Peter Ibbetson Part 10

"Now, then, you cowardly skunk!" I said, tucking up my s.h.i.+rt-sleeves; "stand up, and I will knock every tooth down your ugly throat."

His face went the colors of a mottled Stilton cheese, and he asked what I meddled with him for. A ring formed itself, and I felt the sympathy of the crowd _with_ me this time--a very agreeable sensation!

"Now, then, up with your arms! I'm going to kill you!"

"I ain't going to fight you, mister; I ain't going to fight _n.o.body_.

Just you let me alone!"

[Ill.u.s.tration:]

"Oh yes, you are, or you're going on your marrow-bones to be pardon for being a brutal, cowardly skunk"; and I gave him a slap on the face that rang like a pistol-shot--a most finished, satisfactory, and successful slap this time. My finger-tips tingle at the bare remembrance.

He tried to escape, but was held opposite to me. He began to snivel and whimper, and said he had never meddled with me, and asked what should I meddle with him for?

"Then down on your knees--quick--this instant!" and I made as if I were going to begin serious business at once, and no mistake.

So down he plumped on his knees, and there he actually fainted from sheer excess of emotion.

As I was helped on with my coat, I tasted, for once in my life the sweets of popularity, and knew what it was to be the idol of a mob.

Little Joey Lintot and his brothers and sisters, who had never held me in any particular regard before that I knew of, wors.h.i.+pped me from that day forward.

And I should be insincere if I did not confess that on that one occasion I was rather pleased with myself, although the very moment I stood opposite the huge, hulking, beer-sodden brute (who had looked so formidable from afar) I felt, with a not unpleasant sense of relief, that he did not stand a chance. He was only big, and even at that I beat him.

The real honors of the day belonged to Lintot, who, I am convinced, was ready to act the David to that Goliath. He had the real stomach for fighting, which I lacked, as very tall men are often said to do.

And that, perhaps, is why I have made so much of my not very wonderful prowess on that occasion; not, indeed, that I am physically a coward--at least, I do not think so. If I thought I were I should avow it with no more shame than I should avow that I had a bad digestion, or a weak heart, which makes cowards of us all.

It is that I hate a row, and violence, and bloodshed, even from a nose--any nose, either my own or my neighbor's.

There are slums at the east end of London that many fas.h.i.+onable people know something of by this time; I got to know them by heart. In addition to the charm of the mere slum, there was the eternal fascination of the seafaring element; of Jack ash.o.r.e--a lovable creature who touches nothing but what he adorns it in his own peculiar fas.h.i.+on.

I constantly haunted the docks, where the smell of tar and the sight of ropes and masts filled me with unutterable longings for the sea--for distant lands--for anywhere but where it was my fate to be.

I talked to s.h.i.+p captains and mates and sailors, and heard many marvellous tales, as the reader may well believe, and framed for myself visions of cloudless skies, and sapphire seas, and coral reefs, and groves of spice, and dusky youths in painted plumage roving, and friendly isles where a lovely half-clad, barefooted Neuha would wave her torch, and lead me, her Torquil, by the hand through caverns of bliss!

Especially did I haunt a wharf by London Bridge, from whence two steamers--the _Seine_ and the _Dolphin_, I believe--started on alternate days for Boulogne-sur-Mer.

I used to watch the happy pa.s.sengers bound for France, some of them, in their holiday spirits, already fraternizing together on the sunny deck, and fussing with camp-stools and magazines and novels and bottles of bitter beer, or retiring before the funnel to smoke the pipe of peace.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BOULOGNE STEAMER.]

The sound of the boiler getting up steam--what delicious music it was!

Would it ever get up steam for me? The very smell of the cabin, the very feel of the bra.s.s gangway and the bra.s.s-bound, oil-clothed steps were delightful; and down-stairs, on the snowy cloth, were the cold beef and ham, the beautiful fresh mustard, the bottles of pale ale and stout. Oh, happy travellers, who could afford all this, and France into the bargain!

Soon would a large white awning make the after-deck a paradise, from which, by-and-by, to watch the quickly gliding panorama of the Thames.

The bell would sound for non-pa.s.sengers like me to go ash.o.r.e--"Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere!" as Uncle Ibbetson would have said. The steamer, disengaging itself from the wharf with a pleasant yoho-ing of manly throats and a slow, intermittent plas.h.i.+ng of the paddle-wheels, would carefully pick its sunny, eastward way among the small craft of the river, while a few handkerchiefs were waved in a friendly, make-believe farewell--_auf wiedersehen_!

