Chapter I: Part 1

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL

OF

POPULAR

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART

Fifth Series

ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832

CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)

NO. 129.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]

ARACHNE AND MELISSA.

When Anne was queen and ‘Mrs Freeman’ was her mistress, two ladies known to fame as Arachne and Melissa came one day before the reading public. Those who are up in the literature of the time will remember their portraits, which expressed two well-defined and persistent types of humanity—those who get good from everything like Melissa, and those who draw only evil like Arachne. Now, each of these ladies has left behind her a long train of descendants—a wide-spreading _gens_, as the old Romans would have said—in the people who prefer to drink vinegar out of a leaden cup or wine out of a golden; who are to their surroundings as frost or as dew; who see the trodden backward path and the unsurmounted hills in front through spectacles tinted in black or in rose-colour; and who sing their Psalm of Life in the minor key, discordantly, or in the major, with full harmonies. These are the descendants of the Arachne (spider-born) and Melissa (honey-maker) who, in Queen Anne’s time, sucked poison or gathered honey; and we meet them at all four corners of our way.

The Arachnides are for the most part characterised by a strange and chilling silence, when a few words would remove a painful impression or enlighten a dangerous ignorance. When they do speak, their words fall like vocal icicles which freeze and cut at the same time; and they contrive to make their good advice more painful than other people’s rebukes, and to give their information the form of a sarcastic reproach in that you did not know it all before. Their presence in society reminds one of the winter whose ‘Breath was a chain which without a sound, The earth and the air and the water bound.’ Where they are, freedom flags and gaiety declines; and only the most robust of those moral pachyderms who oppose their thick insensitiveness to all outside influences whatsoever, can withstand the lethal effect of the Arachnides. Their small pale eyes wither; their pinched lips paralyse; their very smiles are the fracture of a crystal more than the visible sign of a living, friendly heart; and they are the veritable ‘freezing mixtures’ of life. They take strong and unreasoning dislikes to quite innocent strangers and harmless acquaintances, and will not be convinced that they have no occasion to do so; they quarrel for a mere nothing with those who are so unfortunate as to be their friends and relations, and cannot be induced to make nor to receive an explanation. No one knows what has offended them, but all at once they become like anthropomorphous polar bears to those to whom they had been moderately human a little while before; and more intolerable than ever to those to whom they had been intolerable enough when things were at their best. Then they retreat into their own spiritual den to hammer away at that leaden cup from which they drink the deadly acid that vitiates all their life and destroys all their happiness. They make the worst of things in every direction. If a cloud has come across the sky of others’ friendships, they do what they can to increase the trouble and to make that permanent which, by the nature of things and without their evil offices, would have been evanescent. They kill all the tender little sprouts of growing affection between two young people or two likely comrades; and what they cannot do by straightforward means, they do by crooked ones—which comes to the same thing in the end.

If any one is so ill advised as to take one of these Arachnides into his confidence, he is sure to smart for it. Has he complained of a common friend?—the grim confidant rasps the little abrasion till it becomes a gangrened sore, and never lets it alone till it has lost all power of healing. He does the same by the other—the one complained of—till what was a mere nothing in the beginning becomes a cancer which eats into the whole substance of their mutual love, and reduces it to something worse than death. At no time is one of these Arachnides a safe confidant; for so surely as the night follows on the day, so surely will your secret be divulged in one of these moments of pique and ill-temper for which the Spider-born are famous. Women of the Spider-born _gens_ are great in this kind of small treachery. Have you a false tooth?—a well-concealed twist of the poor weak spine?—a tress of hair that never grew on your own head?—a blemish on your shoulder beyond the line of the most _décolleté_ dress, and to the world therefore as though it were not?—and has Arachne found out, or been told in an impulse of misdirected confidence, one or all these things? It is only a question of time. In time the whole of society will know the fact; and that perfect bit of porcelain which the Generals and the Colonels, the Bishops and the Archdeacons, admired so much, will ring cracked for ever after. You might just as well have advertised your secret in the _Times_; and so you find out when too late.

Egotist to their finger-tips, the Arachnides make their own small annoyances the one great thought of their lives. They do not make much account of their blessings, only of their misfortunes; and nothing is so large as a microscopic speck on one of their most luscious fruits. The fate of empires and the fall of nations are not so important as the change of a servant or the ill arrangement of a dinner. The loss of a hundred men in a battle does not touch them so much as the loss of a row of cabbages in their garden; and a burnt duster out of a set is a more serious affair in their eyes than a passenger-ship wrecked on the Cornish coast or a merchant-steamer burnt to the water’s edge. On one thing only can they be made loquacious—on their own small sufferings. On these they will descant an hour by the clock, and more to come after. But speak to them of the heart-anguish of others, and they are unsympathetic, dumb, indifferent. Their fire burns for themselves alone; to all the world beyond they have only slag and ice to give.

As a physiognomical sign, the Arachnides do not often look you in the face. They glance rather than gaze with straight and level eyes; and they prefer the corners of their eyes to the centres.

