That Very Mab Part 11

'The Hour has come.'

And Mr. Goschen, with his usual calm impartiality, replied:

'Yes, Randolph, and the Man!'

Through all the uproar Queen Mab and the Owl had looked on with breathless interest; but now, at a reiterated mandate from the General, the members were compelled to disperse, some furious, some alarmed, and all discomfited. There only remained one policeman, the General, and the Democrat to fight it out between themselves, and decide whether a European war would be advisable, or whether they should disband the army and devote themselves to Home Reform. But by this time Queen Mab and the Owl had had enough, for the din which still continued outside the windows was giving them neuralgia. They therefore left the House and flew away westward over the crowd, where differences of opinion, expressed in the British public's own graceful and forcible manner, had become the order of the day. They met Mr. Bradlaugh at a little distance, hurrying to the scene of combat with the air of 'Under which king, Bezonian?' and if the locality had not been so extremely noisy they could not have but turned back to see the fun. The Prime Minister had unaccountably (though not unexpectedly) disappeared from the arena, and his adherents were under the impression that he had been treacherously stowed away in the Tower or some subterranean dungeon. The fact was, that, as eloquence could have no effect on the House in its present state of delirium, the temptation to study Hitt.i.te inscriptions in their native home became too strong for him, and he was on his peaceful way to the sh.o.r.es of the Orontes and the ruins of Megiddo.

Shortly after, the Owl and the Fairy met the Bishop, who had heard of the catastrophe, and was torn by conflicting emotions; personal anxiety about his prospects being overclouded by the fear that the new Government might proceed to pa.s.s the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill immediately. 'And a man who marries his Deceased Wife's Sister,' he exclaimed pathetically to the air, 'may very soon end in the swamps of Rationalism!' Only Queen Mab and the Owl heard the words as they flew overhead. Next they met Mr. Matthew Arnold, smiling a happy smile, and concocting a 'childlike and bland' article for the 'Nineteenth Century'

on the present crisis. So they flew on westward till, gaining a freer and fresher neighbourhood, they came upon a wide green lawn, and on the lawn three old acquaintances, the Poet, the Palaeonto-theologist, and--wholly altered from the pale and dreamy boy of their recollection--Walter, the Professor's child.

The Professor was a man given to prompt.i.tude of speech and action, and, once awakened to the serious state of Walter's health, physical and mental, he had resolved, at whatever discomfort to himself, to check the boy's undue mental precocity and subst.i.tute for it mere physical vigour.

He was content with no half-measures, and he sent the lad at once to a preparatory school for Eton. At Eton he knew Walter's brain would have a rest. The effect was miraculous. The boy, whom the Palaeonto-theologist had rashly invited to spend a holiday at his home, was a different creature. He had become st.u.r.dy and robust; he had forgotten his new religion of Dala, with his science primers, and could no more have composed a hymn to a fairy than he could have endured a false quant.i.ty.

He had forgotten the Goona stones; he had forgotten the dates of the Kings of England. He said that bogies were all bosh; he said that Cardinal Wolsey was imprisoned in the Tower for thirteen years and wrote 'Robinson Crusoe' there, and that the Nile rose in Mungo Park. He had forgotten his father's instructions, and regarded birds, not as products of Evolution, but as things suitable to shy stones at, and to be treated with contempt, and catapults. He was incorrigible at Euclid, but he was excellent at cricket, and on this occasion he had f.a.gged the Poet and the Palaeonto-theologist to bowl to and field out for him. It was beyond human nature to expect them to enjoy it. The Poet was in the midst of a sublime stanza when he was peremptorily ordered to come and bowl, and he went dreamily and reluctantly, to be greeted with a further mandate of 'Look sharp there!' The Palaeonto-theologist was deep in an exhaustive inventory of the animals in Noah's Ark, and was discussing the probability of the Mammoth's having been one of its residents. If so, there came the knotty point of how Noah contrived to stow him and the Megatherium in comfortably, and whether they never wanted to do away with the other animals, in which case the Patriarch must have had stirring times. The Palaeonto-theologist was just about to begin the grand chain of evidence in which he proves conclusively, from careful study of the original Hebrew ma.n.u.scripts, and from examination of the soil of Mount Ararat, whose fossils are abraded to this day where the Ark rested on them, that the dimensions of the Ark were anything but what they are said to be, when Walter ordered him to come and field.

There was no help for it; he went and fielded; 'he ran, he fell, he fielded well.'

