Chapter XXII: A Reformer’s Reward

Oliver suited the action to the word, flung off his coat, bared his long sinewy arms to the shoulders, advanced to the vacant board, and laid hold of the dough fast becoming flat and unprofitable. In spite of his passion he felt shy and awkward under the consciousness of the adverse, critical eyes glancing at him, some of them in sheer amazement, some of them in jealous resentment, some of them in sly amusement, and only a very few of them in dubious generous approbation. He distrusted his qualifications with reason. But when was he not awkward? and it was surely possible for a man of his muscle and modicum of experience to knead dough into a passable condition and dispose of it in an oven.

As Oliver solemnly pounded at his lump of dough, he was assailed mentally by successive trains of thought, contradictory, sympathetic, purely humorous.

In the first place he was angrily sensible of the same momentary rush of shamefacedness, in trying to bake before his bakers, that he had felt in first standing in his shop-door before his fellow-townsmen—yet what was there in this fine, white flour, powdering him and his companions alike, to stain a man with so disgraceful a stain that in the case of poor Neaves, the very reflection of it caused the weak undergraduate to leap into the Isis in order to wash out the blot and his miserable life with it? Was the mark so much more invidious than the soil which Neaves’s quondam companions had been fain enough to contract from the earth of hunting fields, or the soil of stables and kennels, or the mire of race-courses, or even the smoke and blood of a battle-field—to pass through which without ‘falling into a funk,’ if the chance came his way, without any deed of his, constituted every young man a hero?

Why should the mere inference of having to do with wheat as it was made into bread to feed the multitudes, operate more violently upon men’s stupid, snobbish prejudices than the report of being mixed up with barley in the course of becoming malt, or with hops as they passed into ale—to form refreshment for the thirsty, no doubt? But the refreshment was decidedly open to abuse when the great distillers and brewers might also be the great licensed victuallers, the invisible, irresponsible landlords of scores and hundreds of gin-palaces and ale-houses, as well as the builders of churches and founders of schools.

Oliver had a fleeting vision of Mrs. Hilliard’s cool, fresh drawing-room in contrast to the hot vapour-laden bakehouse, with Catherine Hilliard bidding men fight or die, or speak and witness for the truth—but never mix flour, yeast and salt, and convert leaven into wholesome bread, to fill the mouths and recruit the strength of hungry, fainting creatures.

Oliver saw Harry Stanhope standing without his coat, bareheaded, on his half-laden cart, ‘forking’ his sheaves of corn, and knew that was one thing in the estimation of the world and kneading dough was quite another. There was as great a difference between them as that between a bar of iron and a twopenny nail. Yet Oliver remembered the American philosopher Thoreau, and his delight in the sign of self-sufficing independence which he recognised in the act of baking his own bread. What a manly, ay, a kingly work Thoreau had made of it, as historians and poets had dealt with the picturesque initiatory steps taken by Cincinnatus when the patriot returned from saving his country in the ranks of war, to plough, and reap, and gather in the fruits of his own peaceful fields.

Thoreau baked for his own hand, at his own will and pleasure. He was a republican of republicans—to whom not only courts and thrones were repugnant, but who, while he had no quarrel with his kind, sought to know the feelings of a wild man—alone with the marvellous hordes of lower animals whom he understood and loved, and who repaid him with their trust—alone with Nature as she came from the hands of her Maker. Thus Thoreau had steeped his rough bread-making in reflections which had lent it a hue at once primitive and solemn.

There was another man dubbed a baker, whether he would or not, nicknamed in wanton mockery because he could not furnish bread for his famished people; a shy, shrinking man, not altogether without the dignity of the line of a hundred kings—of St. Louis himself, blended with the native dignity of innocent intentions in the midst of his weakness, and with the pathos of a martyr for the sins of his fathers and evil advisers, as he stood forward in the window of his palace, wearing the red cap of anarchy for the crown of sovereignty, while France heard him hailed, not as the monarch—not as ‘Louis le Desiré,’ but as ‘Louis Capet, the Baker.’

There was still another figure engaged in the homely occupation that rose up then in the Friarton bakehouse. He had been introduced to Oliver and to thousands more in the president’s speech at the close of one of the Royal Society’s meetings. Oliver was not intimately acquainted with the man, as the hero when he had passed from this world was happily to be rendered familiar to the whole reading public. But the miller and baker of Friarton—a distinct specimen of his kind—had got from the president’s speech a general idea of that other master baker, and rejoiced and gloried in him.

