Allen Upward

“ The Garden of Eden is like that flying island of Arabian geography which descends unawares in front of the adventurer, and tempts him to tread its enamelled turf, surrendering his senses to the hymeneal music of its birds, and the perfume of its myriad flowers. The earth was changed for Alistair by a keeper’s daughter, a girl of his own age, with a face fair as an apple-blossom, in whose heart the seed of ambition had been early sown by a vain mother’s hand. All through one summer-tide they met by stealth among the woods of Trent ”

“ As Alistair reached the southern foot of the bridge all the lights and sounds of Lambeth burst upon him with an effect of squalid but stirring energy.
He plunged into the bustling thoroughfare, with its noisy street-stalls, its jostling tramcars, and its hurrying passengers, as a bather plunges into the sea, and took his way along the road which branches southwards in the direction of Kennington. The sense of bankruptcy and failure no longer affected him disagreeably as it still did in the region he had just quitted. ”

“ It was the first time Lord Alistair had ever visited this part of the house, and the whole spectacle depressed him. He found himself pitying the departed servants who had had to occupy such mean and desolate quarters. Why should it be necessary for these fellow-creatures to pass their lives so shabbily? Why should one man be worse off than another? And that sensation of a spiritual kinship between himself [257] and all the underlings of the world, which had first come to him as he stood on Westminster Bridge, returned like a wave of melancholy over his heart. ”

“ The marriage of true minds, so rare and so desirable, made formal marriage vulgar. There was something impossible in that astounding ceremony by which society revealed its strain of primitive savagery. How could a man and woman, sensitive to beautiful things, their hearts vibrating with the awful music of creation, prank themselves out like negroes at a fair, and march into a public building to advertise mankind of what they were about to do? The marriage of true minds did not admit impediments like these.
The thorns of life pressed less roughly against his spirit as he talked with Hero. ”

“ The soul has her imperial moments when she exercises a prerogative that reason cannot take away; when the toilsome knowledge gathered together by the senses falls into shards under her feet, and she enters into possession of herself, freed from the bonds and trammels cast about her by the material brain. In that moment Alistair did not think—he knew, knew well, more surely than if a voice from the beyond had spoken it in his ear, that he was an immortal spirit inhabiting eternity. ”

“ She knew that Vanbrugh held opinions which she had been accustomed to hear described in the venomous language of her creed as infidelity, and which she had been taught to attribute to moral perversity rather than to mental aberration. Such a man was not the father-in-law she would have chosen for her son, though she had resigned herself to the relationship as an inevitable evil, the flaw inseparable from all human arrangements. While it pleased her to see that he liked Alistair, she watched with secret uneasiness Alistair’s unaffected liking for him. ”

“ Alistair Stuart assumed the character of a high-priest among the pagans, as they chose to call themselves—poets whose verses echoed still more faintly the faint autumnal sighs of Verlaine; wits whose epigrams were brilliant with the phosphorescence of corruption; men in whom genius was a vice, and vice an affectation. Hatred of the middle classes was the watchword of this sect, which was recruited from penniless younger sons, from university failures, from a whole class for whom the Protestant Church has no refuge, but who in Catholic countries end often in the monastery. ”

“ The proprieties of the cupboard-door were equally loathsome to both; the hackneyed dance of society, for ever whirling giddily round on the skirts of the Divorce Court maelstrom, was equally repellent.
The attitude of the scientist contained an enigma for Alistair, whose intellect, wavering and searching like a flame in the wind, contrasted with Vanbrugh’s as the strength of fire contrasts with the strength of steel. To him there appeared something stubborn and unreasonable in the scientist’s morality, which substituted collective Teutonic instinct for the voice of God. ”

“ His mind presented him with two contrasted pictures—the felon of civilization, in his dreadful garb, numbered and branded like a chattel, drudging in the stone quarries under the warder’s eye; and that sufferer of the antique world, drawn out of some fetid Eastern gaol, clad in the royal robe and crown, and marched in solemn priest-led procession to the top of a Syrian hill to be put to death for the salvation of the people. The sin-bearer, the redeemer—surely every criminal was such! “Don’t you see,” he said suddenly to the astonished anthropologist, “that they were right? ”

