Chapter V: A Last Appeal

‘THINK twice over what you are going to do,’ urged Fan, for the last time. ‘I tell you that you look back on the past softened by distance, and I suppose surrounded by a sort of halo of youthful associations and kindly recollections. I have never been removed from Friarton Mill for such a length of time as to forget all its ills and only remember its advantages. How will you like to hang on in the mill and, worse, in the bakehouse and shop—to be bearded by your own men, who will be the first to recognise that you have not been bred to their trade and to make good use of your ignorance—to be worsted by trades’ unions—for I conclude bakers will go out “on strike,” if they have not yet done so—like other work people? How will you stand being patronised by the farmers and corn-dealers, and having to submit to the whims and insolence of your customers?’

‘Upon my word, I do not see why I should stand either, if I do my duty. And I would rather hang on in a mill or a bake-shop than in city chambers draped round with cobwebs and filled with empty tin boxes bearing lying titles, or in a vestry hall where I had no business to be, or in a barrack yard where I should never learn the goose step, or in stables or kennels.’

‘It is my duty to speak,’ said Fan, solemnly, developing a fine talent for lecturing; ‘since you have been so long away, you have forgotten or you do not rightly understand a great deal that will happen if you persist in your folly. All the better class of people in Friarton—the Fremantles and Wrights and that set, who took us up because they expected you to become one of themselves and to do them credit—will drop us again; and who can blame them? when they discover that you have no ambition—that you have a taste for low company—so it will seem to them. We shall of course fall back among the Polleys and the Dadds and the rest of the tradespeople like ourselves,’ said Fan, bitterly. ‘We choose their ranks deliberately as ours, and how can we expect that the members of another rank will continue to stoop to us, or consent, for our sake, to anything so disagreeable as being habitually mixed up with people far beneath them in birth and breeding? Are you not able to recall how dreadful a tea at the Dadds, or a supper at the Polleys, used to be? How, when you were a boy and knew little else, you hated it and shirked it, when father would let you?’

Oliver winced a little, but recovered himself gallantly. ‘I was an intolerable young fool—giving myself airs, as old Dadd once told me to my face. He is a shrewd intelligent old fellow in his linendrapery line. One may easily listen to the experience of a far inferior man.’

‘Have you grown fonder of his coarse familiar jokes and the all-pervading smell of his gin-and-water?’ asked Fan, with scornful incredulity. ‘If so, perhaps you can also better appreciate young Dadd’s jewellery and Mrs. Dadd’s mock “umbleness,” like Uriah Heep’s, to hide her slyness and spitefulness. And you may have come to value, at their proper worth, the Polley girls’ giggles and shams, and their mother’s loud self-assertion and sheer impertinence. No doubt you admire their combined illiterateness and absorption in the pettiest gossip, their poor aping of the faults, or else their rude defiance of the merits, of their social superiors. Don’t you know that the Dadd and Polley idea of a life worth leading, is to make money in order to eat, drink, and lie in bed, to keep sporting dogs, attend low races and offer and accept bets, to have parties, “beaux,” and flirtations to the girls’ hearts’ content? Are greediness, laziness, bumptiousness and folly—gaudy, tawdry pretence, and coarse gorgeousness, such admirable qualities in men and women and their surroundings? I declare the Dadds and Polleys are the most irreverent undutiful people I know. Oh! Oliver, it is too horrible that the end of your cleverness and college training should be to condemn yourself, and me with you, to close contact and hopeless association with such people—when we have no relief to expect save from our own deterioration. We shall deteriorate and grow like our neighbours speedily, I daresay, and then we may not feel that we were ever fit for something better. But how we—one of us, at least—must suffer in the process of deterioration before it is complete!’

Fan was perfectly sincere, however absurd, in her horror and distress. She had a natural abhorrence of the vulgar, gross self-indulgence which she had described, and an intense yearning for its opposite, the true refinement of simplicity, self-restraint, and self-devotion, with its outward expression in the subtle charm of pure and graceful harmony. There was this to be said for Fan’s ambition, that it was not composed of coarse materials. It was neither sensual nor sordid. Fan would have been very tolerably content to be a poor lady among ladies and gentlemen. She would have made the very best of her gentle poverty, because she fully comprehended the self-respect involved in self-denial, the essential honour included in showing regard for the rights and claims of her neighbours, and in energy, diligence, and usefulness fitly exercised. Fan had the making of a real lady—rich or poor—in her. And if she were not speaking under a delusion, it was a pity that her vocation should be spoilt.

