Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump Part 3

"How does it come?"

"Oh! In the promiscuous way of these things. The swing of the pendulum, it may be. Some eminent person gets bored at the prospect of repeating that rigmarole about the great Victorians and our present slackness for all the rest of his life, and takes a leaf from one of Hallery's books. We might have something after the fas.h.i.+on of the Efficiency and Wake-up-England affair. Have you ever heard guinea-fowl at dawn?"

"I've heard them at twilight. They say, 'Come back. Come back.' But what has that to do with----"

"Nothing. There's a movement, a stir, a twittering, and then a sudden promiscuous uproar, articles in the reviews, articles in the newspapers, paragraphs, letters, a.s.sociations, societies, leagues. I imagine a very great personality indeed in the most extraordinary and unexpected way coming in...." (It was one of Boon's less amiable habits to impute strange and uncanny enterprises, the sudden adoption of movements, manias, propagandas, adhesion to vegetarianism, socialism, the strangest eccentricities, to the British royal family.) "As a result Hallery finds himself perforce a person of importance.

'The thought of a nation is the life of a nation,' one hears it from royal lips; 'a literature, a living soul, adequate to this vast empire,' turns up in the speech of a statesman of the greatest literary pretensions. Arnold White responds to the new note. The _Daily Express_ starts a Literary Revival on its magazine page and offers a prize. The _Times_ follows suit. Reports of what is afoot reach social circles in New York.... The illumination pa.s.ses with a dawnlike swiftness right across the broad expanse of British life, east and west flash together; the ladies' papers and the motoring journals devote whole pages to 'New Literature,' and there is an enormous revival of Book Teas.... That sort of thing, you know--extensively."

-- 3

"So much by way of prelude. Now picture to yourself the immediate setting of my conference. Just hand me that book by the 'Encyclopaedia.'"

It was Mallock's "New Republic." He took it, turned a page or so, stuck a finger in it, and resumed.

"It is in a narrow, ill-kept road by the seaside, Bliss. A long wall, plaster-faced, blotched and peeling, crested with uncivil gla.s.s against the lower orders, is pierced by cast-iron gates clumsily cla.s.sical, and through the iron bars of these there is visible the deserted gatekeeper's lodge, its cracked windows opaque with immemorial dirt, and a rich undergrowth of nettles beneath the rusty cypresses and stone-pines that border the carriage-way. An automobile throbs in the road; its occupants regard a board leaning all askew above the parapet, and hesitate to descend. On the board, which has been enriched by the attentions of the pa.s.sing boy with innumerable radiant mud pellets, one reads with difficulty--

+-----------------------------------------------------+ THIS CLa.s.sICAL VILLA with magnificent gardens in the Victorian-Italian style reaching down to the sea, and replete with Latin and Greek inscriptions, a garden study, literary a.s.sociations, fully matured Oxford allusions, and a great number of conveniently arranged bedrooms, to be LET OR SOLD. _Apply to the owner_, Mr. W. H. MALLOCK, original author of "The New Republic." _Key within_. +-----------------------------------------------------+

"'This _must_ be it, my dear Archer,' says one of the occupants of the motor-car, and he rises, throws aside his furs, and reveals--the urbane presence of the Encyclopaedist. He descends, and rings a clangorous bell.... Eh?"

"It's the garden of the 'New Republic'?"

"Exactly. Revisited. It's an astonis.h.i.+ng thing. Do you know the date of the 'New Republic'? The book's nearly forty years old! About the time of Matthew Arnold's 'Friends.h.i.+p's Garland,' and since that time there's been nothing like a systematic stocktaking of the English-speaking mind--until the Encyclopaedist reported 'no effects.'