Oliver did not himself possess genius, yet he had some of its wide sympathies, keen intuitions and susceptibilities, and strong beliefs. Had the less gifted man known the greater Oliver would have prized highly the manly self-respect and modesty, even the odd gruff bearing, which was only the prickly husk to the sweet kernel with its milk of human kindness and juice of a fine, genial humour, which no general misconception, no bitter adversity, could sour. Oliver would have gone a pilgrimage—for he, too, had his boundless enthusiasm—to that obscure little northern bakehouse, where an intellectual and moral giant toiled single-handed and fared frugally amidst his inspired drawings of cherubim and seraphim, ape and Greek boy. Oliver Constable could not have pretended to match his brother-tradesman’s profound, patient studies in natural science, or the royal bounty which disposed of the geological and botanical specimens—so painfully, and yet with such deep satisfaction and noble exultation, chiselled from the rock and plucked from the moor. After they had been laboriously and lovingly assorted and preserved, these specimens, together with the deductions carefully and warily drawn from them, were lavished with princely liberality on men of science, for whom they might win name and fame, while the real conqueror of the spoils was content to remain ‘Dick the Baker,’ drudging at a trade which was unremunerative to him, unknown and unhonoured, so far as the mere tinsel of worldly distinction and applause was concerned. And through it all Dick, who was the reverse of a morbid, fantastic misanthropist, would have preferred a certain amount of material prosperity to the slow poverty which ground him to death at last, with the honest human fear of debt and starvation. He would have liked in his early manhood to have met with such a degree of comprehension and fellow-feeling from his neighbours as might have saved him from being quickly driven back on his natural reserve, with his huge stores of kindliness, cheeriness, and wit, confined to the kindred at a distance from him, his one or two rarely endowed, occasional cronies, his simple old housekeeper, the young students who were welcome to his priceless instructions without a thought of a professor’s fee. But in the man’s lofty soul and poetic idealisation, which could exist along with exact knowledge, he was content, with something like scorn of being pointed out for any other distinction, to be known only—apart from a queer fish, and a half-cracked dour sinner—for what he still was, without prejudice or false shame, ‘Dick the Baker.’

There would have been a greater charm in the man for Oliver than what belonged to the simplicity and gladness which took every circumstance of his lot bravely and thankfully, singing over his baking trough, singing back to the roar of the waves of the Northern sea. His heartily admiring biographer has recorded Dick’s honest practice as a tradesman:—‘His quarter loaf always contained four pounds full, while the two-pound loaves of many of the other bakers were short by about four ounces. Cheating had the advantage over honesty of six per cent. on every loaf—a profit in itself, few weighing their bread and deducting the deficiency.’

At last Oliver’s mind rambled off to a comical recollection of his grandfather, the first Oliver Constable, miller and baker, of whom his grandson had very authentic information, in addition to a faint personal recollection. This Oliver had been enterprising and ambitious as any founder of a race. He had gone from a country bakehouse to London, and served for a term there, in order to be taught what might be the metropolitan mysteries and perfections of the trade. He had certainly attained the power of concocting a certain pudding, which was long held in high estimation in Friarton. The old Oliver, his wife, children, and kindred a little farther removed, had piqued themselves on this acquirement, and in order to keep it a private inheritance, had shrouded it in a captivating secresy. Even in family conclave, when there was an annual friendly gathering and festival in the baker’s house each Christmas, and when the supper was crowned with this very London pudding, as a fitting compliment from the host to his guests, the rites of the piece of cookery were conducted not only with peculiar ceremony, but with closed doors. In the course of the evening, the hostess, having retired and seen that a collection of the necessary materials—eggs, butter, milk, flour, fruit, and spices, was complete, and without flaw, ranged in her own back kitchen, returned to the company, and asked her husband with brief significance, ‘Goodman, are you ready?’

The head of the house—a man of solid gravity both of body and mind—then withdrew with quiet importance from the circle of his friends for the space of half-an-hour. The prevailing standard of manners exacted that nobody should remark on the retirement of the entertainer for the good of the entertained, though it was fully comprehended that he had thrown off his company coat, donned his professional apron, and was then whisking eggs and beating butter in solitude, as the highest proof of his hospitality. The result figured at the banquet, and then all tongues were loosed in praise of the dish and its maker.

Why not? Perhaps old Oliver Constable’s exercise of his professional skill in the middle of his season of recreation, was a greater sacrifice to friendship, and not more of an act of vanity, than is the preparation of a salad or a sauce by the amateur hands of a modern host or hostess.

As Oliver shook off the flour, and put on his coat again, Webster lounged into the bakehouse, and stopped short, bewildered, staring hard at the empty board and the baker who had just quitted it.

