Part 1
[Illustration:
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART
Fifth Series
ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832
CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)
NO. 139.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]
OUR WAYS AND THEIRS.
To do at Rome as the Romans do is sage advice, not always nor often followed by those of us who wander afield. Voluntarily placing ourselves among people whose ways and habits are different from our own, and whose principles of action are as sacred to them as ours are to us, we ‘fling our five fingers’ in the face of rules and regulations which are to them the very sign and substance of social decorum. Principles which are stricter than our own we call prejudices; and pooh-pooh as valueless those virtues in which we are wanting, while condemning as unpardonably immoral everything whatever which is of laxer fibre and looser holding than the corresponding circumstance at home. Thus, we fall foul of the southern nations for their want of straightforwardness, their sweet deceptive flatteries, their small short-sighted dishonesties; yet we count it but a little matter that they should be sober, abstemious, kind-hearted, and charitable; that they should not beat their children nor kick their wives to death; nor spend on one gross meal of beef and beer half the earnings of the week. We forget, too, that if we are ‘done’ in the vineyards and the orange groves, others are as much ‘done’ in the hop gardens and the hay-fields; and that: ‘Here is a stranger—come, let us rob him,’ is the rule of life all the world over. We deride the costly political efforts made by young nations struggling to obtain a place in European councils; but we have not a word of praise for the patience with which the people bear their heavy burden of taxation, that their country may be great with the great, and strong with the strong. In short, we find more barren land than fertile, all the way from Dan to Beersheba; and, once across the silver streak, very few points, if any, attract our admiration, while fewer still compel our adhesion.
One of the most striking acts of unconformity lies in the charter of liberty given to our girls, compared with the close guard enforced among the bold wooers and jealous possessors of the fervid south. An amount of freedom, which is both innocent and recognised here, is held as dangerous and improper there; but few English girls will submit to more personal restraint in Palermo or Madrid than that to which they have been accustomed in Cornwall or Cumberland. And indeed, they often launch out into strange license, and do things in foreign cities which they would not dare to do in their own native towns. They think they are not known; and what does it signify what people say of them?—the honour of the English name not counting. If you reason with them, and tell them that such and such things are ill thought of by the natives, they look at you blankly and answer: ‘What does it matter to us? Their ways are not ours, thank goodness! and we prefer our own. Besides, they must be very horrid people to think evil when there is none.’ Mothers and chaperons are no more sensitive, no more conformable, than their charges, and quite as resolute to reject any new view and trample under foot any rule of life to which they have not been accustomed. Tell one of them that, in a purely foreign hotel, the girl must not be let to sleep in another corridor—on another floor—or away from her own immediate vicinity, and she asks: ‘Why? My daughter is not a baby; she can take care of herself. And what harm should happen to her?’ Tell her that the girl must not wander unaccompanied about the passages, the gardens, the public rooms of the hotel, nor sit apart in corners of the salon talking in whispers with the men, nor lounge on the benches with one favoured individual alone—and she scouts all these precautions as foolish if not insulting. Say that it is not considered correct for the young lady to come to table-d’hôte by herself at any time of the meal it may suit her to appear—perhaps dashing into dinner in her hat, breathless, heated, excited—and again the advice is rejected. Her daughter has been accustomed to be mistress of her own time as well as actions, and lawn-tennis is a game which cannot be interrupted nor determined by one person only. She did just the same last year at Scarborough, and no one made unpleasant observations; so, why should she be under more control now? Yes, she did all these things at home, where they are compatible with ‘well-and-wise-walking.’ But in a foreign hotel, tenanted by men who respect young women only in proportion to the care that is taken of them, they are not well nor wise; nay, more, they are looked on as criminal acts of neglect in those who have the guidance of things.