And I propose to make this little party in the motor-car a sort of scratch expedition, under the impetus of the proposed Revival of Thought. They are prospecting for a Summer Congress, which is to go into the state of the republic of letters thoroughly. It isn't perhaps quite Gosse's style, but he has to be there--in a way he's the official British man of letters--but we shall do what we can for him, we shall make him show a strong disposition towards protective ironies and confess himself not a little bothered at being dragged into the horrid business. And I think we must have George Moore, who has played uncle to so many movements and been so uniformly disappointed in his nephews. And William Archer, with that face of his which is so exactly like his mind, a remarkably fine face mysteriously marred by an expression of unscrupulous integrity. And lastly, Keyhole."

"Why Keyhole?" I asked.

"Hallery has to murder some one. I've planned that--and who _would_ he murder but Keyhole?... And we have to hold the first meeting in Mallock's garden to preserve the continuity of English thought.

"Very well! Then we invent a morose, elderly caretaker, greatly embittered at this irruption. He parleys for a time through the gate with all the loyalty of his cla.s.s, mentions a number of discouraging defects, more particularly in the drainage, alleges the whole place is clammy, and only at Gosse's clearly enunciated determination to enter produces the key."

Boon consulted his text. "Naturally one would give a chapter to the Villa by the Sea and Mallock generally. Our visitors explore. They visit one scene after another familiar to the good Mallockite; they descend 'the broad flights of steps flanked by G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses'

that lead from one to another of the 'long, straight terraces set with vases and Irish yews,' and the yews, you know, have suffered from the want of water, the vases are empty, and ivy, under the benediction of our modest climate, has already veiled the cla.s.sical freedom--the conscientious nudity, one might say--of the statuary. The laurels have either grown inordinately or perished, and the 'busts of orators, poets, and philosophers' 'with Latin inscriptions,' stand either bleakly exposed or else swallowed up, in a thicket. There is a pleasing struggle to translate the legends, and one gathers scholars.h.i.+p is not extinct in England.

"The one oasis in a universal weediness is the pond about the 'scaly Triton,' which has been devoted to the culture of spring onions, a vegetable to which the aged custodian quite superfluously avows himself very 'partial.' The visitors return to the house, walk along its terrace, survey its shuttered front, and they spend some time going through its musty rooms. Dr. Keyhole distinguishes himself by the feverish eagerness of his curiosity about where Leslie slept and where was the boudoir of Mrs. Sinclair. He insists that a very sad and painful scandal about these two underlies the _New Republic_, and professes a thirsty desire to draw a veil over it as conspicuously as possible. The others drag him away to the summer dining-room, now a great brier tangle, where once Lady Grace so pleasantly dined her guests. The little arena about the fountain in a porphyry basin they do not find, but the garden study they peer into, and see its inkpot in the shape of a cla.s.sical temple, just as Mr. Mallock has described it, and the windowless theatre, and, in addition, they find a small private gas-works that served it. The old man lets them in, and by the light of uplifted vestas they see the decaying, rat-disordered ruins of the scene before which Jenkinson who was Jowett, and Herbert who was Ruskin, preached. It is as like a gorge in the Indian Caucasus as need be. The Brocken act-drop above hangs low enough to show the toes of the young witch, still brightly pink....

"They go down to the beach, and the old man, with evil chuckles, recalls a hitherto unpublished anecdote of mixed bathing in the 'seventies, in which Mrs. Sinclair and a flushed and startled Dr.

Jenkinson, Greek in thought rather than action, play the chief parts, and then they wade through a nettle-bed to that 'small cla.s.sical portico' which leads to the locked enclosure containing the three tombs, with effigies after the fas.h.i.+on of Genoa Cemetery. But the key of the gate is lost, so that they cannot go in to examine them, and the weeds have hidden the figures altogether.

"'That's a pity,' some one remarks, 'for it's here, no doubt, that old Laurence lies, with his first mistress and his last--under these cypresses.'

"The aged custodian makes a derisive noise, and every one turns to him.

"'I gather you throw some doubt?' the Encyclopaedist begins in his urbane way.

"'Buried--under the cypresses--first mistress and last!' The old man makes his manner invincibly suggestive of scornful merriment.

"'But isn't it so?'

"'Bless y'r 'art, _no_! Mr. Laurence--buried! Mr. Laurence worn't never alive!'

