are not enough," says he kindly, "you must draw upon

  my agents, Messrs. Frank and Merryweather at Calcutta, who will receive

  your signature just as if it was mine." Before going away, he introduced

  Clive to F. and M.'s corresponding London house, Jolly and Baines, Fog

  Court--leading out of Leadenhall--Mr. Jolly, a myth as regarded the firm,

  now married to Lady Julia Jolly--a Park in Kent--evangelical interest--

  great at Exeter Hall meetings--knew Clive's grandmother--that is, Mrs.

  Newcome, a most admirable woman. Baines represents a house in the

  Regent's Park, with an emigrative tendency towards Belgravia--musical

  daughters--Herr Moscheles, Benedick, Ella,--Osborne, constantly at

  dinner-sonatas in P flat (op. 936), composed and dedicated to Miss

  Euphemia Baines, by her most obliged, most obedient servant, Ferdinando

  Blitz. Baines hopes that his young friend will come constantly to York

  Terrace, where the most girls will be happy to see him; and mentions at

  home a singular whim of Colonel Newcome's, who can give his son twelve or

  fifteen hundred a year, and makes an artist of him. Euphemia and Flora

  adore artists; they feel quite interested about this young man. "He was

  scribbling caricatures all the time I was talking with his father in my

  parlour," says Mr. Baines, and produces a sketch of an orange-woman near

  the Bank, who had struck Clive's eyes, and been transferred to the

  blotting-paper in Fog Court. "He needn't do anything," said good-natured

  Mr. Baines. "I guess all the pictures he'll paint won't sell for much."

  "Is he fond of music, papa?" asks Miss. "What a pity he had not come to

  our last evening; and now the season is over!"

  "And Mr. Newcome is going out of town. He came to me, to-day for circular

  notes--says he's going through Switzerland and into Italy--lives in

  Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Queer place, ain't it? Put his name

  down in your book, and ask him to dinner next season."

  Before Clive went away, he had an apparatus of easels, sketching-stools,

  umbrellas, and painting-boxes, the most elaborate and beautiful that

  Messrs. Soap and Isaac could supply. It made J. J.'s eyes glisten to see

  those lovely gimcracks of art; those smooth mill-boards, those

  slab-tinted sketching-blocks, and glistening rows of colour-tubes lying

  in their boxes, which seemed to cry, "Come, squeeze me." If

  painting-boxes made painters, if sketching-stools would but enable one to

  sketch, surely I would hasten this very instant to Messrs. Soap and

  Isaac! but, alas! these pretty toys no more make artists than cowls make

  monks.

  As a proof that Clive did intend to practise his profession, and to live

  by it too, at this time he took four sporting sketches to a printseller

  in the Haymarket, and disposed of them at the rate of seven shillings and

  sixpence per sketch. His exultation at receiving a sovereign and half a

  sovereign from Mr. Jones was boundless. "I can do half a dozen of these

  things easily in a morning," he says. "Two guineas a day is twelve

  guineas--say ten guineas a week, for I won't work on Sundays, and may

  take a holiday in the week besides. Ten guineas a week is five hundred a

  year. That is pretty nearly as much money as I shall want, and I need not

  draw the dear old governor's allowance at all." He wrote an ardent

  letter, full of happiness and affection, to the kind father, which he

  shall find a month after he has arrived in India, and read to his friends

  in Calcutta and Barrackpore. Clive invited many of his artist friends to

  a grand feast in honour of the thirty shillings. The King's Arms,

  Kensington, was the hotel selected (tavern beloved of artists for many

  score years!). Gandish was there, and the Gandishites, and some chosen

  spirits from the Life Academy, Clipstone Street, and J. J. was

  vice-president, with Fred Bayham by his side, to make the speeches and

&n
bsp; carve the mutton; and I promise you many a merry song was sung, and many

  a health drunk in flowing bumpers; and as jolly a party was assembled as

  any London contained that day. The beau-monde had quitted it; the Park

  was empty as we crossed it; and the leaves of Kensington Gardens had

  begun to fall, dying after the fatigues of a London season. We sang all

  the way home through Knightsbridge and by the Park railings, and the

  Covent Garden carters halting at the Half-way House were astonished at

  our choruses. There is no half-way house now; no merry chorus at

  midnight.