‘Webster, it is not in the fitting order of things that I should be under the necessity of doing your work,’ said Oliver, whose temper had got time to cool; ‘I have warned you before, and you have paid no heed. The connection between us had better come to an end. I give you your leave.’

‘As you please, sir; from this moment if you like,’ said Webster jauntily.

‘Very well. I take you at your word,’ said his master.

Oliver was inclined to make an example—if it can be called an example among servants, whose turn has come to carry matters with a high hand, and dictate terms to their masters. Let us hope that the new masters will be magnanimous, and not abuse their power, to a still greater extent than was done by the old, else the present dead-lock would never have arisen.

But Oliver was not aware—whether or not the knowledge might have swayed him—of the combination of circumstances which rendered Webster’s dismissal a severe blow to the man, in spite of his bravado, at a crisis in his affairs. The restless, factious baker had been keeping company with a girl slightly above him in station, whose relations, especially her father—a thriving master-builder, of punctilious and conservative views—did not by any means admire in his prospective son-in-law the hectoring tone, and the free and easy ways, which, along with considerable force of will and cleverness at his trade, as at other things, had secured for Webster an ascendency among the other journeymen bakers, who were characterised for the most part by greater pliability and less ability. The principal score in Webster’s favour was his remaining in Mr. Constable’s service. It was this which kept Webster from being rejected with unhesitating severity by Keys the builder, and as an inevitable consequence of the summary dismissal, with tender regret, by pretty, gentle, Nelly Keys. For though Nelly had been greatly taken with her lover’s lordly swagger, she was too good a girl, and too dutiful a daughter, to act in direct disobedience to her father.

When Webster got his leave from Oliver, he knew it was all up with him and Nelly, to whom he was attached with the peculiar vehemence and self-assertion of his nature, though he put the best face on what he regarded as a misfortune, if not a wrong, and braved it out at the first brush in the bakehouse.

And sure enough, Keys told Webster on the afternoon of the same day to keep the outside of the master-builder’s door for the rest of the journeyman baker’s stay at Friarton. The said master-builder had seized the opportunity of the first rumour of Webster’s quarrel with Mr. Constable to rescue his daughter from a future husband who had shown himself a breeder of mischief and instigator to rebellion, and was likely to end a noisy idle demagogue, a rolling stone that would gather no moss.

After trying in vain to soften the father, and next to obtain a private interview with the weeping Nelly, in order to drag from her a promise to stand by her lover, against her father and the whole world, Webster took refuge in a Friarton gin-palace, and continued there so long as to do still more deadly injury to his cause. He was seen towards nightfall, in Friarton streets, drunk and disorderly, a long step for a tradesman who has hitherto been decorous in his cups, and who has not ‘gone on the spree’ like any shameless reprobate.

Another day intervened, during which Webster went here and there, unable, in spite of his boasted powers, to secure a second engagement in Friarton or its neighbourhood. Instead of getting rid of the fumes of rage and drink, he contracted still denser fumes of a similar description. As ill luck would have it, on the evening of the second day, when the man, always headstrong and violent, and now half-beside himself with disappointment, mortification, and Dutch courage, was on his way to the village at which Jim Hull’s nephew still kept together his country connection, Webster’s path took him past Friarton Mill, and at some hundred yards’ distance from the house, he encountered his late master, taking a stroll in the autumn dusk, with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth.

Oliver was about to pass by his discarded baker with a brief ‘Good evening,’ when Webster brushed up against him, and delivered himself of a sneering, stammering proposal: ‘Let us have a little of your company, Mister Constable—take a walk together—not out of the way when you don’t object to fill my place in the bakehouse.’

Oliver saw the state the man was in, and sought to be quit of him without an unpleasant scene. ‘No; the arrangement would be rather different,’ he said coolly; ‘but I have no mind to discuss it. Get out of my road, man, or it will be the worse for you.’

The last sentence was provoked by Webster’s stumbling right across Oliver’s path, and standing unsteadily barring his farther progress.

‘So, Mister Constable, it was enough to meddle with my baking, and bully, and make short work of me, though you have not a word to say to me for the wrong done me—not a word as from man to man, when we meet like equals. Anyhow, the meeting-place is on a road as is free to both of us, and under the dark night which is going to come down, and cover both of us—and what one of us may choose to do to settle the question between us,’ said Webster incoherently and grandiloquently.

‘What should I have to say to you?’ demanded Oliver. ‘You broke faith as a servant, you were not in the bakehouse when it was your duty to me and the other men that you should be there. I simply did my duty as a master in turning you adrift, not without repeated notice beforehand of what must happen.’