“ It is as if diseased human nature instinctively sought its own remedy, as the suffering animal seeks out the herb possessed of healing powers.
As Alistair Stuart took his way through the mean streets of Lambeth and Vauxhall, with their narrow dirty pavements, their scanty shops at the street-corners and their taverns in which the only touches of brightness and prosperity seemed concentrated, he felt the temptation growing strong upon him. ”

“ Molly screamed, as she saw him turning from her. “Alistair! Alistair!”
She cast herself on the ground before him and caught him by the foot, in a paroxysm of sobs and wails.
“I’m very sorry for you, Molly. I’m not angry [262] with you at all; I’ve no right to be; but I can’t live with you any longer; you must see that. I fancied it would come to this sooner or later. I don’t blame you; I dare say I ought to blame myself. But I can’t live on money that another man gives you; you must know that well enough.” ”

“ A moist wind thick with delicious sea-smells, that mounted in the brain like wine, lifted him out of his vexed meditation as the steamer drew clear of the tangled lights of Spithead and came out on the wide moonlit pavement of the sea. His mother joined him on the deck, and they sat and watched the broad moon sail aloft like a luminous balloon scattering glory.
“I should like it to be like this always,” Alistair sighed in ecstasy. ”

“ And over all the summer haze lay like a spell of strong imagination, and conjured up a legendary world.
It was a leaf of poetry that lay outspread before him, and he read it with a poet’s eye. The faculty of toil, the long labour of the midnight lamp, the fortunate strategy of words, had been denied to Alistair Stuart, and therefore he was not a poet. Remained the gift of wonder and of worship, and by that talisman he still had power to people the sweeping landscape with mysterious life ”

“ A whole generation in England had endured an experience more or less like Alistair’s, and the literature of the age still breathes a suppressed bitterness against the cruelties of Evangelicalism. The persecution was all the more oppressive because it was not sanctioned by any public authority, nor embodied in any law. It was carried on privately, around every hearth, and in every hour of family life, poisoning the springs of truthfulness and self-respect, and breaking the hearts of the young. It was the memory of such wrongs that had made easy the triumph of the Catholic reaction ”

“ In his own mind he had a husband chosen for Hero—an engineer; one of that class to whom the future seems to be assigned; sane, strong, and self-reliant; a water-drinker, like himself; a man of orderly life and wholesome instincts; an ideal father, for whom what science calls the mechanism of life was really mechanism, and nothing more; a man in whose eyes poetry-books and prayer-books were alike contemptible; one who found no weakness in himself, and tolerated none in others. ”

“ He judged of life like a novel—it is the villain who is the soul of the plot.
If he had been born fifty years before, Alistair Stuart might have been happily engaged among those who were struggling for the emancipation of Europe from the old Legitimist régime. Political liberty, the liberty that Shelley had hymned, and Mazzini plotted, and Garibaldi fought for, seemed a Dead Sea fruit to his taste, but yet at least the struggle for it had been worth waging. To-day nothing interesting, nothing heroic, was going on in the world. ”

“ Every man of genius, driven like him into exile by poverty and love of freedom, would find here a retreat in which he could rest from the storms of the world. Or if stupidity were not the curse of gold, the millionaires themselves would raise a voluntary tax to build an alms-house for Rousseau and Marat, instead of flogging them on to the work of anarchy with the sharp goads of hunger and contempt. ”

“ Alistair murmured an expression of gratitude.
“I hope you will look on me as a friend too,” the Duchess of Gloucester went on. “Will you let me speak to you frankly, and will you be frank with me in return?”
“Will you pardon me if I am?” asked Alistair. “It is easy for some men to be frank; but when I am frank I find I only shock good people.” ”

