Part 14

Millicent, to hear her talk, only asked to keep her skirts clear and marry some respectable tea-merchant. But for our hero she was magnificently plebeian, in the sense that implied loud recklessness of danger and the qualities that shine forth in a row. She summed up the sociable humorous ignorant chatter of the masses, their capacity for offensive and defensive passion, their instinctive perception of their strength on the day they should really exercise it; and as much as any of this their ideal of something smug and prosperous, where washed hands and oiled hair and plates in rows on dressers and stuffed birds under glass and family photographs of a quite similar effect would symbolise success. She was none the less plucky for being at bottom a shameless Philistine, ambitious of a front garden with rockwork; and she presented the plebeian character in none the less plastic a form. Having the history of the French Revolution at his fingers’ ends, Hyacinth could easily see her (if there should ever be barricades in the streets of London) with a red cap of liberty on her head and her white throat bared so that she should be able to shout the louder the Marseillaise of that hour, whatever it might be. If the festival of the Goddess of Reason should ever be enacted in the British Capital—and Hyacinth could consider such possibilities without a smile, so much was it a part of the little religion he had to remember always that there was no knowing what might happen—if this solemnity, I say, should be revived in Hyde Park, who was better designated than Miss Henning to figure in a grand statuesque manner as the heroine of the occasion? It was plain she had laid her inconsequent admirer under a peculiar spell, since he could associate her with such scenes as that while she consumed beer and buns at his expense. If she had a weakness it was for prawns; and she had, all winter, a plan for his taking her down to Gravesend, where this luxury was cheap and abundant, when the fine long days should arrive. She was never so frank and facetious as when she dwelt on the details of a project of this kind; and then Hyacinth was reminded afresh that it was an immense good fortune for him she was so handsome. If she had been ugly he couldn’t have listened to her; but the rare bloom and grand style of her person glorified even her accent, interfused her cockney genius with prismatic hues, gave her a large and constant impunity.

XI

She desired at last to raise their common experience to a loftier level, to enjoy what she called a high-class treat. Their commerce had been condemned for the most part to go forward in the streets, the wintry, dusky, foggy streets, which looked bigger and more numerous in their perpetual obscurity and in which everything was covered with damp, gritty smut, an odour extremely agreeable to Miss Henning. Happily she shared Hyacinth’s relish of vague perambulation and was still more addicted than he to looking into the windows of shops, before which, in long, contemplative halts, she picked out freely the articles she shouldn’t mind having put up for her. He invariably pronounced the objects of her selection hideous and made no scruple to assure her she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing he could say to her affronted her so much, for her pretensions in the way of a cultivated judgement were boundless. Had not indeed her natural aptitude been fortified, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace (there was scarcely anything they didn’t sell in the great shop of which she was an ornament), by daily contact with the freshest products of modern industry? Hyacinth laughed this establishment to scorn and made the point that there was nothing in it from top to bottom that a real artist would look at. She inquired with answering derision if this were a description of his own few inches; but in reality she was fascinated as much as she was provoked by his attitude of being difficult to please, of seeing indescribable differences among the smartest things. She had given herself out originally as very knowing, but he could make her gape with doubts. When once in a while he pointed out a commodity that he condescended to like (this didn’t happen often, because the only shops in which there was a chance of his making such a discovery were closed at nightfall) she stared and bruised him with her elbow, declaring that if any one should give her such a piece of rubbish she would sell it for fourpence. Once or twice she asked him to be so good as to explain to her in what its superiority consisted—she couldn’t rid herself of a suspicion that there might be something in his judgement and was angry at not finding herself as positive as any one. Then he would reply that it was no use attempting to tell her; she wouldn’t understand and had better continue to admire the insipid productions of an age that had lost the sense of fineness—a phrase she remembered, proposing to herself even to make use of it on some future occasion, but was quite unable to interpret.