Webster was not open to reason. He was brutal with unrestrained passion and distraught with strong drink. He shouted the lie direct to Oliver, following the accusation of falsehood with a fierce curse and a furious blow.

Such things happen still, occasionally, in England, in spite of civilisation, propriety, and the rural police.

Oliver could have best parried the blow by a counter-blow, which, directed by a strong, steady, not untrained hand, would have laid the reeling assailant at the assailed man’s feet. But he had an objection to this aggressive mode of self-defence in which he was certain to come off conqueror, and in trying merely to parry the violent lunge made at him, Oliver entangled his long legs with those of his enemy, swerved, swayed, and fell, somewhat ignominiously, to the ground.

Webster, notwithstanding his half-furious, half-dazed malice, was still so much the creature of order, and of a peaceful if bragging past, as to take no advantage of Oliver’s lying prone at the man’s feet and at his mercy for one decisive minute—the next, Webster uttered a crow of triumph, administered a not unnatural, but most unchivalrous kick to the shins of the antagonist struggling on his feet again, and meandered away in the gathering darkness.

Oliver stood wincing with pain, pulling himself together, and not believing his senses till he was forced to laugh at his own incredulity. He might have given chase to the fellow in the heat of the fray, since Oliver imagined any damage which he had received would have yielded, for the moment, to the fighting cock in him, while it ought to have been about matched by the enemy which Webster had put into his mouth, to steal away his brains and the right use of his legs.

Oliver could, with still greater ease, have called aloud, and reckoned with security on his call being heard as far as Ned Green’s and the other millers’ cottages, bringing him instant assistance, which Oliver did not believe would have been withheld because of the disaffection common both to the mill and the bakehouse. Webster’s outrage had been too gross and included the chance of turning the tables, and effectually scaring many of the conspirators.

As it was, Oliver did neither. He laughed again, a little constrainedly, for that kick on his shins, though he had been accustomed to be mauled at football, and though this was almost a playful kick administered in the delirious inconstancy of Webster’s mind, had done its work with considerable effect.

After his short laugh Oliver began to reflect. ‘I must have hurt the rascal on some tender spot to reduce him to such excess of drink and madness in a couple of days. I gave credit to his pretensions and to Jim Hull’s dogmatic assurance that Webster would find another master sooner than I should another servant. Well, there’s nothing to be done at this time of the day. It is utterly impossible now for him to make submission and agree to my terms, or for me to reinstate him in the bakehouse, but we may be no more than quits, although he should have contrived to crack my ankle-bone. How shall I manage to hop home, though Fan accuses me of a propensity to stand on one leg? And what am I to say to Fan and the world at large? A fall? It was a fall, but a jolly rum fall to produce such consequences.’

Yet Oliver had no further account to give of the accident, whether it were pride or magnanimity, or a mixture of both, which kept him silent. He would not condescend to a more particular explanation, though it was discovered in time that some of the smaller bones of his ankle had been fractured, and that because the injury had not been properly attended to at first—on account of his having choked down his suffering, and slurred over the amount of damage he had received—there followed a protracted and painful imprisonment to the mill-house. And Oliver came out of it, and the accompanying illness, even though he had allowed a pair of learned physicians to be summoned to his aid, limping slightly for life on one ankle—if not on one knee like Horatius Coccles, as the culminating touch to his awkwardness.

The accident and its result, when the latter came to be fully known, excited some stir and talk in Friarton. Of course no ordinary fall on a level country road as smooth as a bowling-green, to a man in full possession of his wits and limbs, could have occasioned such a disaster. The marvel was, how Oliver Constable had fallen at all on the familiar and sure ground even in the uncertain light of gathering night, people commented with raised eyebrows. But doubtless it was his best policy to vouchsafe no details of this unaccountable fall. There could be hardly any question that it had occurred in some discreditable scuffle or brawl with low companions. The speakers recalled the moonlight frolics of the young tradesmen, the time out of mind removal of lamps from honoured doors, the letting loose of a pig or two from their styes, with the wild attempt at inaugurating a boar-hunt in the streets of Friarton. Oliver Constable had been known to be present at these disgraceful performances, though he might have been charitably supposed beyond taking an active part in the idiotic riotous amusements. But innate low tastes, possibly a secret, wretched, craving for what was generally the stimulant to such uproarious behaviour, had certainly prevailed over the superficial refinement wrought by education.

Oliver Constable was likely to prove a dangerous tempter and corrupter in place of a fine model for his class to follow, and a bracing encouragement by way of example to the young men of the lower middle rank. He was a proper fellow to mask his self-indulgence and license under the guise of philanthropy and unworldliness, to pose as a reformer! Here was a crying instance of a wolf in sheep’s clothing!