Manners are special to countries as to classes, and are accepted as so much current coin, which passes here, but would not run out of the limits of the realm. Jermimer, down at Margate, giggles back to ’Arry, making lollipop eyes at her over the old boat, while sucking the knob of his sixpenny cane. From giggling and making lollipop eyes, the pair soon come to speech; from speech to association; from association to love-making in earnest, and mayhap to marriage. In any case, no harm is done; and Jermimer and ’Arry are as little out of the right course, judged from their own stand-point, when they make acquaintance in this primitive manner, as is Lady Clara Vere de Vere when she is whirled away in Lord Verisopht’s arms on a first introduction. The coin is good where it is minted. But Lady Clara Vere de Vere would be but base metal at Tangier and Tunis; and Jermimer is not understood, say at Palermo, when she comes there in force, trailing her Margate manners at her heels. Consequently, when three pretty girls alight at that fair city, and ‘carry on’ as if they were in ’appy ’Ampton, they naturally excite some attention, not of a flattering kind, among people to whom girlhood is at once brittle ware and a sacred deposit. A showy triad, dressed in the fluttering fashion dear to the tribe of Jermimer—bows here, ends there—colours which dazzle, and shapes not to be overlooked—they make themselves still more conspicuous by their millinery than nature has already made them by her gift of milkwhite skins and flaxen hair. They make themselves more conspicuous by their manners than by either millinery or colour. They care nothing for sight-seeing, and all for flirting, or what in their vernacular is ‘larking.’ Like their prototype giggling back to ’Arry over the old boat, they look back and laugh and beckon and nod to the young officers who follow them through the streets, thinking that here is sport made to their hand, and that to reject the roasted larks which fall from the sky would be a folly unworthy a rational human being. From looking they pass into speech; and, by aid of a dictionary and their fingers, make appointments and go off on expeditions, unchaperoned, with these young men, to whom they have no more clue than is given by their uniform and the number of their regiment. When warned by experienced compatriots, they treat the warning as envy of their enjoyment. When advised by the handsome general who takes his own share of the cake, liberally, they treat his advice as jealousy of the younger men; and so, following their own course, they become the town’s talk, the shame of the English colony, the indignation of their hotel companions, and the standing marvel of the whole native population. They put, too, a stone in the hand of the reactionary and exclusive; and: ‘See to what your dangerous liberties lead your girls!’ is a reproach which no one can ward off. This is an instance of unconformity known to the writer of these lines as having taken place last winter in Palermo.
English and American girls flirt in a way which the fervid south neither permits nor understands. So far that fervid south is more real and more intense than we, who yet pride ourselves on both our sincerity and our depth. A painful little drama took place not long ago, founded on these cross lines of violated custom. Down on the Gulf of Naples a quite young girl, precocious in character and appearance and given up by her mother to the care of her maid, flirted with a young Italian as a foolish child would, given the chance, and only a venal servant to accept bribes for not looking after her. The young fellow took her seriously. When the trying moment came, she opened her large blue eyes and said with the candid air of a cherub: ‘I meant nothing but fun. I do not love you, and I am too young to marry.’ The youth shot himself as his commentary on her answer.
Again, no kind of warning as to the untrustworthiness of certain plausible scoundrels, known to be mere _cacciatori_ or fortune-hunters, will do any good to certain women determined to ruin themselves. A girl not long ago fell in love with a Sicilian scamp of handsome presence and desperate character. In vain her friends warned her of his reputation, and besought her to conquer her suicidal passion—in vain! in vain! She would not, and she did not; but, like the poor foolish moth, flew right up to the candle, and proved too fatally what the flame was like. She married; and then learnt what a torturer and a tyrant could do when put to it. Before the year was out she had to escape by stealth from a man who starved her and beat her; who slept with a revolver under his pillow, with which he threatened her at dead of night—waking her from her sleep to terrify her into almost madness—and who made her regret too bitterly that she had not taken advice when it was given her, and believed in the truer knowledge of the more experienced.
In health it is the same story. We, who go on a visit of a few weeks, know so much better what is good for us than the natives of the place, who have had the experience of a lifetime and the traditions of centuries to guide them! We laugh at their precautions, and refuse to be ‘coddled.’ Hence, we go straight into the jaws of danger, and then wonder that we are bitten. We hang over the malarial waters stagnating in the Colosseum, when we go there to ‘enthuse’ by moonlight. We lie on the rank grass in the Campagna, cooling our flushed faces on the earth which teems with the germs that slay and the emanations that destroy. We whip our blood to fever-heat by violent exertion under the burning sun, then get chilled to the marrow when the great orb sinks to darkness and the cold damps rise like malignant spirits from the tomb; and we think the inhabitants lazy because they take their exercise doucely, and effeminate because they avoid the half-hour of sundown as they would avoid a tiger crouching in the jungle. We eat and drink in feverish Italy and exciting Spain as we eat and drink in damp, depressing England; and we refuse to do at Rome as the Romans do, to the damage of our liver and the ruin of our nerves. We know best—are we not free-born Britons?—and our flag of unconformity is the sign of our superiority. We despise the religion of the countries we visit, and will not believe that the worshippers of the saints have more respect than have we ourselves for the faith into which they have been born and bred. A friend of our own carries this feeling to its last development, not being able to understand, nor to believe, that the old Greeks and Romans had any respect for Zeus or worship for Minerva. The grandeur and multiplicity of their temples, the magnificence and frequency of their processions, say nothing to him. Their ways are not his, and he cannot accept them as true for them if not for him. All people who have been abroad, and who respect the habits and feelings of those among whom they have placed themselves, know how painful it is to meet certain of their countrymen and women in the churches during service. These nonconformists pay no more respect to the place than if it were a barn cleared out for a play-night. They walk about making comments in audible voices, and stepping over the obstructive feet of the kneeling worshippers as unconcernedly as if they were picking their way among so many bales of cotton and wool. Why should they not? When faith and habits clash, are not our own those which we must consider? At a funeral service in St Roch, when the nave was draped in black and occupied by the mourners gathered round the coffin, there came up the side aisle, arm-in-arm, a young Englishman and, perhaps, his bride, joyous, happy, talking, laughing. What to them, in the flush of their youthful bliss, was the sorrow of the widow, the grief of the children, the loss of a good man and a useful life? They were on one plane, and all these weeping mourners were on another; and their own was predominant.