  Then Clive and J. J. took the steamboat to Antwerp; and those who love

  pictures may imagine how the two young men rejoiced in one of the most

  picturesque cities of the world; where they went back straightway into

  the sixteenth century; where the inn at which they stayed (delightful old

  Grand Laboureur, thine ancient walls are levelled! thy comfortable

  hospitalities exist no more!) seemed such a hostelry as that where

  Quentin Durward first saw his sweetheart; where knights of Velasquez or

  burgomasters of Rubens seemed to look from the windows of the tall-gabled

  houses and the quaint porches; where the Bourse still stood, the Bourse

  of three hundred years ago, and you had but to supply figures with beards

  and ruffs, and rapiers and trunk-hose, to make the picture complete;

  where to be awakened by the carillon of the bells was to waken to the

  most delightful sense of life and happiness; where nuns, actual nuns,

  walked the streets, and every figure in the Place de Meir, and every

  devotee at church, kneeling and draped in black, or entering the

  confessional (actually the confessional!), was a delightful subject for

  the new sketchbook. Had Clive drawn as much everywhere as at Antwerp,

  Messrs. Soap and Isaac might have made a little income by supplying him

  with materials.

  After Antwerp, Clive's correspondent gets a letter dated from the Hotel

  de Suede at Brussels, which contains an elaborate eulogy of the cookery

  and comfort of that hotel, where the wines, according to the writer's

  opinion, are unmatched almost in Europe. And this is followed by a

  description of Waterloo, and a sketch of Hougoumont, in which J. J. is

  represented running away in the character of a French grenadier, Clive

  pursuing him in the lifeguard's habit, and mounted on a thundering

  charger.

  Next follows a letter from Bonn. Verses about Drachenfels of a not very

  superior style of versification; an account of Crichton, an old Grey

  Friars man, who has become a student at the university; of a commerz, a

  drunken bout, and a students' duel at Bonn. "And whom should I find

  here," says Mr. Clive, "but Aunt Anne, Ethel, Miss Quigley, and the

  little ones, the whole detachment under the command of Kuhn? Uncle Brian

  is staying at Aix. He is recovered from his attack. And, upon my

  conscience, I think my pretty cousin looks prettier every day.

  "When they are not in London," Clive goes on to write, "or I sometimes

  think when Barnes or old Lady Kew are not looking over them, they are

  quite different. You know how cold they have latterly seemed to us, and

  how their conduct annoyed my dear old father. Nothing can be kinder than

  their behaviour since we have met. It was on the little hill at

  Godesberg: J. J. and I were mounting to the ruin, followed by the beggars

  who waylay you, and have taken the place of the other robbers who used to

  live there, when there came a procession of donkeys down the steep, and I

  heard a little voice cry, 'Hullo! it's Clive! hooray, Clive!' and an ass

  came pattering down the declivity, with a little pair of white trousers

  at an immensely wide angle over the donkey's back, and behold there was

  little Alfred grinning with all his might.

  "He turned his beast and was for galloping up the hill again, I suppose

  to inform his relations; but the donkey refused with many kicks, one of

  which sent Alfred plunging amongst the stones, and we were rubbing him

  down just as the rest of the party came upon us. Miss Quigley looked very

  grim on an old white pony; my aunt was on a black horse that might have

  turned grey, he is so old. Then come two donkeysful of children, with

  Kuhn as supercargo; then Ethel on donkey-back, too, with a bunch of

  wildflowers in her hand, a great straw hat with a crimson ribbon, a white

  muslin jacket, you know, bound at the waist with a ribbon of the first,

  and a dark skirt, with a shawl round her feet which Kuhn had arranged. As

  she stopped, the donkey fell to cropping greens in the hedge; the trees

  there chequered her white dress and face with shadow. Her eyes, hair, and

  forehead were in shadow too--but the light was all upon her right cheek:

  upon her shoulder down to her arm, which was of a warmer white, and on

  the bunch of flowers which she held, blue, yellow, and red poppies, and

  so forth.

  "J. J. says, 'I think the birds began to sing louder when she came.' We

  have both agreed that she is the handsomest woman in England. It's not

  her form merely, which is certainly as yet too thin and a little angular

  --it is her colour. I do not care for woman or picture without colour. O

  ye carnations! O ye lilia mista rosis! O such black hair and solemn

  eyebrows! It seems to me the roses and carnations have bloomed again

  since we saw them last in London, when they were drooping from the

  exposure to night air, candle-light, and heated ballrooms.