How different it is with those others—those Melissides who drink their wine of life in deep draughts from golden cups; those singers of glad melodies; those lovers of their kind and rejoicers in the sunshine; those whose own jocund nature tints the whole outlook with roseate hues, eloquent of the fresh morning and the young day’s hope! Wherever they are, things go more easily. They do not suffer troubles to arise, but put their broad backs to the work when strength is required—handle the difficulty with their delicate fingers where tact is needed—and by the marvellous power of their genial tempers, smooth all ruffled feathers and still all angry seas. Seeing life as a mixed web, where rare silks are shot through with the coarse fibres of roughened hemp or common cotton, they prefer not to linger on the hemp nor to fret over the cotton. They think the good is as true as the bad; and where they cannot cure they do not contemplate. When two friends fall apart, they do their level best to bring them together again; and when the skin of the over-sensitive shows signs of abrasion and inflammation, they treat it with an anodyne, not an irritant. They are too frank to be untruthful; but they are too genial to be parsimonious of praise or pinched in the matter of verbal accuracy. If a little embroidery can hide the poverty of the original stuff, well, they do embroider; and they think it no sin to expound a text already given. Thus they make a grudging admission on the part of A. that B. is not quite such a ruffian after all as Mr A. imagined, do as much good work as a positive statement that B. is a very fine fellow indeed, and A. has no fault to find with him anyhow. By which they knit up that weak bit of the rope, and the two friends, who had strayed so far apart, are hauled up into line as before.

When these workers in gold are, what common parlance calls friends, with the workers in lead, the former have a hard time of it. They are always at the point where the Arachnides are backing and the Melissides are pulling—where the one are trying to break and the other doing their best to hold. The Arachnite takes offence at a word, a look, a gesture, a thing done or not done; and the Melissite will not have it. ‘Come, old fellow, what’s up now?’ he says in that round cheery voice of his which suggests honey and sunshine, or a strong west wind, or anything else you like both sweet and wholesome. Probably the Arachnite pinches his lips and says ‘Nothing;’ but ‘nothing’ does not answer the purpose, and an explanation is forced—if indeed that poor chilled soul can be forced into anything frank and human. If he cannot, then the other does his best to laugh away the cloud and to go on as before; but it all depends on the mood of the Spider-born whether this frankness will be an offence or a clearance—whether it will win the day or lose it for ever. Unlike the Arachnite, whose analogue is that liquid which, when it is struck or stirred ever so lightly, breaks at once into crystals, the Melissite is almost impossible to freeze. Even his anger has a touch of generous pity in it, in that a man should be such a fool or so wrong-headed; and where the one will not forgive the smallest mistake, the other will forget the gravest wrong and trust to better things in the future. Tender of heart, he nourishes all good impulses in himself, and recognises them with gladness in others; and essentially peace-loving, as the really strong ever are, he is slow to ‘wash his spears,’ and only when forced by self-respect, goes out to fight his foes. Generous as a master and genial as an administrator, he puts up with the worries and disappointments inevitable to his business, whatever it may be; not troubling the gods with his complaints because men are made of clay, and every now and then break in the handling and fly in the firing. On the contrary, he makes the best of things even when they are bad; and looks to the perfected work rather than to the abortive, which cannot now be mended. He believes in the doctrine of encouragement rather than in the theory of repression, and thinks when men know that they are trusted to do well, they do better than when they know that they are expected to do ill—with the handcuffs to follow. He has no great faith in gags and bearing-reins, whips and spurs, for any kind of team that he may have to manage. He trusts rather to the cheering voice and the guiding hand; and his choice of method is justified by its results. In all troublous times, the Melissite—he who looks at a man’s circumstances from that man’s own standpoint, and not from one external, unintelligent and unsympathetic—escapes the doom accorded to the Arachnides, and lives in peaceful security where these others are not safe, however well protected. If such as he did not form what Matthew Arnold calls the remnant, society would stand still like the clogged wheels of a watch, and men would perish in the moral desert as they perish in the material. The righteous men who save cities are they who do good to their brother-men as well as they who pray to God; and ‘he prayeth best who loveth best’ is a phrase we all know by head, and some of us by heart and head as well.

In hours of doubt and danger, the Arachnite despairs; but the Melissite buckles to for the work of decision and deliverances, hoping while a ray of light remains, or a plank whole out of the wreck. The one cannot spell success; the other will not learn to say defeat; the one does not hold on, the other cannot be beaten off. Hence we seldom find the working Arachnides successful in life; and the bread which they have to bake for themselves is apt to be both scant in quantity and sour in quality. The others, on the contrary, for the most part succeed. They have not only a larger volume of life to bear them on, but they have also the art of making friends, such as those poor starved prison-pinched souls do not know. They are thus backed by their own strength, and given a helping hand by the strength of others; where the Arachnides get no extraneous aid, and soon come to the end of their own power. Then they complain of their ill-luck, or speak of secret enemies who work in the dark against them; and, if women, they go into the sunless labyrinth of ‘nerves,’ by which they excuse their jealousy and ill-temper, their sourness and crossness. They say severely that no one knows what they suffer, save those who are in like manner afflicted, and that they alone can measure the pain they endure. Perhaps the good-tempered interlocutor thinks to himself: ‘A little honey mixed in with all thy vinegar, O Arachnite, would soften much of thy misery and reduce thy misfortunes to zero; and the milk of human kindness set to make cream is a better spiritual drink than the poison thou distillest and the vinegar which makes thee thin; and the poor thin whey, which is but serum with all the cream and cheese and butter taken out, is bad nourishment for men or babes.’