In a smaller matter than this, we show the same want of conformity. We go to a theatre in full dress where the ladies of the place go in bonnets, and to the opera in ulsters and travel-worn hats where the élite are in their diamonds and plumes. But so it is all through. We are British, and may do as we like, not being slaves nor wearing wooden shoes like those others, and Britannia ruling the seas—a cross between Neptune and Minerva. We eat and drink and dress and flirt and live independent of the rules by which the people of the country are guided and checked. But if any one does not conform to our ways, he is anathematised, and we wonder how such bad taste is possible with a well-conditioned person! It is the stiff Anglo-Saxon neck, which, were it to bend, would not lose in power, but would gain in grace.
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XLII.
Marian was behind in the dining-room and bedrooms with Aunt Clemmy, helping to nurse and tend the sick and wounded as well as she could, in the midst of so much turmoil and danger. When she and Edward had been roused by the sudden glare of the burning cane-houses, reddening the horizon by Orange Grove, and casting weird and fitful shadows from all the mango-trees in front of their little tangled garden, she had been afraid to remain behind alone at Mulberry, and had preferred facing the maddened rioters by her husband’s side, to stopping by herself under such circumstances among the unfamiliar black servants in her own house. So they had ridden across hurriedly to the Dupuys’ together, especially as Marian was no less timid on Nora’s account than on her own; and when they reached the little garden gate that led in by the back path, she had slipped up alone, unperceived by the mob, while Edward went round openly to the front door and tried to appease the angry negroes.
The shouts and yells when she first arrived had proved indeed very frightening and distracting; but after a time, she could guess, from the comparative silence which ensued, that Edward had succeeded in gaining a hearing: and then she and Aunt Clemmy turned with fast beating hearts to look after the bleeding victims, one of whom at least they gave up from the first as quite dead beyond the reach of hope or recovery.
Nora was naturally the first to come to. She had fainted only; and though, in the crush and press, she had been trampled upon and very roughly handled by the barefooted negroes, she had got off, thanks to their shoeless condition, with little worse than a few ugly cuts and bruises. They laid her tenderly on her own bed, and bathed her brows over and over again with Cologne water; till, after a few minutes, she sat up again, pale and deathly to look at, but proud and haughty and defiant as ever, with her eyes burning very brightly, and an angry quiver playing unchecked about her bloodless lips.
‘Is he dead?’ she asked calmly—as calmly as if it were the most ordinary question on earth, but yet with a curious tone of suppressed emotion, that even in that terrible moment did not wholly escape Marian’s quick womanly observation.
‘Your father?’ Marian answered, in a low voice.—‘Dear, dear, you mustn’t excite yourself now. You must be quite quiet, perfectly quiet. You’re not well enough to stand any talking or excitement yet. You must wait to hear about it all, darling, until you’re a little better.’
Nora’s lip curled a trifle as she answered almost disdainfully: ‘I’m not going to lie here and let myself be made an invalid of, while those murderers are out yonder still on the piazza. Let me get up and see what has happened.—No; I didn’t mean papa, Marian; I know he’s dead; I saw him lying hacked all to pieces outside on the sofa. I meant Mr Noel. Have they killed him? Have they killed him? He’s a brave man. Have the wretches killed him?’
‘We think not,’ Marian answered dubiously. ‘He’s in the next room, and two of the servants are there taking care of him.’