While he and the Poet were thus occupied, Mab and the Owl rested on a great horse-chestnut and watched the game, and Mab, under the impression that the boy, at sight of her, would be filled with wonder and delight, slipped off her invisible cloak. For some time he was too much absorbed in 'crumping the Poet's slows,' as he said, to notice her; but at last, when the Poet and the Palaeonto-theologist were utterly 'collared' (as Walter put it) and exhausted, and the perspiration stood thick on their intellectual foreheads, the advent of refreshments gained them a momentary respite. Walter attacked the fruit and cakes so vigorously that Queen Mab grew impatient, and descended to a lower branch of the huge tree, where at last the boy, raising his eyes, beheld her.

'Hi!' he cried, rus.h.i.+ng indiscriminately at his companions. 'Get me a catapult, lower boy, I say! Stones, peashooter, anything. Look alive!

Here goes!'

And he a.s.sailed the astonished Mab with a cricket-ball, and next 'it came to pleats,' as Mrs. Major O'Dowd said; and then he hurled a jampot and a fruit-knife. Fortunately for the fairy, who at the moment was too much astonished to move, his aim was rendered inaccurate by his excitement, and the missiles flew wide. The unhappy f.a.gs had started up, and the Poet, looking round bewildered, with a volley of desperate expletives un-uttered in his soul, caught sight of Mab.

'Celestial being!' he exclaimed rapturously. 'I again behold thee.

Bright inmate! How did it run?'

'Bother your verses!' cried the boy with utter contempt. 'Shy at it, you duffer! Oh, what a b.u.t.terfly! Get her into the teapot. Blockhead!'

This last disdainfully to himself, for he had hurled the ancient and valuable teapot at Mab, who was flying to a higher branch, and the teapot had missed.

'Rash boy!' cried the Palaeonto-theologist, shaking him angrily, 'you have broken my grandfather's teapot.'

'Run for the b.u.t.terfly-net,' returned the boy unabashed. 'By George, I'll give you the jolliest licking!'

'Hi, there she goes! Seize her!' he shouted distractedly, and the unlucky Palaeonto-theologist rushed after a b.u.t.terfly-net, while Queen Mab, in unutterable indignation, rose slowly into the air, followed by the bewildered Owl, who had not had time to explain the boy's 'new departure' to himself on scientific principles. It was not till they were fully half a mile from the ill-starred spot that the Owl opened his beak to murmur, with an air of long-suffering melancholy but scientific delight, the word--

'Reaction!'

But Queen Mab, after this crowning insult, was fain to depart from Britain and renounce the higher civilisation. In the Councils of the New Democracy she had no place. Church and State abjured her: the rising generation needed no fairies, but was content with football and cricket, 'Treasure Island,' and the Latin Grammar. Education, Philosophy, and the Philistines had made of the island she once loved well a wilderness wherein no fairy might henceforth furl its wings.

She said 'good-bye' to the Owl, who shed one tear at parting, and to all the loyal birds, and went back to Samoa. But alas! Samoa, like Great Britain, was no longer any place for her. It was annexed: it was evangelised. The natives of it were going to church; they were going to Sunday School; they were going to heaven. They were sending their children to be educated at English colleges: they were translating Tennyson and Wesley's sermons, and learning the catechism, and reading the Testament in the original Greek, and wearing high-crowned hats and paper collars. There was no end of the things they were doing, and they had no time for fairies.

Queen Mab summoned her Court together in despair, and left for one of the Admiralty Islands. There, till the civilisation that dogs the steps of the old folk-lore has driven her thence--with const.i.tutions, and microscopes, and a higher Pantheism that leaves the older Pantheism in the lurch, and other advantages of the nineteenth century--she is secure. We trust that she is also happy, and that the shadow of the approaching hour when she will be ultimately reduced by scientific theologians to a symbol of some deeper verity, the conception of men whose understandings could not cope, like ours, with abstract truth, is not cast heavily upon her path. For she knows well, now, that her day is over, that she is too tangible by far for a higher Pantheism, and that only among the heathen, in some obscure corner of Oceania, she is still permitted to linger on, till that lagging island too receives its chrism of intellect, and is caught up into the van of time.

The Owl is yet the wisest of the birds, though he has commenced a course of psychological research that, it is to be feared, if persisted in, will seriously injure his brain. For he said, only yesterday, that as he was conscious of external objects merely through the medium of his own ego, how was he to know whether or not his own ego was the sole ego in the universe--in fact, composed the universe? He wished to be informed whether he could possibly be nothing but an impression or somebody else's ego; and said finally, in a despondent tone, that it was hopeless to regard this mundane scheme as anything but a subjective phenomenon, mere _Schein_ or _maya_, and that he gave it up.

But the Democrat, untroubled by transcendental scruples, goes on his way, rejoicing in the prospect of the Millennium, now close at hand. He does not much care what the universe is, but he knows what he wants to get out of it, and that is sufficient for his purpose. To be sure, he wants to get what no one ever did or will obtain, but his moments are impa.s.sioned, and his idea is a distraction, like another.