by Ouida
Hopper is struggling between the two constables, who have him by the collar: “Hi, mister!” he groans, “won’t ye speak hup for a ‘onest man?
Kep’ me on beastly swills, you hev — kep’ promisin’ on me beer’d be free all round — promised as ow I’d live in Windsor Castle, and hev ale an’ gin on tap all day — promised as ‘ow — promised as ‘ow — promised as ow —
“Shut up his jaw,” says one of the constables to the other. “Get him along somehow. We can’t waste no more time.”
They go down the road, dragging and pushing Hopper, a group of small boys dancing hilariously in their rear.
“I assure you he was an entirely reformed character, up to this moment,” says Bertram to the satirical and remaining policeman.
“Aye, they’re alius the worst, sir,” says that functionary, with conviction.
“Reformed characters have a knack of backsliding,” says Marlow, who has lingered to look on, with great enjoyment of the scene. “Vice is magnetic. Virtue isn’t — somehow.” Bertram ignores him and continues to address the policeman: “I suppose I can witness on his behalf in the police court? Get him out on bail?
My testimony surely—”
“Well, sir, I’d let him bide if I was you,” says the policeman, without a grain of sympathy. “Seven days’ll do him a world o’ good. Wonderful how it sobers ’em.”
“Why are you so ungenerous to your own class?”
Policeman looks puzzled: “Don’t know about ongenerous, sir; but I didn’t never cotton to drunkards afore I was in the force.”
“I thought you were a total abstainer, Bertram?” says Marlow.
Bertram replies, very stiffly: “Drink is the most disgusting of all weaknesses, but our disgust ought not to destroy our compassion. In that poor man yonder it is a relapse into a bad habit after three years of rigorous abstinence.”
The policeman smothers a decorous smile: “Beg pardon, sir that ’ere man was run in dead drunk a fortnight ago on the Nottin’ ‘Ill road and got two days.”
Bertram is silent.
He remembers that Hopper appeared at his chambers ten days previously with a black eye and bandaged head, and accounted for his condition by a very well-told episode of a runaway horse and a lady saved by his courage and resolution.
Marlow laughs, nods, and walks on; Bertram lights another cigarette. He is not pleased by this episode.
Marlow, meanwhile continuing his walk, comes, some tenth part of a mile further down the road, on two ladies, whom he recognises immediately although their backs are towards him; one is Cicely Seymour, the other Lady Jane Rivaux. He overtakes them with as much haste and joyousness as it is possible for a London man in the ‘Nineties to display in public.
“Oh, Miss Seymour, such a lark down there,” he says, with great satisfaction. “A friend of Bertram’s run in dead drunk by the police, and Bertram preaching red ruin on his behalf. On my word, it’s the drollest sight I’ve seen for many a day.”
“It must be,” replied Cicely, between her teeth. “We have all of us numbers of friends who take more stimulants than are good for them, but they are careful to be in the sanctuary of their own houses or in their clubs.”
“How you do pull up a fellow!” murmurs Marlow. “Of course, when I say friend I mean a — a — well, one of his monstrous queer acquaintances. He lives amongst that class.”
“What class?”
“Well, the — the mob — you know. Folks that come out when there’s a riot and smash windows and lamps; never see ’em any other time; burrow, I suppose, like rabbits.”
“Darkest London? I fear the lamps when they are not smashed do not throw much light on their darkness.”
“How sententious you are, Cicely!” says Lady Jane. “You ought to marry a rising politician.”
“Because I detest politics?”
“Bertram’s views aren’t politics, they’re red ruin,” repeats Marlow. “Red ruin to himself, too; he’s dropped such a pot o’ money over that revolutionary journal of his that he’ll be in the bankruptcy court before the season’s over.”
“Has he borrowed any money of you?” asks Cicely, curtly.
“Oh dear, no; I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Then what are his affairs to you?”
“Well — I — I — don’t know. Mustn’t one talk of one’s neighbours?”
“It shows great poverty of mind to speak merely of people. There are so many other subjects.”
Marlow is abashed.
He knows that his mind is not rich according to her ideas of intellectual wealth.