  "Here I was in the midst of a regiment of donkeys, bearing a crowd of

  relations; J. J. standing modestly in the background--beggars completing

  the group, and Kuhn ruling over them with voice and gesture, oaths and

  whip. Throw in the Rhine in the distance flashing by the Seven Mountains

  --but mind and make Ethel the principal figure: if you make her like, she

  certainly will be--and other lights will be only minor fires. You may

  paint her form, but you can't paint her colour; that is what beats us in

  nature. A line must come right; you can force that into its place, but

  you can't compel the circumambient air. There is no yellow I know of will

  make sunshine, and no blue that is a bit like sky. And so with pictures:

  I think you only get signs of colour, and formulas to stand for it. That

  brick-dust which we agree to receive as representing a blush, look at it

  --can you say it is in the least like the blush which flickers and varies

  as it sweeps over the down of the cheek--as you see sunshine playing over

  a meadow? Look into it and see what a variety of delicate blooms there

  are! a multitude of flowerets twining into one tint! We may break our

  colour-pots and strive after the line alone: that is palpable and we can

  grasp it--the other is impossible and beyond us." Which sentiment I here

  set down, not on account of its worth (and I think it is contradicted--as

  well as asserted--in more than one of the letters I subsequently had from

  Mr. Clive, but it may serve to show the ardent and impulsive disposition

  of this youth), by whom all beauties of art and nature, animate or

  inanimate (the former especially), were welcomed with a gusto and delight

/>   whereof colder temperaments are incapable. The view of a fine landscape,

  a fine picture, a handsome woman, would make this harmless young

  sensualist tipsy with pleasure. He seemed to derive an actual hilarity

  and intoxication as his eye drank in these sights; and, though it was his

  maxim that all dinners were good, and he could eat bread and cheese and

  drink small beer with perfect good-humour, I believe that he found a

  certain pleasure in a bottle of claret, which most men's systems were

  incapable of feeling.

  This springtime of youth is the season of letter-writing. A lad in high

  health and spirits, the blood running briskly in his young veins, and the

  world, and life, and nature bright and welcome to him, looks out,

  perforce, for some companion to whom he may impart his sense of the

  pleasure which he enjoys, and which were not complete unless a friend

  were by to share it. I was the person most convenient for the young

  fellow's purpose; he was pleased to confer upon me the title of friend en

  titre, and confidant in particular; to endow the confidant in question

  with a number of virtues and excellences which existed very likely only

  in the lad's imagination; to lament that the confidant had no sister whom

  he, Clive, might marry out of hand; and to make me a thousand simple

  protests of affection and admiration, which are noted here as signs of

  the young man's character, by no means as proofs of the goodness of mine.

  The books given to the present biographer by "his affectionate friend,

  Clive Newcome," still bear on the titlepages the marks of that boyish

  hand and youthful fervour. He had a copy of Walter Lorraine bound and

  gilt with such splendour as made the author blush for his performance,

  which has since been seen at the bookstalls at a price suited to the very

  humblest purses. He fired up and fought a newspaper critic (whom Clive

  met at the Haunt one night) who had dared to write an article in which

  that work was slighted; and if, in the course of nature, his friendship

  has outlived that rapturous period, the kindness of the two old friends,

  I hope, is not the less because it is no longer romantic, and the days of

  white vellum and gilt edges have passed away. From the abundance of the

  letters which the affectionate young fellow now wrote, the ensuing

  portion of his youthful history is compiled. It may serve to recall

  passages of their early days to such of his seniors as occasionally turn

  over the leaves of a novel; and in the story of his faults,

  indiscretions, passions, and actions, young readers may be reminded of

  their own.

  Now that the old Countess, and perhaps Barnes, were away, the barrier

  between Clive and this family seemed to be withdrawn. The young folks who

  loved him were free to see him as often as he would come. They were going

  to Baden: would he come too? Baden was on the road to Switzerland, he

  might journey to Strasbourg, Basle, and so on. Clive was glad enough to

  go with his cousins, and travel in the orbit of such a lovely girl as

  Ethel Newcome. J. J. performed the second part always when Clive was

  present: and so they all travelled to Coblentz, Mayence, and Frankfort

  together, making the journey which everybody knows, and sketching the

  mountains and castles we all of us have sketched. Ethel's beauty made all

  the passengers on all the steamers look round and admire. Clive was proud

  of being in the suite of such a lovely person. The family travelled with

  a pair of those carriages which used to thunder along the Continental

  roads a dozen years since, and from interior, box, and rumble discharge a

  dozen English people at hotel gates.

  The journey is all sunshine and pleasure and novelty: the circular notes

  with which Mr. Baines of Fog Court has supplied Clive Newcome, Esquire,

  enabled that young gentleman to travel with great ease and comfort. He

  has not yet ventured upon engaging a valet-de-chambre, it being agreed