Nora rose from the bed with a sudden bound, and stood, pale and white, all trembling before them. ‘What are you stopping here wasting your care upon me for, then?’ she asked half angrily. ‘You think not—think not, indeed! Is this a time to be thinking and hesitating! Why are you looking after women who go into fainting-fits, like fools, at the wrong moment? I’m ashamed of myself, almost, for giving way visibly before the wretches—for letting them see I was half afraid of them. But I wasn’t afraid of them for myself, though—not a bit of it, Marian: it was only for—for Mr Noel.’ She said it after a moment’s brief hesitation, but without the faintest touch of girlish timidity or ill-timed reserve. Then she swept queen-like past Marian and Aunt Clemmy, in her white dinner dress—the same dress that she had worn when she was Marian’s bridesmaid—and walked quickly but composedly, as if nothing had happened, into the next bedroom.
The two negresses had already taken off Harry’s coat and waistcoat, and laid him on the bed with his shirt front all saturated with blood, and his forehead still bleeding violently, in spite of their unskilful efforts to stanch it with a wet towel. When Nora entered, he was lying there, stretched out at full length, speechless and senseless, the blood even then oozing slowly, by intermittent gurgling throbs, from the open gash across his right temple. There was another deeper and even worse wound gurgling similarly upon his left elbow.
‘They should have been here,’ Nora cried; ‘Marian and Clemmy should have been here, instead of looking after me in yonder.—Is he dead, Nita, is he dead? Tell me!’
‘No, missy,’ the girl answered, passively handing her the soaked towel. ‘Him doan’t dead yet; but him dyin’, him dyin’. De blood comin’ out ob him, spurt, spurt, spurt, so him can’t lib long, not anyway. Him bledded to death already, I tinkin’, a’most.’
Nora looked at the white face, and a few tears began at last to form slowly in her brimming eyelids. But she brushed them away quickly, before they had time to trickle down her blanched cheek, for her proud West Indian blood was up now, as much as the negroes’ had been a few minutes earlier; and she twisted her handkerchief round a pocket pencil so as to form a hasty extemporised tourniquet, which she fastened bravely and resolutely with intuitive skill above the open wound on the left elbow. She had no idea that the little jets in which the blood spurted out so rhythmically were indicative of that most dangerous wound, a severed artery; but she felt instinctively, somehow, that this was the right thing to do, and she did it without flinching, as if she had been used to dealing familiarly with dangerous wounds for half her lifetime. Then she twisted the hasty instrument tightly round till the artery was securely stopped, and the little jets ceased entirely at each pulsation of the now feeble and weakened heart.
‘Run for the doctor, somebody!’ she cried eagerly; ‘run for the doctor, or he’ll die outright before we can get help for him!’
But Nita and Rose, on their knees beside the wounded man, only cowered closer to the bedside, and shook with terror as another cry rose on a sudden from outside from the excited negroes. It was the cry they raised when they found Delgado was really struck dead before their very eyes by the visible and immediate judgment of the Almighty.
Nora looked down at them with profound contempt, and merely said, in her resolute, scornful voice: ‘What! afraid even of your own people? Why, I’m not afraid of them; I, who am a white woman, and whom they’d murder now and hack to pieces, as soon as they’d look at me, if once they could catch me, when their blood’s up!—Marian, Marian! you’re a white woman; will you come with me?’
Marian trembled a little—she wasn’t upheld through that terrible scene by the ingrained hereditary pride of a superior race before the blind wrath of the inferior, bequeathed to Nora by her slave-owning ancestors; but she answered with hardly a moment’s hesitation: ‘Yes, Nora. If you wish it, I’ll go with you.’
There is something in these conflicts of race with race which raises the women of the higher blood for the time being into something braver and stronger than women. In England, Marian would never have dared to go out alone in the face of such a raging tumultuous mob, even of white people; but in Trinidad, under the influence of that terrible excitement, she found heart to put on her hat once more, and step forth with Nora under the profound shade of the spreading mango-trees, now hardly lighted up at all at fitful intervals by the dying glow from the burnt-out embers of the smoking cane-houses. They went down groping their way by the garden path, and came out at last upon the main bridle-road at the foot of the garden. There Marian drew back Nora timidly with a hand placed in quick warning upon her white shoulder. ‘Stand aside, dear,’ she whispered at her ear, pulling her back hastily within the garden gate and under the dark shadow of the big star-apple tree. ‘They’re coming down—they’re coming down! I hear them, I hear them! O God, O God, I shouldn’t have come away! They’ve killed Edward! My darling, my darling! They’ve killed him—they’ve killed him!’
‘I wouldn’t stand aside for myself,’ Nora answered half aloud, her eyes flashing proudly even in the shadowy gloom of the garden. ‘But to save Mr Noel’s life, to save his life, I’ll stand aside if you wish, Marian.’