Richard Whiteing

“ The lips of the beautiful creature parted, but only in sighs; the eyes closed. Once more, too, my own lips approached them, when the girl roused herself, by some mysterious (288) exertion of will, tore herself from my embrace, and ran to the very edge of the cliff.
‘Deep into the deep sea, beloved one, for ever beloved of my heart, if you come one step more! Go now, go from me, and leave me to say my prayers. I love you; take that last word from Victoria; you will never hear her voice again.’
‘She shall hear mine. After such a last word, my Victoria, there must be more. ”

“ A MISSION. A deep melancholy, an extreme lassitude follow our great bereavement. ’Tis as though Death had passed over us, and his lingering shadow still blighted the sunlight of the Isle. We turned to work again, but, at first, only like automaton figures. There is the action of labour, but little effect. We eat and drink in much the same mechanical way. A bird’s-eye view of us would suggest something in waxwork on a grand scale. Our talk is depressing as a demonstration on the phonograph, the topics indifferent, the tones a mere resurrection of the voice. ”

“ We looked in at another club on the way home, a mere tripot this, but gorgeous like all the rest, and throwing blazing beams across the boulevard from its many chandeliers. Here their industry is baccarat, and the net profits of many a mine and factory, transmitted by inheritance to youths of spirit who want to see the world, pass from hand to hand across the baize. Sailors reef the topsail in storms, coal miners lie on backs or bellies in the dark, girls ripen to premature womanhood in the tropic heat of factories, to feed this sport. ”

“ I am steadily gazing at the rafter, as I have been any time this hour past, when I hear a knock at the door, give the familiar pass-word, and receive Victoria’s unembarrassed ‘Good-morning’ as she walks majestically in, and takes a seat on the edge of the bed. I watched her savage cheek for the trace of a blush, but there was none. I hope she did not watch mine.
‘Must we call you “Lord”?’ she inquired, with grave politeness. ”

“ So, I am on longer Victoria’s shadow. I wander alone. I make up to the Ancient, and borrow his fowling piece, to pay my respects to the wild birds. The wild birds do not mind. I trouble them a good deal less than I trouble Victoria. It is an old fowling piece; how did men contrive to kill anything in the days when it was made, especially to kill one another? The slaughter of Malplaquet quite enhances one’s respect for the race, and takes rank with Stonehenge and the Pyramids among material marvels wrought by simple means. ”

“ Take nothing in but what you can digest to true use, which is beauty of life. What a scandal, if you were caught and opened in an unguarded hour, and half your stomach were found lined with vanities as profitless as the bits of shoe leather and old corks so often found in the maw of your prototype—vanities of things bolted to the end of bolting, titles of park and meadow where you can never find a flower, visiting-lists where you can never find a friend, cards for music where you may never hear a note that breathes one of the secrets of Heaven. ”

“ Go into the dismal slums that manufacture for Mayfair, and follow the dainty casket for jewels from one end to the other of the line—from the rickety workshop, airless, and only not lightless, too, because the light is wanted for the labour, to the still daintier casket for men and women, in which it finds its cushioned rest. If this beautiful correspondence, why that grotesque incongruity? If these who touch it as owners are as fine as itself, why not, also, they who touch it as makers, at least with the inner fineness, and a certain amplitude of material life? ”

“ Not an English ship this time—a Yankee, by her beautiful flag.
It is the old scene—the hurried assembling of the people; the signals and answering signals; the manning of the surf boat; the meeting of the elders for consultation as to ways and means of reception. But this meeting is for serious work. The new ship is a trader; and only a ship of war imports no danger to these defenceless folk. There may be a rough crew, not too well in hand, fierce men, beyond punishment for excess, immediate or remote. ”