"'But there was a _young_ Mr. Laurence?'

"'That was Mr. Mallup 'imself, that was! 'E was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup, and sometimes 'e went about pretendin' to be Mr. Laurence and sometimes he was Mr. Leslie, and sometimes----But there, you'd 'ardly believe. 'E got all this up--cypresses, chumes, everythink--out of 'is 'ed. Po'try. Why! 'Ere! Jest come along 'ere, gents!'

"He leads the way along a narrow privet alley that winds its surrept.i.tious way towards an alcove.

"'Miss Merton,' he says, flinging the door of this open.

"'The Roman Catholic young person?' says Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole.

"'Quite right, sir,' says the aged custodian.

"They peer in.

"Hanging from a peg the four visitors behold a pale blue dress cut in the fas.h.i.+on of the 'seventies, a copious 'chignon' of fair hair, large earrings, and on the marble bench a pair of open-work stockings and other articles of feminine apparel. A tall mirror hangs opposite these garments, and in a little recess convenient to the hand are the dusty and decaying materials for a hasty 'make-up.'

"The old custodian watches the effect of this display upon the others with masked enjoyment.

"'You mean Miss Merton _painted_?' said the Encyclopaedist, knitting his brows.

"'Mr. Mallup did,' says the aged custodian.

"'You mean----?'

"'Mr. Mallup was Miss Merton. 'E got _'er_ up too. Parst 'er orf as a young lady, 'e did. Oh, 'e was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup. None of the three of 'em wasn't real people, really; he got 'em all up.'

"'She had sad-looking eyes, a delicate, proud mouth, and a worn, melancholy look,' muses Mr. Archer.

"'And young Laurence was in love with her,' adds the Encyclopaedist....

"'They was all Mr. Mallup,' says the aged custodian. 'Made up out of 'is 'ed. And the gents that pretended they was Mr. 'Uxley and Mr.

Tyndall in disguise, one was Bill Smithers, the chemist's a.s.sistant, and the other was the chap that used to write and print the _Margate Advertiser_ before the noo papers come.'"

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James

-- 1

The Garden by the Sea chapter was to have gone on discursively with a discussion upon this project of a conference upon the Mind of the Race. The automobile-ful of gentlemen who had first arrived was to have supplied the opening interlocutors, but presently they were to have been supplemented by the most unexpected accessories. It would have been an enormously big dialogue if it had ever been written, and Boon's essentially lazy temperament was all against its ever getting written. There were to have been disputes from the outset as to the very purpose that had brought them all together. "A sort of literary stocktaking" was to have been Mr. Archer's phrase. Repeated.

Unhappily, its commercialism was to upset Mr. Gosse extremely; he was to say something pa.s.sionately bitter about its "utter lack of dignity." Then relenting a little, he was to urge as an alternative "some controlling influence, some standard and restraint, a new and better Academic influence." Dr. Keyhole was to offer his journalistic services in organizing an Academic plebiscite, a suggestion which was to have exasperated Mr. Gosse to the pitch of a gleaming silence.

In the midst of this conversation the party is joined by Hallery and an American friend, a quiet Harvard sort of man speaking meticulously accurate English, and still later by emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Hearst, by Mr. Henry James, rather led into it by a distinguished hostess, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, late but keen, and by that Sir Henry Lunn who organizes the Swiss winter sports hotels. All these people drift in with an all too manifestly simulated accidentalness that at last arouses the distrust of the elderly custodian, so that Mr. Orage, the gifted editor of the _New Age_, arriving last, is refused admission. The sounds of the conflict at the gates do but faintly perturb the conference within, which is now really getting to business, but afterwards Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by a dexterously plied rake and incurably embittered, makes his existence felt by a number of unpleasant missiles discharged from over the wall in the direction of any audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets into a point of vantage in a small pine-tree overlooking the seaward corner of the premises, and from this he contributes a number of comments that are rarely helpful, always unamiable, and frequently in the worst possible taste.