“At all events,” he says, rather crossly and hotly, “one may be allowed to envy such a prig such good luck as to have Miss Seymour for a champion.”
“Jane,” says Cicely, turning to her friend, “here come your children. How well that mite Dolly rides!”
“He is a prig, you know, my dear,” murmurs Lady Jane, “and I am sorry it makes you angry when we say so.”
“I dislike all injustice,” says Cicely, coldly, “and I do not consider that Mr. Bertram is in the least done justice to by his friends and relations. How badly every one treated him yesterday in return for a most learned and interesting lecture!”
While she is thus defending himself and his doctrines in his absence, Bertram, still seated under the trees, sees in the distance a girl’s figure; she wears a black straw hat, a black jacket, and a grey stuff skirt; she has thread gloves and leather high-lows, the highlows are white with dust; she has two deep baskets filled with primroses and covered by red cotton handkerchiefs; she carries one on each arm. She has a round, fair, freckled face, a sweet and cheerful expression, and a fringe of naturally curling brown hair.
She approaches Bertram smiling: “Oh, gracious, sir! Don’t get up for the likes of me. Mother told me as how you were under this tree; I just met her by the Gate, so I thought I’d come and have a peep at you.”
“Thanks,” replies Bertram, distantly. “Don’t say ‘as how,’ Annie. You are heavily laden this morning.”
“Oh, no, sir. Primroses have no roots; they make a fine show, but they don’t weigh naught.”
“Like the party of which they are the emblem.”
Annie smiles, in entire ignorance of his meaning, and sits down by him, planting her baskets on the ground.
“These aren’t very good flowers,” she says, regretfully, “the rain’s spiled ’em. They’ll do to put at the horses’ ears. Why do they put ’em at the horses’ ears, sir? I asked a groom onst, and he says, says he, it means that when our party come back to office we’ll take the tax off horses. Is that so, sir?”
“They are not only at the horses’ ears, but at the asses’ buttonholes!” says Bertram. “As for taxation, it is the arc of Toryism.”
“Dear me!” he thinks, “why will she sit down by me? With all the will in the world one cannot but fret occasionally at their manners, though of course manner is only the shell, and ought not to weigh with one!”
Annie is meanwhile making some primroses up into a bunch. “What had you said to mother?” she asks. “Her back was quite set up, like.”
“Your mother,” replies Bertram, “is the most estimable and indefatigable of persons, but she has the taint of painfully narrowed and archaic views: she persists in considering herself of an inferior class; she persists in speaking of ‘quality,’ by which she means the patrician order, as something superhuman and alien to herself. It distresses me.”
“Oh, yes! Mother’s always going on about our engagement. She says as how—”
“‘As how,’ again, Annie!”
“Well, sir, that’s just what mother means. You speak in one way and I in another. And your friends will laugh at my way of speaking, sir; they certainly will.”
“Let them laugh! Besides, we shall not see them, Annie; we shall live wholly apart from them, in some remote spot of our own.”
“Out o’ London, sir?”
“Out of London beyond a
doubt. Is that any subject of regret?”
“Well — I should miss the streets, sir.”
“Miss the streets! Merciful heavens! To what a pass has the baneful disease of town life brought a pure and unsophisticated soul! But you have been in the country this morning early — the hem of the country at any rate. Did the freshness, the silence, the fragrance around you say nothing to your heart?”
“Well, no, sir. Where the growers are you don’t smell much else than manure; and there’s a steam pump always going fit to deafen you.”
“Well, well! But you must have seen the real country. I have taken you myself to Bushey and Thames Ditton. Surely you must see that the streets are the quintessence of vulgarity, of artificiality, of hideousness, of ludicrous effort?”
“If they’re as bad as that, sir, why do all the great ladies stay all the summer in ’em, when they might be in the country? Our little street ain’t much, for sure, but there’s a deal o’ neighbourliness in it; and I’m so used to listening for Sam’s growler rattlin’ home I don’t think sleep ‘ud come to me without it.”
“We really cannot take Sam and his cab into our wedded life,” remarks Bertram, with irritation; “and why will you say ‘sir,’ and not Wilfrid?”