IN ALL SHADES.

CHAPTER XXXI.

Delgado had fixed ‘the great and terrible day’ for Wednesday evening. On Monday afternoon, Harry and Nora, accompanied by Mr Dupuy, went for a ride in the cool of dusk among the hills together. Trinidad that day was looking its very best. The tall and feathery bamboos that overhung the serpentine pathways stood out in exquisite clearness of outline, like Japanese designs, against the tender background of pearl-gray sky. The tree ferns rose lush and green among the bracken after yesterday’s brief and refreshing thunder-shower. The scarlet hibiscus trees beside the negro huts were in the full blush of their first flowering season. The poinsettias, not, as in England, mere stiff standard plants from florists’ cuttings, but rising proudly into graceful trees of free and rounded growth, with long drooping branches, spread all about their great rosettes of crimson leaflets to the gorgeous dying sunlight. The broad green foliage of the ribbed bananas in the negro gardens put to shame the flimsy tropical make-believes of Kew or Monte Carlo. For the first time, it seemed to Harry Noel he was riding through the true and beautiful tropics of poets and painters; and the reason was not difficult to guess, for Nora—Nora really seemed to be more kindly disposed to him. After all, she was not made of stone, and they had an interest in common which the rest of the house of Dupuy did not share with Nora—the interest in Edward and Marian Hawthorn. You can’t have a better introduction to any girl’s heart—though I daresay it may be very wicked indeed to acknowledge it—than a common attachment to somebody or something tabooed or opposed by the parental authorities.

Mr Dupuy rode first in the little single-file cavalcade, as became the senior; and Mr Dupuy’s cob had somehow a strange habit of keeping fifty yards ahead of the other horses, which gave its owner on this particular occasion no little trouble. Harry and Nora followed behind at a respectful distance; and Harry, who had bought a new horse of his own the day before, and who brought up the rear on his fresh mount, seemed curiously undesirous of putting his latest purchase through its paces, as one might naturally have expected him to do under the circumstances. On the contrary, he hung about behind most unconscionably, delaying Nora by every means in his power; and Mr Dupuy, looking back from his cob every now and again, grew almost weary of calling out a dozen times over: ‘Now then, Nora, you can canter up over this little bit of level, and catch me up, can’t you, surely?’

‘If it weren’t for the old gentleman,’ Harry thought to himself more than once, ‘I really think I should take this opportunity of speaking again to Nora’—he always called her ‘Nora’ in his own heart—a well-known symptom of the advanced stages of the disease—though she was of course ‘Miss Dupuy’ alone in conversation. ‘Or even if we were on a decent English road, now, where you can ride two abreast, and have a _tête-à-tête_ quite as comfortably as in an ordinary drawing-room! But it’s clearly impossible to propose to a girl when she’s riding a whole horse’s length in front of you on a one-horse pathway. You can’t shout out to her: “My beloved, I adore you,” at the top of your voice, as they do at the opera, especially with her own father—presumably devoted to the rival interest—hanging ahead within moderate earshot.’ So Harry was compelled to repress for the present his ardent declaration, and continue talking to Nora Dupuy about Edward and Marian, a subject which, as he acutely perceived, was more likely to bring them into sympathy with one another than any alternative theme he could possibly have hit upon.

Presently, they descended again upon the plain, and Mr Dupuy was just about to rejoin them in a narrow lane, almost wide enough for three abreast, and bordered by a prickly hedge of cactus and pinguin, when, to Nora’s great surprise, Tom Dupuy, on his celebrated chestnut mare Sambo Gal, came cantering up in the opposite direction, as if on purpose to catch and meet them. Tom wasn’t often to be found away from his canes at that time of day, and Nora had very little doubt indeed that he had caught a glimpse of Harry and herself from Pimento Valley, on the zigzag mountain path, without noticing her father on in front of them, and had ridden out with the express intention of breaking in upon their supposed _tête-à-tête_.

Mr Dupuy unconsciously prevented him from carrying out this natural design. Meeting his nephew first in the narrow pathway, he was just going to make him turn round and ride alongside with him, when Nora, seized with a sudden fancy, half whispered to Harry Noel: ‘I’m not going to ride with Tom Dupuy; I can’t endure him; I shall turn and ride back in the opposite direction.’

‘We must tell your father,’ Harry said, hesitating.

‘Of course,’ Nora answered decidedly.—‘Papa,’ she continued, raising her voice, ‘we’re going to ride back again and round by Delgado’s hut, you know—the mountain-cabbage palm-tree way is so much prettier, and I want to show it to Mr Noel. You and Tom Dupuy can turn and follow us.—The cob always goes ahead, you see, Mr Noel, if once he’s allowed to get in front of the other horses.’