When her companion demeaned himself in this manner it was not with a view of strengthening the tie that united him to his childhood’s friend; but the effect followed on Millicent’s side and the girl was proud to think herself in possession of a young man whose knowledge was of so high an order that it was inexpressible. In spite of her vanity she was not so convinced of her perfection as not to be full of ungratified aspirations; she had an idea it might be to her advantage some day to exhibit a sample of that learning; and at the same time, when, in consideration for instance of a jeweller’s gas-lighted display in Great Portland Street, Hyacinth lingered for five minutes in perfect silence and she delivered herself according to her wont at such junctures, she was a thousand miles from guessing the perverse sentiments that made it impossible for him to speak. She could long for things she was not likely to have; envy other people for possessing them and say it was a “regular shime”; draw brilliant pictures of what she should do with them if she did have them; and pass immediately, with a mind unencumbered by superfluous inductions, to some other topic equally intimate and personal. The sense of privation with her was often extremely acute; but she could always put her finger on the remedy. With her fellow-sufferer the case was very different; the remedy for him was terribly vague and inaccessible. He was liable to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all he would have liked most to enjoy in life settled on him like a pall. They had a bitterness, but they were not invidious—they were not moods of vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflexion, in which he felt how in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and how a sordid struggle in which one should go down to the grave without having tasted them was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull demoralisation it would involve.

In such hours the great roaring indifferent world of London seemed to him a huge organisation for mocking at his poverty, at his inanition; and then its vulgarest ornaments, the windows of third-rate jewellers, the young man in a white tie and a crush-hat who dandled by on his way to a dinner-party in a hansom that nearly ran over one—these familiar phenomena became symbolic, insolent, defiant, took on themselves to make him smart with the sense that _he_ was above all out of it. He felt, moreover, that there was neither consolation nor refutation in saying to himself that the immense majority of mankind were out of it with him and appeared to put up well enough with the annoyance. That was their own affair; he knew nothing of their reasons or their resignation, and if they chose neither to rebel nor to compare he at least, among the disinherited, would keep up the standard. When these fits were on our young man his brothers of the people fared, collectively, very ill at his hands; their function then was to represent in massive shape precisely the grovelling interests which attracted one’s contempt, and the only acknowledgment one owed them was for the completeness of the illustration. Everything which in a great city could touch the sentient faculty of a youth on whom nothing was lost ministered to his conviction that there was no possible good fortune in life of too “quiet” an order for him to appreciate—no privilege, no opportunity, no luxury to which he mightn’t do full justice. It was not so much that he wanted to enjoy as that he wanted to know; his desire wasn’t to be pampered but to be initiated. Sometimes of a Saturday in the long evenings of June and July he made his way into Hyde Park at the hour when the throng of carriages, of riders, of brilliant pedestrians was thickest; and though lately, on two or three of these occasions, he had been accompanied by Miss Henning, whose criticism of the scene was rich and distinct, a tremendous little drama had taken place privately on the stage of his inner consciousness. He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place. In the midst of this his sense was vivid that he belonged to the class whom the “bloated” as they passed didn’t so much as rest their eyes on for a quarter of a second. They looked at Millicent, who was safe to be looked at anywhere and was one of the handsomest girls in any company, but they only reminded him of the high human walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege and dense layers of stupidity fencing the “likes” of him off from social recognition.