But Oliver dealt her a stern rebuke.

‘This is too bad,’ he said, indignantly, taking the pipe from his mouth. ‘There is only one grain of truth in your tirade against the class in which you were born—its members are guilty of aping the faults of a higher class. As you have yourself said so, you cannot be ignorant that greed, and its opposite—senseless extravagance, laziness, levity, and worse, are safe to be found—just masked by a thin veneer of polish—in still greater abundance among dukes and duchesses—or say at once kings and queens, than among tradespeople. And you have said nothing of the peculiar virtues of tradespeople. You spoke of Mrs. Polley’s self-assertion. I grant it is offensive—but surely you have been told what that woman has done for her family. When her husband proved an incapable ne’er-do-well, who if left to himself would have gone straight to the dogs, and reduced his children to the workhouse, did not his “missus” come to the front and stand by her master like a brick and a Trojan? She kept him from both his and her undoing. She maintained Polley’s grocery business by her industry, and made it flourish by her mother-wit, till now her husband is no worse than a tolerably respectable nonentity, and her children have been reared in independence and comfort. No blame will rest on her if they are not able to hold their own in the world. I have often heard, and so have you, my father and old Floyd praise that woman for her works. As for Mrs. Dadd, I don’t say that her meekness is the real thing, but she is not without true motherliness and kindness of heart. Have you forgotten how she left her own child and came out and stayed here to nurse you through scarlatina because she doubted Sally Pope’s experience and ability to cope with the disease? For shame! Fan, a short memory is unpardonable here.’

‘I have not forgotten,’ said Fan, pettishly; ‘if I had, I should not have kept up the amount of intercourse with the Dadds I have consented to keep.’

‘No doubt it is a great reward for her trouble and risk that you should call for her—behaving civilly in the performance of your duty, I take it for granted—once in three months,’ said Oliver, still in a fume. ‘I am not of your opinion. But though I have not the same faith in the light of my countenance, and the edification implied in the bestowal of my company for a spare half-hour, still I have my own views on the subject. But upon my honour, Fan, I hesitate at this moment under a sense of my unworthiness, and a conception of these respectable people’s positive virtues, to presume to weigh their comparative defects and measure them against any supposed superiority of intellect and training on my part. Are brains and culture—of which one hears so much from pedants and puppies—to be named in the same breath with honest men and women’s fidelity to their sense of right? But if the questionable superiority has an existence, am I not called upon by every dictate of true public spirit and good feeling to show that superiority by striving to do what I have already spoken of—raise the tone of my class, and lead it to higher aims and purer pleasures? Is not that a nobler ambition than to content myself with rising above my class—abandoning it to grovel in materialism, if not to wallow in the mire? Do you know that Kingsley said teachers and preachers to the rich and the poor were not wanting, but where was he who would go on a mission to the lower middle and small trading classes, and reclaim them from their special form of animalism and licence, “their irreverence and undutifulness,” as you put it. Do you believe the Bible, Fan, or do you hold that such injunctions as to preserve old landmarks and not to forget our own and our father’s friends, are out-of-date precepts—simply fit for Orientals?’

‘You are clever, Oliver,’ said Fan, coldly. ‘I cannot pretend to vie with you in quotations misapplied.’

‘As the devil is great in texts—no, you don’t mean that,’ said Oliver, trying to conjure back a friendly spirit into the dispute. He had smoked his pipe and was knocking out its ashes. There was silence for a time, and then he pointed out that the moon had risen unobserved while they were speaking. It was flooding the landscape with a light which, though it comes so often, never gives a familiar impression, but always produces an effect wholly removed from that of ordinary light, causing both heaven and earth to be changed for us, and to come out, in their every aspect, a more solemn and grander sky, a sadder and fairer world, than those we see by the beams of the sun.

Under the rays of the moon, the midsummer green of the Copley Grange trees had grown dusky. They were massed together and cast deep shadows over the turf, while the waters of the Brook flashed here and there like silver by contrast. In the sky overhead the Pleiades were asking who should bind their sweet influence? Orion the mighty hunter was abroad. The Pole-star was glittering with his special effulgence.