They turned back once more in this reversed order, Nora and Harry Noel leading the way, and Mr Dupuy, abreast with Tom, following behind somewhat angrily, till they came to a point in the narrow lane where a gap in the hedge led into a patch of jungle on the right-hand side. An old negro had crept out of it just before them, carrying on his head, poised quite evenly, a big fagot of sticks for his outdoor fireplace. The old man kept the middle of the lane, just in front of them, and made not the slightest movement to right or left, as if he had no particular intention of allowing them to pass. Harry had just given his new horse a tap with the whip, and they were trotting along to get well in front of the two followers, so he didn’t greatly relish this untoward obstacle thrown so unexpectedly in his way. ‘Get out of the road, will you, you there!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Don’t you see a lady’s coming? Stand aside this minute, my good fellow, and let her pass, I tell you.’

Delgado turned around, almost as the horse’s nose was upon him, and looking the young man defiantly in the face, answered with an obvious sneer: ‘Who is you, sah, dat you speak to me like-a dat? Dis is de Queen high-road, for naygur an’ for buckra. You doan’t got no right at all to turn me off it.’

Harry recognised his man at once, and the hot temper of the Lincolnshire Noels boiled up within him. He hit out at the fellow with his riding-whip viciously. Delgado didn’t attempt to dodge the blow—a negro never does—but merely turned his head haughtily, so that the bundle of sticks pushed hard against the horse’s nose, and set it bleeding with the force of the sudden turn. Delgado knew it would: the sticks, in fact, were prickly acacia. The horse plunged and reared a little, and backed up in fright against the cactus hedge. The sharp cactus spines and the long aloe-like needles of the pinguin leaves in the hedgerow goaded his flank severely as he backed against them. He gave another plunge, and hit up wildly against Nora’s mount. Nora kept her seat bravely, but with some difficulty. Harry was furious. Forgetting himself entirely, he knocked the bundle of sticks off the old man’s head with a sudden swish of his thick riding-crop, and then proceeded to lay the whip twice or three times about Delgado’s ears with angry vehemence. To his great surprise, Delgado stood, erect and motionless, as if he didn’t even notice the blows. Appeased by what he took to be the man’s submissiveness, Harry dug his heel into his horse’s side and hurried forward to rejoin Nora, who had ridden ahead hastily to avoid the turmoil.

‘He’s an ill-conditioned, rude, bad-blooded fellow, that nigger there,’ he said apologetically to his pretty companion. ‘I know him before. He’s the very same man I told you of the other evening, that wouldn’t pick my whip up for me the first day I came to Trinidad. I’m glad he’s had a taste of it to-day for his continual impudence.’

‘He’ll have you up for assault, you may be sure, Mr Noel,’ Nora answered earnestly. ‘And if Mr Hawthorn tries the case, he’ll give it against you, for he’ll never allow any white man to strike a negro. That man’s name is Delgado; he’s an African, you know—an imported African—and a regular savage; and he had a fearful quarrel once with papa and Tom Dupuy about the wages, which papa has never forgiven. But Mr Hawthorn _does_ say’—and Nora dropped her voice a little—‘that he’s really had a great deal of provocation, and that Tom Dupuy behaved abominably, which of course is very probable, for what can you expect from Tom Dupuy, Mr Noel?—But still’—and this she said very loudly ‘all the negroes themselves will tell you that Louis Delgado’s a regular rattlesnake, and you must put your foot firmly down upon him if you want to crush him.’

‘If you put your foot on rattlesnake,’ Louis Delgado cried aloud from behind, in angry accents, ‘you crush rattlesnake; but rattlesnake sting you, so you die.’ And then he muttered to himself in lower tones: ‘An’ de rattlesnake has got sting in him tail dat will hurt dat mulatto man from Englan’, still, dat tink himself proper buckra.’

Tom Dupuy and his uncle had just reached the spot when Louis Delgado said angrily to himself, in negro soliloquy, this offensive sentence. Tom reined in and looked smilingly at his uncle as Delgado said it. ‘So you know something, too, about this confounded Englishman, you wretched nigger you!’ he said condescendingly. ‘You’ve found out that our friend Noel’s a woolly-headed mulatto, have you, Delgado?’

Louis Delgado’s eyes sparkled with gratified malevolence as he answered with a cunning smile: ‘Aha, Mistah Tom Dupuy, you glad to hear dat, sah! You want to get some information from de poor naygur dis ebenin’, do you! No, no, sah; de Dupuys an’ me, we is not fren’; we is at variance one wit de odder. I doan’t gwine to tell you nuffin’ at all, sah, about de buckra from Englan’. But when mule kick too much, I say to him often: “Ha, ha, me fren’, you is too proud. You tink you is horse. I s’pose you doan’t rightly remember dat your own fader wasn’t nuffin’ but a common jackass!”’

He loved to play with both his intended victims at once, as a cat plays with a captured mouse before she kills it. Keep him in suspense as long as you can—that’s the point of the game. Dandle him, and torture him, and hold him off; but never tell him the truth outright, for good or for evil, as long as you can possibly help it.

‘Do you really know anything,’ Tom Dupuy asked eagerly, ‘or are you only guessing, like all the rest of us? Do you mean to tell me you’ve got any proof that the fellow’s a nigger?—Come, come, Delgado, we may have quarrelled, but you needn’t be nasty about it. I’ve got a grudge against this man Noel, and I don’t mind paying you liberally for anything you can tell me against him.’