And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a jealousy that couldn’t be intelligent; his personal discomfort was the result of an intense admiration for what he had missed. There were individuals whom he followed with his eyes, with his thoughts, sometimes even with his steps; they seemed to tell him what it was to be the flower of a high civilisation. At moments he was aghast when he reflected that the cause he had secretly espoused, the cause from which M. Poupin and Paul Muniment (especially the latter) had within the last few months drawn aside the curtain, proposed to itself to bring about a state of things in which that particular scene would be impossible. It made him even rather faint to think that he must choose; that he couldn’t (with any respect for his own consistency) work underground for the enthronement of the democracy and yet continue to enjoy in however platonic a manner a spectacle which rested on a hideous social inequality. He must either suffer with the people as he had suffered before, or he must apologise to others, as he sometimes came so near doing to himself, for the rich; inasmuch as the day was certainly near when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple. Hyacinth thought himself obliged at present to have reasons for his feelings; his intimacy with Paul Muniment, which had now grown very great, laid a good deal of that sort of responsibility upon him. Muniment laughed at his reasons whenever he produced them, but appeared to expect him nevertheless to have them ready on demand, and Hyacinth had ever a desire to do what he expected. There were times when he said to himself that it might very well be his fate to be divided to the point of torture, to be split open by sympathies that pulled him in different ways; for hadn’t he an extraordinarily mingled current in his blood, and from the time he could remember wasn’t there one half of him always either playing tricks on the other or getting snubs and pinches from it?

That dim, dreadful, confused legend of his mother’s history, as regards which what Pinnie had been able to tell him when he first began to question her was at once too much and too little—this stupefying explanation had supplied him first and last with a hundred different theories of his identity. What he knew, what he guessed had sickened and what he didn’t know tormented him; but in his illuminated ignorance he had fashioned forth an article of faith. This had gradually emerged from the depths of darkness in which he found himself plunged as a consequence of the challenge he had addressed to Pinnie—while he was still only a child—on the memorable day that had transformed the whole face of his future. It was one January afternoon when he had come in from a walk. She was seated at her lamp, as usual, with her work, and had begun to tell him of a letter one of the lodgers had got describing the manner in which his brother-in-law’s shop at Nottingham had been rifled by burglars. He had listened to her story, standing in front of her, and then by way of response had suddenly said to her: “Who was that awful woman you took me to see ever so long ago?” The expression of her white face as she looked up at him, her fear of such an attack all dormant after so many years—this strange, scared, sick glance was a thing he could never forget, any more than the tone, with her breath failing her, in which she had repeated “That awful woman?”

“That woman in the prison years ago—how old was I?—who was dying and who kissed me so, as I’ve never been kissed, as I never shall be again! Who _was_ she, who WAS she?” Poor Pinnie, to do her justice, had made, after she recovered her breath, a gallant fight: it had lasted a week; it was to leave her spent and sore for ever after, and before it was over Anastasius Vetch had been called in. At his instance she had retracted the falsehoods with which she had previously tried to put the boy off, and had made at last a confession and a report which he was satisfied to believe as complete as her knowledge. Hyacinth could never have told you why the crisis had occurred on such a day, why his question had broken out at that particular moment. The strangeness of the matter to himself was that the germ of his curiosity should have developed so slowly; that the haunting wonder which now, as he looked back, appeared to fill his whole childhood, should only after so long an interval have crept up to the air. It was only of course little by little that he had recovered his bearings in his new and more poignant consciousness; little by little that he had reconstructed his antecedents, taken the measure, so far as was possible, of his heredity. His having the courage to disinter from the _Times_ in the reading-room of the British Museum a report of his mother’s trial for the murder of Lord Frederick Purvis, which was very copious, the affair having been quite a _cause célèbre_; his resolution in sitting under that splendid dome and, with his head bent to hide his hot eyes, going through every syllable of the ghastly record, had been an achievement of comparatively recent years. There were certain things Pinnie knew that appalled him; and there were others, as to which he would have given his hand to have some light, that it made his heart ache supremely to find she was honestly ignorant of. He scarce understood what sort of favour Mr. Vetch wished to make with him (as a compensation for the precious part he had played in the business years before) when the fiddler permitted himself to pass judgement on the family of the wretched young nobleman for not having provided in some manner for the infant child of his assassin. Why should they have provided when it was evident they had refused absolutely to recognise his lordship’s responsibility? Pinnie had to admit this under Hyacinth’s terrible cross-questioning; she couldn’t pretend with any show of evidence that Lord Whiteroy and the other brothers (there had been no less than seven, most of them still living) had at the time of the trial given any symptom of believing Florentine Vivier’s asseverations. That was their affair; he had long since made up his mind that his own was very different. One couldn’t believe at will, and fortunately, in the case, he had no effort to make; for from the moment he began to consider the established facts (few as they were and poor and hideous) he regarded himself immutably as the son of the recreant and sacrificed Lord Frederick.