“ Our own Mother Island but a dot in a waste beside it, Victoria’s Island but a dot on the dot, the parasite of a midge. With this, the figures for commerce, the figures for sails on all the seas that wash the ball, the figures for wealth—a round nine thousand millions sterling, if we were sold up to-morrow, and, for all the bad years since ‘seventy-five, a steady hundred and eighty millions (174) added year by year to the hoard—our swelling liver almost putrid with the gorge of gold.
Victoria is delighted; wants to measure Pitcairn with her sash—is stopped; becomes light of heart, effusive ”

“ Often I get the benefit of a whole morning’s lecture, requiring copious notes, while, for all she knows of it, I have but watched her as she manœuvred a battalion of fowls.
A grand provision of leisure for the true work of life seems to be her chief instinctive aim. She has the genius of indifference to trivial things; she is never busy with aught that does not truly count. The idleness of hurry is unknown to her; she is always free for essentials—a true word, a noble action, a great thought. ”

“ Here, then, was my opportunity, unique, as far as I know, to get at a real pedigree of a Poor Stupid; how infinitely more interesting than any pedigree of the baronage, if only by reason of its rarity. I encouraged him, therefore, by every means in my power, to leave the current affairs of the Empire for a season, and to talk about the past of his own race. He was nothing loath, and, after weeks of labour, we had a family tree drawn out for him that, for hoary age, might not have been unworthy of a seventh Earl. ”

“ She lives to beauty, the sole end. She does naught only for the thing done; there is also the way of doing it. I note her placid disdain of a certain hen, that has an absurd habit of hatching by quantity, and addles half the brood. The other half, for want of due maternal care, are a species of bush-fowl that have lost their way in civilisation, and Victoria spends days over their bags of bone and feathers, to bring them into harmony with her great law. ”

“ The savage has learned so much about his watch as to feel the utter inadequacy of the reflection that watches have curious ways. He cannot examine, but he begins to guess. There is (243) but one guess to make, the old one—it must be the phantasm of the living Curly that stands between us and the perfect light. We know what came of that guess before. If I step back to make way for him, Victoria will follow, to know the reason why. A pest on him for a phantom that plays us on and off: it is neither my fault, nor Victoria’s; it is the phantom that does not know its own mind! ”

“ Why seek for more?’
‘That reason, from myself to myself, Victoria, may be enough. It is not enough from you to me.’
‘From me to you then,’ she said; ‘will this do? All things leave us, as we stand here in this Isle; all things pass us by. Whatever comes to us, as surely goes. Why should we hope to keep it, when that must be the end? (280) God has marked us out for solitude: let us bow to God’s will. Nothing could keep you here: it is written. Nothing has kept others.’
The pang that had almost ceased darted through me again with its full force, at these last words. ”

“ Why you may spend twenty or thirty thousand pounds in getting a good breed of race-horses, if that is your hobby. You get a hobby, that’s the way it’s done—horses, hounds, women, pictures, or china, anything will do—and keep on sinking your money till you have the rarest and the best.’
‘Is there any taste in that way as to improving the breed of men? Does a rich man ever buy a slum, and keep on playing with it till he has turned it into a paradise?’
‘No; breeding is chiefly done for the shows.’
‘Are all the people in Europe as funny as that?’ said Victoria, ‘or is it only the English? ”

“ Nature herself smiles benignly on the festival, and contributes to it with great sunsets that touch the summits of grove and mountain with indescribable beauty, and harmonise into perfect peacefulness of association even the tumult of the breakers in their everlasting strife with the shore. ”

“ We feel so quickly; and all our feeling is in each terrible moment as it flies. I set myself above our people; I shuddered to think I should ever be like that. My love was part of my respect for myself. Half our women have had their love tokens taken away in Queen’s ships, and have still lived on to be wives and mothers in the Isle. ”

“ Impossible to doubt, after this, that the spirit is to be lord of the house; that living is the finest of the fine arts, or nothing; and that such is the message, delivered through Nature, of the Unknowable behind the Nature veil.
The Ancient is thoughtful all the while, thoughtfullest at the hour of the breaking-up of this great council of the soul, when the councillors wander away in pairs, and are lost in the radiant hazes of the night. It is the last council—to-morrow they go. Our Chief has led the way to his cottage, and has asked the Captain to step in on his way home. ”