But Delgado shook his head doggedly. ‘I doan’t want your money, sah,’ he answered with a slow drawl; ‘I want more dan your money, if I want anyting. But I doan’t gwine to help you agin me own colour. Buckra for buckra, an’ colour for colour! If you want to find out about him, why doan’t you write to de buckra gentlemen over in Barbadoes?’

He kept the pair of white men there, dawdling and parleying, for twenty minutes nearly, while Harry and Nora went riding away alone towards the mountain cabbage-palms. It pleased Delgado thus to be able to hold the two together on the tenter-hooks of suspense—to exercise his power before the two buckras. At last, Tom Dupuy condescended to direct entreaty. ‘Delgado,’ he said with much magnanimity, ‘you know I don’t often ask a favour of a nigger—it ain’t the way with us Dupuys; it don’t run in the family—but still, I ask you as a personal favour to tell me whatever you know about this matter: I have reasons of my own which make me ask you as a personal favour.’

Delgado’s eyes glistened horribly. ‘Buckra,’ he answered with a hideous grin, dropping all the usual polite formulas, ‘I will tell you for true den; I will tell you all about it. Dat man Noel is son ob brown gal from ole Barbadoes. Her name is Budleigh, an’ her fam’ly is brown folks dat lib at place dem call de Wilderness. I hear all about dem from Isaac Pourtalès. Pourtalès an’ dis man Noel, dem is bot’ cousin. De man is brown just same like Isaac Pourtalès!’

‘By George, Uncle Theodore!’ Tom Dupuy cried exultantly, ‘Delgado’s right—right to the letter. Pourtalès is a Barbadoes man: his father was one of the Pourtalèses of this island who settled in Barbadoes, and his mother must have been one of these brown Budleighs. Noel told us himself the other day his mother was a Budleigh—a Budleigh of the Wilderness. He’s been over in Barbadoes looking after their property.—By Jove, Delgado, I’d rather have a piece of news like that than a hundred pounds!—We shall stick a pin, after all, Uncle Theodore, in that confounded, stuck-up, fal-lal mulatto-man.’

‘It’s too late to follow them up by the mountain-cabbages,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy exclaimed with an anxious sigh—how did he know but that at that very moment this undoubted brown man might be proposing (hang his impudence) to his daughter Nora?—‘it’s too late to follow them, if we mean to dress for dinner. We must go home straight by the road, and even then we won’t overtake them before they’re back at Orange Grove, I’m afraid, Tom.’

Delgado stood in the middle of the lane and watched them retreating at an easy canter; then he solemnly replaced the bundle of sticks on the top of his head, spread out his hands and fingers in the most expressively derisive African attitudes, and began to dance with wild glee a sort of imaginary triumphal war-dance over his intended slaughter. ‘Ha, ha,’ he cried aloud, ‘Wednesday ebenin’—Wednesday ebenin’! De great and terrible day ob de Lard comin’ for true on Wednesday ebenin’! Slay, slay, slay, an’ leave not one libbin’ soul behind in de land ob de Amalekites. Dat is de first an’ de last good turn I ebber gwine to do for Tom Dupuy, for certain. I doan’t want his money, I tell him, but I want de blood ob him. On Wednesday night, I gwine to get it. Ha, ha! We gwine to slay de remnant ob de Amalekites.’ He paused a moment, and poised the bundle more evenly on his head; then he went on, walking homewards more quietly, but talking to himself aloud, in a clear, angry, guttural voice, as negroes will do, under the influence of powerful excitement. ‘What for I doan’t tell dat man Noel himself dat he is mulatto when him hit me?’ he asked himself with rhetorical earnestness. ‘Becase I doan’t want to go an’ spoil de fun ob de whole discovery. If _I_ tell him, dat doan’t nuffin’—even before de missy. Tom Dupuy is proper buckra: he hate Noel, an’ Noel hate him! He gwine to tell it so it sting Noel. He gwine to disgrace dat proud man before de buckras an’ before de missy!’

He paused again, and chewed violently for a minute or two at a piece of cane he pulled out of his pocket; then he spat out the dry refuse with a fierce explosion of laughter, and went on again: ‘But I doan’t gwine to punish Noel like I gwine to punish de Dupuys an’ de missy. Noel is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn, de fren’ ob de naygur: dat gwine to be imputed to him for righteousness. In de great and terrible day, de angel gwine to pass ober Noel, same as him pass ober de house ob Israel; but de house ob de Dupuy shall perish utterly, like de house ob Pharaoh, an’ like de house ob Saul, king ob Israel, whose seed was destroyed out ob de land, so dat not one ob dem left.’

THE MODERN PRIZE SYSTEM.

It may be accepted as a principle that the education question admits of no final settlement in a state of progressive civilisation. Methods and forms, possibly the outcome of much thought and effort, established in one age, become cumbrous or altogether valueless in the next. They are found unsuited to the requirements of the later period, during which a demand has arisen for other kinds of knowledge, or for more advanced teaching in subjects previously treated in an elementary manner only. Hence it follows that the minds of enlightened nations become directed to educational matters with a certain degree of periodicity: from time to time the education question becomes a burning one.