Oh, to stand by that unseasonably sou'-westered man at the wheel, and watch St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower of London fade out of sight--never, never to see them again. No _auf wiedersehen_ for me!

Sometimes I would turn my footsteps westward and fill my hungry, jealous eyes with a sight of the gay summer procession in Hyde Park, or listen to the band in Kensington Gardens, and see beautiful, welldressed women, and hear their sweet, refined voices and happy laughter; and a longing would come into my heart more pa.s.sionate than my longing for the sea and France and distant lands, and quite as unutterable. I would even forget Neuha and her torch.

After this it was a dreary downfall to go and dine for tenpence all by myself, and finish up with a book at my solitary lodgings in Pentonville. The book would not let itself be read; it sulked and had to be laid down, for "beautiful woman! beautiful girl!" spelled themselves between me and the printed page. Translate me those words into French, O ye who can even render Shakespeare into French Alexandrines--"Belle femme? Belle fille?" Ha! ha!

If you want to get as near it as you can, you will have to write, "Belle Anglaise," or "Belle Americaine;" only then will you be understood, even in France!

Ah! elle etait bien belle, Madame Seraskier!

At other times, more happily inspired, I would slake my thirst for nature by long walks into the country. Hampstead was my Pa.s.sy--the Leg-of-Mutton Pond my Mare d'Auteuil; Richmond was my St. Cloud, with Kew Gardens for a Bois de Boulogne; and Hampton Court made a very fair Versailles--how incomparably fairer, even a pupil of Lintot's should know.

And after such healthy fatigue and fragrant impressions the tenpenny dinner had a better taste, the little front parlor in Pentonville was more like a home, the book more like a friend.

For I read all I could get in English or French.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Novels, travels, history, poetry, science--everything came as grist to that most melancholy mill, my mind.

I tried to write; I tried to draw; I tried to make myself an inner life apart from the sordid, commonplace ugliness of my outer one--a private oasis of my own; and to raise myself a little, if only mentally, above the circ.u.mstances in which it had pleased the Fates to place me.[A]

[Footnote A: _Note_--It Is with great reluctance that I now come to my cousin's account of deplorable opinions he held, at that period of his life, on the most important subject that can ever engross the mind of man. I have left out _much_, but I feel that in suppressing it altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance; for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents (otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is "Wax to receive, marble to retain."

Madge Plunket.]

It goes without saying that, like many thoughtful youths of a melancholy temperament, impecunious and discontented with their lot, and much given to the smoking of strong tobacco (on an empty stomach), I continuously brooded on the problems of existence--free-will and determinism, the whence and why and whither of man, the origin of evil, the immortality of the soul, the futility of life, etc., and made myself very miserable over such questions.

Often the inquisitive pa.s.ser-by, had he peeped through the blinds of No.--Wharton Street, Pentonville, late at night, would have been rewarded by the touching spectacle of a huge, rawboned ex-private in her Majesty's Life Guards, with his head bowed over the black and yellow key-board of a venerable square piano-forte (on which he could not play), dropping the bitter tear of loneliness and _Weltschmertz_ combined.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It never once occurred to me to seek relief in the bosom of any Church.

Some types are born and not made. I was a born "infidel;" if ever there was a congenital agnostic, one agnostically const.i.tuted from his very birth, it was I. Not that I had ever heard such an expression as agnosticism; it is an invention of late years....

"_J'avais fait de la prose toute ma vie sans le savoir!_"

But almost the first conscious dislike I can remember was for the black figure of the priest, and there were several of these figures in Pa.s.sy.

Monsieur le Major called them _maitres corbeaux_, and seemed to hold them in light esteem. Dr. Seraskier hated them; his gentle Catholic wife had grown to distrust them. My loving, heretic mother loved them not; my father, a Catholic born and bred, had an equal aversion. They had persecuted his G.o.ds--the thinkers, philosophers, and scientific discoverers--Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus; and brought to his mind the cruelties of the Holy Inquisition, the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew; and I always pictured them as burning little heretics alive if they had their will--Eton jackets, white chimney-pot hats, and all!

I have no doubt they were in reality the best and kindest of men.

The parson (and parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Pa.s.sy priest; but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition, with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat, his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of being a "gentleman" by profession. Most unattractive, also, were the cheap, brand-new churches wherein he spoke the word to his dreary-looking, Sunday-clad flock, with scarcely one of whom his wife would have sat down to dinner--especially if she had been chosen from among them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUNDAY IN PENTONVILLE.]