“ It is all such a relief after the official landings of the Pacific station, and the French polish of the South American dons, much tarnished by keeping in a torrid clime.
The people are as curious and inquisitive as children. They draw the officers’ swords, (103) run their fingers along the dulled edges, cry wonder at the damascened blades. Some of them have never seen the uniform before: none can ever see it too often. They have the fullest confidence in the honour of the wearers; and they give themselves up to enjoyment, without a thought of harm. ”

“ They were all scratching themselves; and when an entire civilisation begins to do that, it is a serious thing.
It was a serious thing for me. For the life of me I could not get them into focus again for my grand pictorial composition of a community all playing the game of life for mutual diversion. Theirs was rather that infernal game of bowls in the Fourth Circle, where the tormented wretches will roll the balls in one another’s faces, when a more sensible direction would give them delightful sport. ”

“ There is an almost absolute void of perception between the boat at the landing-stage, and the ship, with her solitary passenger, flying at full speed from the shore. Active consciousness seems to have been suspended between these two decisive facts. Memory is resumed, with one ineffaceable impression that it must hold for life—Victoria stretching her arms towards the ship, from the summit of the Peak. ”

“ Look at the beautiful gradation at home—an aristocracy for the fine art of life; a middle class for the moral qualities, which are not fine art, but only helps to it; a lower for the mere drudgery outside of both art and morals. The great mark of all progressive nations is that struggle of each man to make some other do his dirty work for him, which is commonly known as aspiration for the higher life. A few live in dignity, unhaste, affluence, and wear the fine flower of manners ”

“ White Horse Yard, you must know, Victoria, is a London slum, one of hundreds as clearly marked on the map, and as well known, as Buckingham Palace or Grosvenor Square. The description would interest you, as a semi-savage, but to us worn children of civilisation it is too trite for pleasure or profit. Every social reformer begins by describing White Horse Yard: it is the sign of the “’prentice hand.” Swart’s place was reached by a narrow causeway, reeking with every kind of abomination, and by a staircase, dark and rotten, and swarming with vermin, as I had afterwards good reason to know. ”

“ It took three journeys to complete her preparations; and then I was invited to sit down to the most deliciously novel repast ever spread before me—grey mullet, and the mysterious squid, now turning out to be the more familiar cuttle-fish, to take off the sharper edge of appetite; the baked bird, with yams, roasted breadfruit, and plantain cake to follow; bananas, oranges, and cocoa-nuts for dessert. The liquors, I am bound to say, were a failure. I was offered water with the fish, and cocoa-nut milk with the bird; and, I suppose, my passing spasm of pain caught Victoria’s eye. ”

“ He is not to be like yourselves, a simple work-a-day creature, feeling his way to the law by the perpetual revelations of the conscience and the heart, and only getting a little beyond you in the knowledge of it, because he feels and labours more. No, he is to be a creature apart, interpreting a message from behind the Veil—a message delivered, not merely a meaning found. ”

“ Cease to be competitive and self-helping, at least in precious moments when you feel your heart sick. Go back to it, if you will, if you can, when you feel a man again, as convalescents resume their mulligatawny and hot lobster when the plainer roast and boiled have set them right. Treat your mind like a stomach, and give it a touch of nature once in a while. Then, if you have a taste that way, still return for your gorge at the banquet of work. ”

“ I have not forgotten, I have not done wrong.’ There is certainly something stirring up there, in the green moonlight, but Victoria will in nowise let me obey her order to find out what it is, but draws me back into the shadow of the gorge, and insists on our hurrying home. Amiable and harmless ghost, the girl is mute about thee, and I am fain to be content with thy biography from the Ancient’s lips. The Ridge is haunted by the phantom of a murdered chief, another of the victims of that old wild time. ”