The most superficial reader of the daily papers or magazines cannot fail to have been struck latterly by the increasing attention bestowed on such matters by the people of these countries. So decided an influence is exerted by these considerations on the public just now, that we find them furnishing a test in some districts for parliamentary or other representatives. At social and literary gatherings, such questions as the following are warmly discussed: Should the State provide and maintain schools for the people, or should these be largely left to individual enterprise, as at present?—Should State interference take the form it has done in recent educational experiments, wherein two universities and one gigantic scheme of intermediate education have been framed on the lines of mere examining boards, disbursing public prize-money?—What is the relative value of the kinds of instruction ordinarily given in schools?—How may the desire for information be aroused among the masses, and in what way may the stimulus be best applied?

These and other questions of a kindred nature occupy the thoughts of many at this time. It is not our present purpose to deal with the whole question of education, but to consider very briefly one aspect of it—namely, prizes and their distribution.

If we inquire what inducements are offered to pupils to excel in special subjects or to proceed to higher branches of them, we find that the same general plan is followed in all our institutions, from the most elementary to the highest—namely, money prizes or their equivalent in books or medals, the obtaining of which presupposes a competitive examination. In most instances, the prize-money is paid in cash to the successful candidate. The age in which we live is eminently competitive, a fact early recognised by children at school, and still better understood in after-life. In comparing ourselves with our neighbours, may it not be a fact that we are an over-examined people? We may further ask, are examinations always fair tests of ability? Is the reward system, as we have it, the best means of promoting a higher culture?

Those who have had any experience at all of examinations must have been over and over again surprised at the order in which candidates known to them are placed on the Honour list. There is a certain element of chance about examinations rapidly conducted that cannot be eliminated, and which may lead to the disappointment of the most confident hopes. A diligent student, who has perhaps overtaxed himself physically in preparation for, or who is over-anxious about the examination, fails utterly, or is surpassed by some one of very superficial attainments. It seems to us that the verdict of a teacher, or, to prevent favouritism, of several teachers, as to the relative merits of the pupils long under their training and observation, has some advantages over the examination method at present in vogue, success in which is as often attained by an unhealthy effort of ‘cramming,’ as by patient and honest study. Doubtless, examinations for some purposes cannot be entirely dispensed with, but must remain as necessary evils. Still, their frequency could be reduced considerably with decided benefit to the physical, and possibly also to the intellectual, condition of the rising generation.

The second part of our question remains to be considered: Is the present reward system the best means of promoting higher culture? Let us suppose a case. There is a class of twenty pupils engaged upon a subject for which a valuable prize is offered. Possibly seventeen of these, from their former experience of their class-fellows, conclude that the prize lies between the remaining three, and that there is no use trying for it. The prize and perhaps the subject also have no longer any interest for them; they cease to study, or at all events do little. The three amongst whom the prize lies are the most diligent, who probably like the subject, or learning generally for its own sake, or who, from vanity or ambition, are anxious to excel. These are they to whom the stimulus is applied; but they are the very pupils that need no further stimulus. The spur is virtually withheld from those requiring it, and applied to those who need it not.

If it be conceded that the need of reform is indicated in such cases, we must avoid rushing to the opposite extreme in trying to effect it. No one will suggest that the method of reward as applied to donkey-races would meet the case. With our present light, we are not prepared to recommend a thorough-going remedy. Much may, however, be done for the cause of true culture by modifying the distribution of prizes. The current notion of a prize is, that it is a reward for something well done, due as soon as the meritorious act is accomplished. Etymologically considered, the word conveys nothing more than that. A higher estimate of the function of a prize might advantageously be substituted for the one implied in the above definition. If it were regarded as not merely a reward for something past and done, but also as a stimulus to further effort in the same direction, more lasting good might be effected, and a modification of the present system of distribution would become a necessity. For example: a large money prize obtained in a junior school, instead of being paid directly to the successful candidate, might be divided into two unequal sums, the smaller to provide a medal or book, &c., as a tangible evidence of distinction; the larger, to be applied as fees at a neighbouring high-school or college where the favourite subjects could be studied for a longer period free of cost to the pupil. The payment of the larger instalment could be made contingent upon the successful candidate desiring to prosecute his studies further. In the event of the pupil electing to abandon study in favour of trade or business, or from mere disinclination, the medal, book, &c., showing the position attained, might alone be presented, and the balance of the prize-money be forfeited.

Among other benefits resulting from this scheme we might instance—that cramming would be diminished to an appreciable extent. A common practice nowadays with many who enter for prize examinations is to hurriedly prepare a large number of subjects, selected more with reference to their maximum of marks than to the tastes of the pupil, then to obtain the coveted prize, and subsequently to forget the mass of undigested information with which their memories have been surfeited, possibly never to return without disgust to the consideration of them.

We fancy such a modification as sketched above would influence favourably those who select a subject for its own sake and are desirous of knowing it perfectly. If successful in the elementary schools, the means are gained for following it up in a more advanced one till it is finally mastered, the information having been gradually imparted and more perfectly assimilated. On the other hand, the scheme would rather repel those alluded to before, who study hurriedly particular branches solely for the sake of the money to be gained, only so long as this is at once paid to them in the form of cash.