He had no need to reason about it; all his nerves and pulses pleaded and testified. His mother had been a daughter of the wild French people—all Pinnie could tell him of her parentage was that Florentine had once mentioned that in her extreme childhood her father, his gun in his hand, had fallen in the blood-stained streets of Paris on a barricade; but on the other side it took an English aristocrat to account for him, though a poor specimen apparently had to suffice. This, with its further implications, became Hyacinth’s article of faith; the reflexion that he was a bastard involved in a remarkable manner the reflexion that he was a gentleman. He was conscious he didn’t hate the image of his father as he might have been expected to do; and he supposed this was because Lord Frederick had paid so tremendous a penalty. It was in the exaction of that penalty that the moral proof for him resided; his mother wouldn’t have armed herself on account of any injury less cruel than the passage of which her miserable baby was the living sign. She had avenged herself because she had been thrown over, and the bitterness of that wrong had been in the fact that he, hopeless brat, lay there in her lap. _He_ was the one properly to have been sacrificed: that remark our young man often made to himself. That his judgement of the whole question was passionate and personal and took little account of any disturbing conflict of evidence is proved by the importance he attached for instance to the name by which his mother had told poor Pinnie (when this excellent creature consented to take him) that she wished him to be called. Hyacinth had been the name of her father, a republican clockmaker, the martyr of his opinions, whose memory she professed to worship; and when Lord Frederick had insinuated himself into her confidence he had had reasons for preferring to be known as plain Mr. Robinson—reasons, however, into which, in spite of the light thrown upon them at the trial, it was difficult after so many years to enter.

Hyacinth had never known of Mr. Vetch’s saying more than once to Pinnie, “If her contention as regards that dissolute young swell was true why didn’t she make the child bear his real name instead of his false one?”—an inquiry which the dressmaker had answered, with some ingenuity, by remarking that she couldn’t call him after a man she had murdered, as one must suppose her unwilling to publish to every one his connexion with a crime that had been so much talked about. If Hyacinth had assisted at this little discussion it is needless to say that he would have sided with Miss Pynsent; though that his judgement was independently formed is proved by the fact that Pinnie’s fearfully indiscreet attempts at condolence should not have made him throw up his version in disgust. It was after the complete revelation that he understood the romantic innuendoes with which his childhood had been surrounded and of which he had never caught the meaning; they having seemed but a feature of the general fact of the poor woman’s professional life—so much cutting and trimming and shaping and embroidering, so much turning and altering and doing-up. When it came over him that she had for years made a fool of him to himself and to others he could have beaten her for grief and shame; and yet before he administered this rebuke he had to remember that she only chattered (though she professed to have been extraordinarily dumb) about a matter over which he spent nine-tenths of his own time in all gloomily brooding. When she tried to console him for the horror of his mother’s history by descanting on the glory of the Purvises and reminding him that he was related through them to half the aristocracy of England he felt her to be turning the tragedy of his life into a monstrous farce; and yet he none the less continued to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman born. He allowed her to tell him nothing about the family in question, and his impracticability on this subject was one of the reasons of the deep dejection of her later years. If he had only let her idealise him a little to himself she would have felt she was making up by so much for her grand mistake. He sometimes saw the name of his father’s kin in the newspaper, but he then always cast the sheet away. He had nothing to ask of them and wished to prove to himself that he could ignore them (who had been willing to let him die like a rat) as completely as they ignored him. A thousand times yes, he was with the people and every possible vengeance of the people as against such shameless egoism as that; but all the same he was happy to feel he had blood in his veins that would account for the finest sensibilities.