‘How small those lamps up yonder, whose oil has never failed since the creation, make a poor beggar and skirmisher of a day feel!’ said Oliver, suddenly. ‘One would not say, either, that they disdain the humanity they have given light to throughout the centuries. I am not sure whether Friarton Mill is not jollier by moonlight than by daylight. If all you said were true, Fan, what a compensation the beauty of this place might still prove! I defy you to say that in one respect, and that of all save the first importance, the lines have not fallen to us in pleasant places.’

But she would not be appeased. Nature was not to her at any time what it was to him; at this moment the perfection of the scene before her, hurt her afresh, like a taunt added to a blow. ‘You will make me hate this place,’ she cried reproachfully; ‘you will make me wish I had never seen this house which was father’s house, where I have lived the most of my life.’

He was sorry for her pain, but he was also disappointed and wounded at her utter want of sympathy with him. ‘You have one resource left you,’ he said, with some hardness, which had not been there before, stealing into his tone. ‘You can go away and leave me and the mill. My father made sufficient provision for you, to enable you to act as you like, and I will do all in my power——’

She interrupted him, turning upon him with a passionate protest. ‘Do you think I could do it? Do you think I would leave you alone to bear the penalty, though it may be of your own incurring? What do you take me for? You do not know me, Oliver.’

‘That may very well be, since I do not believe your know yourself,’ said Oliver, with a shrug. ‘But I am obliged to you, all the same, for your magnanimity.’ He was really touched by her womanly love and constancy, though he had been too much provoked to show it.

‘There is one question I am entitled to ask you,’ said Fan, more calmly. ‘You admit you did not always mean to sink into a tradesman. I know you had very different ideas when you went first to Oxford. What changed you?’

He hesitated and did not speak for a moment. He did not deny her right to put the question, but he did not know how to answer it. In many things which related to his words and acts, he was by disposition a frank and open-hearted man, but in proportion to his general frankness were his particular reserves. He had sacred secrets which had to do with convictions, feelings, and principles. He could no more turn his nature inside out to his dearest friend where these were concerned than he could consciously practise self-deception and social hypocrisy. He was even shy with himself in dealing with the deep things of his spirit. Still he owed some explanation to Fan, who had been the happy confidant of the early dreams which had passed away like the morning mist, and who now stood there in such estrangement from him.

‘Oh! all sorts of arguments came in and did their work,’ he said at last, a little vaguely. ‘Some familiarity with learning bred the usual contempt, I dare say. I was only her valet, and so she ceased to be a heroine to me. I have grown a good deal older and wiser—let us hope to begin with—and—well there was one affair which made a considerable impression upon me at the time that I can speak of to you. There are plenty of tradesmen’s sons who find their way to Oxford, but there was just one other baker’s son who got there with me. He or his friends for him made a grand mistake in somehow procuring his admission, under false colours possibly, into a notably aristocratic college. I don’t suppose his people had any very honourable aim in sending him to college at all, at least he himself was a vain, weak fellow who thought chiefly of acquiring associates—whom he called friends, in a rank of life far above his own. I have no doubt he intended to cut the baking trade entirely when he left Oxford, and that he hoped by means of his fellow-Oxonians to hoist himself into polite society. For that end he was willing to make himself generally obliging and useful, poor beggar, to his temporary companions. He would help and back them in their money transactions, cater for their entertainment, and bear more than his share of the brunt of their scrapes.

‘That was to be the great business of his college life—with the securing of a high connection for its end—not a very heroic end, eh, Fan? But, to do him justice, he had no more natural turn for study in any shape—classics, history, philosophy, or philology, than nineteen out of twenty of his chosen patrons had developed in their more favourable circumstances, or than had been shown by the whole of his father’s journeymen bakers with their adverse surroundings. But, there was not any more harm in him than being the wrong man in the wrong place, which is not a very uncommon or heinous transgression, though being that, he was a mean little flunkey. But the fault was not altogether his, and he was good-natured and soft-hearted; though he was idle, I never heard he was vicious. They said afterwards that he was liked in his native town, and had been a good son and brother.