“Your Christian name would sound so cheeky, sir,” replies Annie. “I couldn’t bring myself to say it. You’re so different to me, sir. That’s what mother alius says: ‘Mr. Bertram’s got queer notions,’ says she; ‘but he was born of the quality, and quality he’ll be till he die, let him fuss and fad and fettle as much as ever he likes.’”
Bertram is looking uneasily down the Mile: “Won’t your primroses wither in the sun?”
“No; there’s the shade o’ the tree.”
Bertram says to himself: “However shall I get rid of her? If Marlow should come back while she’s sitting here, or Fanshawe come out of his house!” — (Aloud.)— “Dear Annie, if you won’t misunderstand me, I think we’d better not be seen sitting here together. Cæsar’s wife — no, I don’t mean that, I mean an Englishman’s betrothed — in fact, you know what I mean. It was very kind of you to send those violets yesterday, but it was a mistake — my rooms were full — people laughed.”
“Oh, Mr. Bertram, I am sorry. It was silly, of course, now I think of it,” says the girl, as she rises and takes up the baskets. “Mr. Bertram, if you don’t like to be seen with me settin’ on this bench, how ever will you stand being seen with me all your life?”
“You don’t comprehend,” replies Bertram, nervously. “That isn’t the question at all. I don’t want people to say coarse and rude things of you. Of my wife no one will ever dare to do so.”
Annie hangs her head in silence for a minute; then murmurs:
“Do you really love me, sir? Mother says as how it’s moonshine.”
“I dislike the word love. It is coarse, and implies coarse feelings. It is a degrading impulse, shared with the beasts of the fields. Poets are responsible for having covered its unloveliness with a starry garment which has disguised — fatally disguised — its nakedness. What I feel for you is respect, esteem, the sweetness of fulfilled duty, the means of proving to the world the sincerity of my sociology.”
“Yes, sir. You told me that afore.”
“Well, what better sentiment can you desire? Love fills lunatic asylums, divorce courts, cemeteries, heats charcoal braziers, fires revolvers, gives human bodies to fishes; but such a sentiment as I have for you purifies society, advances civilisation, ensures mutual respect, and eliminates passion, the tyrant of man.”
He stops abruptly, for before his memory floats the vision of Cecily Seymour, and he seems to hear her saying: “What heresy! And how untrue!” Annie murmurs, keeping her head down, and in a disappointed voice: “Yes, sir.”
“You do not seem to understand! You are vexed?”
“I’ll try to understand, sir. I’m only a poor girl, and all that you say is very beautiful, I dessay; but — it makes me think of a novel I got onst from the library, where a poor governess, without a umberellar or a friend, stands out in the rain and looks through the winder at a cosy kitchen, where they’re a-toastin’ muffins for tea, and a cat’s a-warming his-self at the fire.”
“‘Jane Eyre.’ I fail to see the connection.”
“Well, Mr. Bertram, I say it ill; but when you talk in that kind o’ way it makes me feel out in the cold like as that poor teacher was, and I think I’d rather have the fire and the muffins and the cat.”
“I fear you are a sad Philistine, Annie.”
“I don’t know what that is, sir. I daresay as it’s only that your beautiful talk’s too fine for me. I think I’ll go now. I didn’t ought to have dawdled here.”
“You are crying, child!”
“Oh, no, sir.”
She gets up and hurries away.
“O Heavens!” Bertram says to himself. “One does not go to that sturdy class to get a sensitive plant that droops at a touch. She says liberry and umberellar. It is absurd that such a trifle should irritate one, but it does; it is like a grain of dust in one’s eye, a crumb of bread in one’s sock. What atoms they are, yet how miserable they can make one! And then her absolute inability to understand one! Love! Good gracious! She would want to have a bride cake from Gunter’s; a temple of Hymen in spun sugar!”
The remembrance of Cicely Seymour’s fair face, with its tender, dreamy eyes and its beautiful mouth, comes over him. He shivers in the warmth of the pleasant and unusual sunshine.
Marlow, who has left the ladies after his snubbing, passes him again, puts his glass in his eye, and gazes after Annie Brown.