The plan recommended appears to be inconsistent with separate or private educational enterprises, many of which depend for their maintenance and efficiency on large fees. The want of uniformity in constitution and management of elementary schools, and the want of harmonious action resulting from the rivalry between them, scarcely offer the proper conditions for the full development of the plan. In a few large towns, where the relations between schools have rendered its introduction possible, it has been eminently successful. Pupils of marked intellectual power, belonging to the less opulent classes, have been induced by the operation of this system to proceed from primary to intermediate schools, and ultimately to the attainment of the highest distinctions at the English universities; following specially at each advancement the subjects of their choice.

Undoubtedly, a complete State-controlled educational scheme embracing all grades would render possible the general adoption of this method of applying large money prizes. In offering this suggestion as a plea in favour of State education we must bear in mind that the State system depends for its favourable reception on considerations of much greater moment, which cannot in our present limits be discussed.

TREASURE TROVE.

A STORY IN FOUR CHAPTERS.—CHAP. III.

After a sleepless night of suspense and dread, Bertha, who was always up first in the little household, lingered in her room until long after her usual time, not daring to descend, for fear of meeting Jasper Rodley, and only did so at the personal summons of her father, who assured her that their visitor had gone.

Contrary to his usual habit, the captain was silent during breakfast; and the girl’s heart, which had been brightened partly by the departure of Jasper Rodley, and partly by the thought that it was Wednesday, interpreted the silence of her father as ominous. After breakfast, she began to prepare as usual for her weekly visit to Saint Quinians’ market.

‘Bertha,’ said her father, who had lighted his pipe and was stumping up and down the room, ‘don’t hurry to-day. An hour or so cannot make much difference. I want to speak to you.’

Pale and trembling, the girl took her seat at the open window, through which streamed the early sunshine.

‘Jasper Rodley was talking to me for a long time last night,’ continued the old man. ‘I think he is a nice young fellow, and I am sure you have made an impression on him.’

Another person better versed in the art of approaching a delicate subject would have chosen a more circuitous mode of procedure; but the simple, blunt, old sailor knew very little about conversational wile and artifice, and could only go straight to the point.

Bertha did not answer, but sat motionless, with her eyes fixed on the shining rocks and the tumbling sea beyond.

So her father continued: ‘And I don’t think you could do better, in case he should make any proposal to you about—about marriage, than accept him. In fact, it is my wish that you should do so.’

Bertha remained silent for some moments; then she moved from her seat, placed herself on the stool by her father’s side, took his hand in hers, and said: ‘Father, my dearest wish is to please you and to do all that you wish. I have but one other friend in the world besides you, and no other relation. You have been the best of fathers to me, and I have tried to be a good daughter to you; but I cannot, oh, I cannot obey you in this!’

‘But, my lass,’ continued the old man, who was evidently moved by the earnest manner in which the girl spoke, ‘Jasper Rodley is a man of a thousand—good-looking, of respectable birth, and doing well. He would make you happy, and another important thing—he would not take you from me.’

‘Oh, it is not that, father—no, no!’ exclaimed the girl.

‘But you must have some reason for not liking him?’

‘Yes; I have the best of reasons, father. In the first place, you know very little about him, or you could not speak so highly of him as you do. He is a man of doubtful character, as you may find out by asking any one in Saint Quinians. In the second place, I—I don’t love him, and could never get to love him, or even like him. And in the third place’——

‘Well, lass, well?’

‘In the third place, I am betrothed to another.’

‘Betrothed to another!’ exclaimed her father in amazement. ‘Why, that is impossible! You never see any one; no one ever comes here; and I cannot believe that all this time you have been deceiving me by carrying on a secret acquaintance, when you have so often protested that you live for me, and me only.’

‘I have never dared tell you, father,’ cried the girl. ‘But it is a weight off my mind, now that you know. And, father, remember that I am not a child, and that, fond as I am of you and the old home, I could not go through life without some love of another kind than that I feel for you.’

Bertha had never spoken to her father in this style before, and the old man looked at her with mingled astonishment and reproach. Then he said: ‘Bertha, I have particular reasons for wishing you to marry Jasper Rodley: I am in his power.’

The girl recalled what Rodley had said to her on the previous Wednesday, and knew now that there was a mystery in which her father and Rodley were involved, a mystery which instinctively filled her with dread that, during all these years of peace and quiet, something had been enacted between them which had been carefully kept from her, and that the interview of the previous evening was but the climax of a long-gathering storm. Many little changes in her father’s manner and habits during the past four years had mystified her; now they were partially accounted for, and yet, to her recollection, she had never seen Jasper Rodley before the present month.

‘In his power, father!’ she exclaimed. ‘How can you be in his power?’

‘That I cannot even tell you, my loved one.’

‘If you went out into the world, and had business dealings with other men, I could perhaps understand that you, being so simple and good-minded, might be drawn into the power of bad men, father,’ cried Bertha. ‘But you see none but me; you get no letters; you never go even into Saint Quinians, and yet you are in the power of a stranger!’

The old man shook his head, and continued: ‘It is kind of you, Bertha, to say that I am good-minded; but I am a rogue.’

‘_You_ a rogue—my own, good, dear father!’ exclaimed the girl. ‘No, no! Were a hundred Rodleys to swear on their knees that you were a rogue, I would tell them they lied!’