‘The fact of his father’s disgraceful trade had been kept in strict concealment, and did not come out for some time. But when it did, the enormity of the offence—though one would say that most people are personally indebted to bakers who mind their business—together with the low deceit of the concealment, proved far too much for any poor popularity Tom Neaves had attained. The fellows he was amongst could not get over the “rank impudence” of his intrusion into their college, yet I should not wonder though they imagined they admired Thackeray—“Less of a cad, you know, than Dickens”—and knew something about George Osborne and “Figs.” They judged Neaves deserved to be punished, and they sat upon him to give him his deserts, and above all to get rid of him, as the officers of a crack regiment sometimes agree to compel a wretched subaltern who is not of their set, and so is not fit for their mess, to exchange or sell out. Of course in both cases the affair is so managed as not to attract the attention or force the interference either of a superior officer or a dean, and only what are considered legitimate weapons are used against the common enemy. Mind, Fan, I do not pretend that Neaves was without blame; and I am perfectly aware that the young fellows who led the attack against him, in their very contempt, did it more in thoughtlessness than in malice. A few of them dropped his acquaintance summarily, as they were perfectly at liberty to do. But the greater number settled to make him their butt till he should endure it no longer. They assailed him with a perpetual storm of allusions to his origin and practical jokes on his father’s trade. They inquired gravely his opinion on dinner rolls. They smuggled loaves into his gown. They showered as much flour upon him from the windows of their rooms when he crossed the quad as ever was scattered from a costermonger’s cart on a Derby day, or a Roman balcony during the carnival. No doubt the wit of these gentlemen was not very high-bred or unique in its expression; but what was lacking in brilliance was made up in energy—the energy of a pack of boys, of undergraduates—in teasing and tormenting their victim. Of course, if Neaves had possessed sense and spirit he would not have minded a straw, or he would have returned the aggressors scorn for scorn—if he had not risen to the height of repaying them good for evil—and possibly brought them to a more rational frame of mind. But unfortunately sense and spirit were just the qualities in which poor Neaves was lamentably deficient. He had already proved himself, as I have told you, a silly, weak fellow, mortally ashamed of his father’s honest calling; therefore his assailants hit him on the tenderest point, and had him at their mercy. He struggled against the persecution for some time, tried to behave as if he did not see it, then blustered a little, then knocked under. To think such gnat-bites could drive a fellow with a soul in him beside himself! They did; therefore his body was found floating in the Isis one fine morning, down among the boats, not far from a place where he had once, after his boat had bumped another boat, given a sort of pic-nic, and boasted that the greatest ‘nobs’ of his college—the wild younger son of a duke and an out-at-elbows young viscount—had been his supporters. There was some confusion in the wording of the telegram which broke the catastrophe to old Neaves. The family clung to the idea that though an accident had happened, and their Tom was the sufferer, he might still be alive. So the mother hurried to the spot along with the father.

‘I chanced to see them after they had been told the worst and were starting for home again to warn the rest of their children of what was coming. The old man did not show what he felt, but the mother——I tell you, Fan, every jury in the kingdom would, with justice, have exonerated the perpetrators of the mischief from even so much guilt as manslaughter, though one of them—I need not say he was not a ringleader—took the misfortune so much to heart that he had to be removed from Oxford to save his reason——and to this day when that woman’s face comes into my mind, I think as I did then, I would rather have been the wretched simpleton in his coffin than those men in the flush of their youth and strength and whatever goodly birthright they claimed besides. By Heavens, Fan,’ protested Oliver, in the passion which had been gathering during his story, ‘what these fellows did was the farthest removed from the chivalrous courtesy which was once held to constitute gentle bearing, it was the grossest example of caddish behaviour I ever came across.’

Fan was scared by the ghastly ludicrousness and grievous pathos of the story, and by the degree to which Oliver was moved in telling it. She had never seen him in his grief for the loss of their father betray so much emotion as he did now, when he grew pale in the moonlight with the violence of his anger, and clenched his teeth in the height of his reprobation and disgust. ‘It was very cruel, very ungenerous,’ said Fan, with a kind of shivering recoil. She crept close to her brother and clasped his arm with her two hands, clinging to him. ‘They never treated you so, dear?’ she asked with a gasp, as if seeking to reassure herself.

‘Not they,’ he said with an awkward laugh, half ashamed of his excitement. ‘My college was not quite so exclusive, and I trust I was made of sterner stuff. If the men had chaffed me with a miff-wheel or a rolling-pin, I should have replied, Yes, these were my arms, and I did not see that something might not be said for them as well as for a pair of wild men of the woods, a Moor’s head, a pirate’s ship, or an assassin’s dagger. The gist of the matter is that if I lost some of my ideals at Oxford I found others to replace them. Let us be thankful. Come along, Fan; the dew has done falling, indeed, but I am keeping you out far too late with only that rag of a handkerchief over your head.’