“A protégée? Younger than your disciples usually are,” he remarks. “Ah, to be sure — that must be the Annie of the violets? My dear Bertram, surely chivalry should suggest that we should carry her baskets for her? If you will take the one, I will take the other.”
Bertram deigns no answer. He feels considerably annoyed, and gazes at the cupola of the hotel in front of him.
Marlow digs holes in the gravel with his cane.
“What an opportunity lost of practical illustration of your doctrines, and — she’s got a smart pair of ankles; rather thick, but still—”
Bertram continues to gaze abstractedly at the hotel roof.
“But why, oh why, let her wear highlows?” continues Marlow. “They would deform a goddess.”
Suddenly, with the sense of taking a plunge into water of unknown depth, the man whom he torments faces what he considers an imperative obligation.
“The young person in the highlows is my future wife,” he says between his teeth. “You will be so good as to make your jokes about some other matter than her ankles.” Marlow stares, utterly incredulous and stupefied.
“Good Lord! you can’t mean it! Your wife? Why, she is — she is — she is a very decent sort of girl no doubt; I should be sorry to imply the contrary, but—”
“Be so good as to understand that I am not in jest. That is the — the — the daughter of the people who I am about to marry.”
“Oh, Lord!”
Marlow drops into a chair, so astonished that he could not recover his speech. Annie is too far off to hear, and there is no one else within earshot except a groom on the other side of the rails; the policeman has gone on down the road.
“I was much to blame,” says Bertram, in his chilliest manner, “not to make the announcement yesterday when you asked who were the Brown family. My reticence was a weakness of which I am sincerely ashamed.”
He has done what he believes that courage, truth, and loyalty to this poor little girl with the primrose skips demanded, but doing our duty, unhappily, is apt to leave a shivery and prickly sensation behind it, and his reasons do not, even to himself, appear so logical, admirable, and clear as they had done three months ago.
And why will she say “liberry” and “umberellar”? and her ankles certainly are thick! He tries to remember Sybil in Disraeli’s romance of that name, but he cannot conceal from hi
s mind that Annie is not in the very least like Sybil, if he himself somewhat resembles Egremont.
“And may I tell people?” asks Marlow, with his eyes staring wide open.
“You may tell every one. The office of bellman to society is, I believe, very congenial to you.”
“Eh? Lord, how they will laugh! They’ll die of laughin’.”
Bertram reddens angrily.
“No doubt they will laugh. Such laughter is still as like the crackling of thorns under a pot as it was in the days of Solomon.”
Marlow continues to stare stupidly.
“Are you sure you aren’t jokin’? chaffin’? humbuggin’?” he asks.
“I do not joke,” replies Bertram, with chill dignity. “And certainly I should not use banter on so delicate and solemn a subject. If you think the actions of my insignificant personality will amuse people, you are at liberty to amuse them.”
With that he nods slightly, and walks towards the French Embassy, leaving Marlow rooted to his chair, still staring with a blank expression of incredulity and amaze.
“And that prig, that dolt, that triple idiot might marry Cicely Seymour if he chose!” mutters the young man with the gold crook of his cane between his teeth.
Marlow cannot believe his own senses. It is eleven o’clock in the morning, and he has taken nothing but some black coffee and a devilled kidney, or he really would think he had been drinking, and forgotten the debauch.
He feels that it would be very agreeable to his feelings to return to barbarian methods and pound into a jelly the highly cultured brains of the author of the Age to Come.
“But what do you marry her for?” he shouts after Bertram’s retreating figure. He receives no answer, and Bertram passes away under the budding April boughs. To explain his reasons to Marlow would be indeed to throw pearls before swine.
As he walks backward in the direction of Hyde Park Corner he sees the figure of Annie Brown going down the almost-deserted roadway of the drive.
“Her ankles are thick,” he thinks painfully; “and why will she use such very odd words as “liberry”? Why? I believe philologists consider that the vernacular of the illiterate is the purest Saxon English spoken; but it grates unpleasantly on one’s ears. Is that you, Fanshawe, at last?”