Mrs. Hilliard repeated the essence of the scandal to her cousin Catherine over their afternoon tea. Oliver Constable was coming out in the colours which might, perhaps, have been detected from the first, through the daubing done over them, by a man of the world. The accident which had fixed a permanent shamble on his gait, was said to have happened in a shocking drunken row.

It was symptomatic that there had been some time ago a split among the chapel people, with which Oliver Constable was mixed up. In general these splits were tokens of a disease peculiar to dissenting bodies, in which nobody outside dreamt of taking any interest. For that matter, nobody was likely to hear of the divisions unless from servants and tradespeople. But for Oliver Constable, who ought to have been the chief pillar of the chapel, to be in bad odour with the members was too ominous to be passed over. Here was the end of foolish aspirations, of eccentricity, and not doing at Rome as the Romans did, but aiming at being hero or saint or a mixture of both. So Apollo and Caliban by turns had merged into Vulcan, who had been stealing very vulgar and unhallowed fire indeed when he met his fit punishment. Mrs. Hilliard was sorry for Fan—yes, she could spare sincere pity for Fan Constable at last.

Mrs. Hilliard told her tale with a curious mixture of regret and annoyance—since she had chosen to count kindred with the Constables—and of lurking satisfaction, because what she had said of Oliver’s high faluting, what she had prophesied as sure to follow transcendental ambition, had been borne out. She had called Oliver half Apollo half Caliban, she herself was half a good-natured woman, half a mocking-cynic.

Mrs. Hilliard was stopped by Catherine. The cold statue became strangely warm, and instinct with life and emotion—red hot, actually gasping for breath in her indignation. ‘I wonder at you, Louisa,’ panted Catherine, ‘to listen to such wicked slander, to give credence to it for a moment, to put yourself on an equality with its fabricators, helping in its circulation. Oliver Constable is a good man, true as steel, pure as honesty itself, kind as a brother, though he may waste his fine qualities. I will pledge myself for his perfect innocence of anything so despicable and loathsome as hypocrisy—even if he were weak enough to be vicious and not as he is, too strong in his virtue to care for appearances.’

‘He does not lack an enthusiastic champion,’ observed Mrs. Hilliard, letting the corners of her mouth droop. ‘Take care, my dear, you are not infallible in your convictions any more than the gentleman is in his conduct. The passion for being _outré_ seems infectious. Ah! blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed. I have not been so wise as to be without expectation, though I have had my misgivings. Now I must confess, in spite of your looking daggers at me, I am disappointed in Oliver Constable. The sequel threatens to exceed so tremendously what I bargained for. I only anticipated a ludicrous collapse; I did not go in for a dismal wreck—at which I shall not be able to laugh, therefore you need not be angry with me,’ complained Mrs. Hilliard with a half-comical air of injury.

But Catherine was angry, in season and out of season, with the wrong as well as the right person. For how did this staunch champion treat Oliver the next time she met him, limping slowly down Friarton High Street? She passed him quickly with the slightest and coldest bow that any of his defamers had yet administered to him. Mrs. Hilliard could no more have bowed in that fashion than she could have taken up a stone and thrown it at the culprit. It was the next thing to a cut direct, and it did cut Oliver to the heart, with the lively impression that Catherine Hilliard had listened to and believed the worst of the idle, senseless, shameful lies told of him.

As for Catherine, she was saying to herself in a fever of perverse, reproachful wrath and mortification. ‘What right had he who was so manly, courageous and steadfast to cast his pearls before swine till they turned and rent him: to spend himself in a manner and for a cause unworthy of the gift: to act so recklessly that he could be thus monstrously misjudged and maligned?’

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

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Transcriber Notes

The following are corrections to the original text.
p12 “to” added to (to her, he had).
p45 “unkown” changed to (an unknown specimen).
p52 period added to (something in my line.)
p53 “luciters” changed to (invented before lucifers.)
p62 “quarterspast” changed to (till three quarters past).
p73 “hinfluenzas” changed to (with her colds and influenzas).
p107 closing quote added to (whatever is necessary.’)
p138 comma added to (who was no reformer,)
p148 “taat” changed to (Agne—that her).
p168 “tat” changed to (this instance—that).
p171 “Freemantle” changed to (Mr. Fremantle was content).
p182 closing quote removed from (cousin. That would try).
p213 “suceeed” changed to (succeed in bringing him).
p248 closing quote added to (will be a Nonconformist.’)
p263 period added to (to his individual light.)