‘Yet, it is true, lass,’ said the old man sadly; ‘and it is to save me from the consequences of being a rogue, that I ask you to accept Jasper Rodley’s offer of marriage. You have a week in which to decide.’

‘A week! Seven short days!’ cried his daughter, springing from her seat. ‘But there is time. I must go, father, now; don’t keep me, for every minute is of value.’

The old man would have said something; but she hurried from the room, and in a few minutes had started.

Never before had the four miles between home and Saint Quinians seemed so long to Bertha; never before had she trod the familiar road unmindful of the beauties of nature around her, and on this April morning nature was very beautiful; but she had no eyes for the majestic green waves splintering into clouds of spray on the shining rocks, for the white-winged birds riding on the swell, for the sweet-scented herbage, or the blue sky glimmering between the dark branches of the pines. Simply she gazed on the gray-walled, red-roofed old town ahead of her, at the entrance of which some one would be waiting to greet her with open arms and glad smile. And her heart felt a little sinking as she gained the sandy eminence whence she generally got a first sight of his figure coming to meet her, and saw no one! She was later than usual, certainly; but he would have waited for her, she felt assured. He was not under the archway, nor coming up the street from the market-place; nor, when she arrived at the market-place, could she descry him anywhere.

‘Ah, Miss Bertha!’ said one of her market-friends. ‘And how’s the poor young gentleman gettin’ on?’

‘The poor young gentleman!’ repeated Bertha. ‘Why, Mrs Hardingson, who do you mean?’

‘Why, who should I mean but Mr Symonds! Sure-ly you’ve heard of his a-bein’ picked out of the South Fossy, half-dead and’——

Bertha almost dropped her baskets, and her blood ran cold within her; then, without waiting to hear further details, she hurried away to the office in which Harry was. The head partner received her with the utmost urbanity, and corroborated what the market-woman had said, stating, that when Harry did not appear at the office at the usual hour, a messenger was sent to his lodgings, who returned with the answer that nothing was known about him. Later in the day he was found lying insensible in the Old Town Ditch. The gentleman added, that although Harry had had a narrow escape, he was out of danger.

From the office, Bertha went to her lover’s lodgings. The servant told her that Harry was in bed, very weak and excitable, but that the doctor spoke hopefully.

She sent him up a long written message, reproaching him with having kept the facts from her, and bidding him lose no precautions for getting better, as she had urgent need of him, but avoiding all direct allusion to what had taken place at home. A painfully scrawled answer came back to her to the effect that the doctor had assured him that within a week he ought to be able to get out, and sending her all sorts of loving messages.

Brief as all this is to tell, Bertha found that she had spent nearly two hours since her arrival in the town in finding out about Harry, so that, when she turned again into the market-place to begin her purchases, it was the usual hour when she was due at home; and by the time she had finished, the church bells were chiming three o’clock. As she turned out of the arch on to the homeward road, she felt bewildered and upset by the events of the past few hours as she had never felt before, and the central figure in the midst of her mental confusion was that of Jasper Rodley. Instinctively, she associated him with what had happened to Harry. All the circumstances pointed to him as being the author of the harm—the anger in which the two young men had parted, Harry’s avowed intention of getting an explanation from Rodley, and the discovery of the former in the Town Ditch a few hours later. To such an extent were her feelings worked up, that she dreaded arriving at home, for fear that Jasper Rodley should be there to meet her and to push his suit; and so, resolving to linger as long as possible, she turned from the direct road over the sandhills, and struck into a more devious path, which led amongst the rocks on the edge of the sea.

So busy was she communing with herself that she did not observe the tide, which she imagined was receding, to be rising fast, and had proceeded for two miles before she noticed that she was cut off from the sandhills by a broad, deep, rapidly increasing sheet of troubled water. For a moment she hesitated, yet not from fear, for familiarity since early childhood with rocks and tides had saved her more than once from a similar predicament, and had made her an expert in rock-scrambling; but from the fact that her absence of mind had caused her to miss the right path. However, she quickly decided; and in spite of being heavily handicapped by the burden of two baskets, struck straight up a ledge of fantastic rock which, she seemed to remember, communicated even at high tide with the shore. But, to her horror and dismay, when she arrived at the summit, she beheld a fast running, angry current separating her from the sand, upon which, not a quarter of a mile away, stood her father’s house. There was nothing to be done but to make for the rocks which towered above her on her right hand, and which she could see were never touched by the waves. Once up there, and she was safe; but the getting there was a problem even for her with her youthful strength and activity. As the rising water was already lapping at her heels and would advance to a level some inches above her head, there was no time for delay. Before starting, she shouted, in order to attract the attention of some one in the house; but the wind was blowing in her teeth, and she knew that she would need all her breath for the climb before her.

It was a quarter of an hour’s race with the tide. At each one of Bertha’s upward steps, the green water seemed to make a step. More than once she slipped back, and was over her ankles in water; but at length she reached her haven, and sank down on a table of dry rock, utterly exhausted, her hands torn and bleeding, her dress in tatters and drenched with water, safe from a fearful death, but face to face with the prospect of having to pass long dark hours in a wild desolate spot, and at the risk of being discovered by some of the lawless characters who made the rocks their homes, their castles, and their storehouses.