“ Life had, in fact, had nothing to offer Don Juan that he could accept as compensation for what his forefathers had possessed and lost. The misery of opposition, the misery of exile, and the misery of ruin had accumulated their shadows over his cradle. The secret of earthly happiness is to have found the work we are best fitted for, and to be doing it with all our might. ”

“ The spectacle of all these men feverishly engaged in the hunt for gold had excited Alistair in sympathy. For a moment he felt a pale reflex of their passion, and wished that he too could be among the winners instead of the losers.
“How do men make money?” he asked wistfully of the millionaire.
“No one can make money,” the rich man replied grimly, “in this world. He can only take it. And [231] the only way to take it is to be a little more greedy and cunning than the man you take it from.”
It was the gospel of Mammon. And Alistair Stuart knew that here at least he could never find salvation. ”

“ Alistair trembled.
“You mean that I ought not to have been born?”
The physician was silent.
“I am a waste product, for which science has no use. O, why not? You have found beautiful dyes in coal-tar; can you find nothing in me?”
Vanbrugh was a father fighting for his child, a zealot fighting for his faith. But he was touched by this appeal.
“I have not said that. I have only told you that you ought not to become a father. It is not your fault if you have received an evil inheritance, but it will be your fault if you pass it on.” ”

“ Never having seen his father since early childhood, and being free from any tendency to romantic idealism, the Duke was able to judge the dead man quite impartially, and to think of him as if he had been some remote ancestor, whose virtues and vices were merely matter of curiosity for his descendants.
“I wonder my mother’s own experience has not taught her the folly of thinking that a worthless man can be redeemed by a good wife,” he reflected impatiently. “Alistair takes after his father; no doubt that is why she has always loved him better than me. ”

“ Show me the man you honour, and I will show you the value of your morality. The hero of to-day is the successful cheat, the tradesman who has made a million by selling rotten food to the poor or to your own soldiers in South Africa; the bandit of the Stock Exchange; the monopolist who has broken the hearts and ruined the lives of a hundred struggling rivals, and who three hundred years ago would have been hanged as an engrosser. ”

“ Molly’s own ideal was really very similar. The Cubitt-built life was the life for which she hankered with all a woman’s thirst for the envy of other women. If the Duchess had known it she might have found in Molly a much more trustworthy ally than in Hero Vanbrugh. But she was never likely to know it. For her Molly embodied every evil influence at work in Alistair’s life. The evil had triumphed, and the best that could now be hoped for was some poor salvage from the wreck. ”

“ In Alistair the seed of genius, delicate from the first, had been choked, not by the pressure of physical needs, but by a profound moral discouragement. During the years in which genius begins to recognize itself, to try its wings, and point its first shy flight towards the empyrean, he had found himself living the life of a criminal on a ticket-of-leave. ”

“ It did not deserve even to be called vanity—it was vulgarity. Instead of the vanity of genius, it was the vulgarity of the charlatan.
Happily unconscious of the reflections passing through Lord Alistair’s mind, the Chevalier Vane was occupying his mind with the problem of his neglected volume, which Lady Alistair had laid aside. The poet of the Catholic renascence was anxious to read some of his work to the company, unworthy though they seemed to feel themselves of such a privilege, and he began forcibly turning the conversation towards the end in view. ”

“ The rebuke which Hero had administered so delicately in the matter of the royal autograph had moved him to the heart. It had been an appeal to his self-respect, a proof that she credited him with honourable instincts like her own, and at this crisis in his life the compliment was like the touch of balm upon a sore. With such a hand as Hero’s to restrain him, that plunge into the social underworld which he was contemplating lost its fascination. ”

“ He was asking this young man to surrender the sweetest [313] form of earthly happiness; what could he offer him in exchange?
“Has science nothing else to say to me? You are a physician; if I am diseased, cannot you cure me?”
Vanbrugh was disconcerted.
“We are only groping our way as yet,” he answered mildly. “Remember that all knowledge was forbidden by the priesthood for a thousand years. We are only in the beginning of a better age.”
“The age in which there will be no men like me!” Alistair commented. “And in the meantime science has no gospel for me.” ”