Piccadilly Part 5

"Oh, nothing, mamma. Lord Frank has been looking for a letter in the recess. You don't happen to have put it up with yours, do you?"

"No, my dear, I think not," said Lady Broadhem, looking through a bundle. "Who was it to, Lord Frank, if you will pardon my curiosity? I shall find it more easily if you will give me the address."

"n.o.body in particular," said I, "so it does not matter; you can keep it and read it. It is a riddle; that is what has been amusing us so much.

Lady Ursula has been making such absurd attempts to guess it. Good-bye, Lady Broadhem. Here is the servant come to say that my fly is at the door."

"Good gracious! Why, where are you going?" said she, evidently imagining that her daughter and I had had some thrilling episode, and that I was going away in a huff, so I determined to mystify her still more.

"Oh, only to Flityville to get everything ready; you know what a state the place is in. Now," and I looked tenderly into the amazed face of Lady Ursula, "I shall indeed have an object in putting it in order, and I shall expect you and Lady Ursula to come some day soon and suggest the improvements. I have only one request to make before leaving, and I do so, Lady Ursula, in the presence of your mother and sister; and that is, that until I see you again, the subject of our conversation just now may never be alluded to between yourselves. Trust in me, Lady Broadhem," I said, taking her hand affectionately, "and promise me you will not ask Lady Ursula what I have just told her; if you do," I whispered, "you will spoil all," and I looked happy and mysterious. "Do you promise?"

"I do," said Lady Broadhem.

"And now, Lady Ursula," I said, crossing over to her and taking her hand, "once more good-bye, and"--I went on in so low a tone that it was impossible for Lady Broadhem to overhear it, but it made her feel sure that all was arranged between us--"you have got the most terrible secret of my life. I know I can trust you. You have seen me"--and I formed the word with my lips rather than uttered it with my breath--"MAD! Hush!"

for Lady Ursula gave a quick exclamation, and almost fainted with alarm; "I am myself again now. Remember my happiness is in your keeping"--this out loud for Lady Broadhem's benefit. "I am going to say good-bye to Lady d.i.c.kiefield, and you shall hear from me when I can receive you at Flityville."

I am endowed with a somewhat remarkable faculty, which I have not been in the habit of alluding to, partly because my friends think me ridiculous if I do, and partly because I never could see any use in it, but I do nevertheless possess the power of seeing in the dark. Not after the manner of cats--the objects which actually exist--but images which sometimes appear as the condensations of a white misty-looking substance, and sometimes take a distinctly bright luminous appearance.

As I gaze into absolute darkness, I first see a cloud, which gradually seems to solidify into a shape, either of an animal or some definite object. In the case of the more brilliant image, the appearance is immediate and evanescent. It comes and goes like a flash, and the subject is generally significant and beautiful. Perhaps some of my readers may be familiar with this phenomenon, and may account for it as being the result of what they call imagination, which is only putting the difficulty one step back; or may adopt the wiser course which I have followed, and not endeavour to account for it at all. Whatever be its origin, the fact remains, and I only advert to it now, as it is the best ill.u.s.tration I can think of to describe the mental process through which I pa.s.sed in the train on my way to Flityville. My mind seemed at first a white mist--a blank sheet of paper. My interview with Lady Ursula had produced this effect upon it. Gradually, and quite unconsciously to myself, so far as any mental effort was concerned, my thoughts seemed to condense into a definite plan of action; now and then a brilliant idea would appear like a flash, and vanish sometimes before I could catch it; but in so far as the complication in which Grandon, Ursula, the Broadhem family, and myself were concerned, I seemed to see my way, or at all events to feel sure that my way would be shown to me, if I let my inspirations guide me. When once one achieves this thorough confidence in one's inspirations, the journey of life becomes simplified. You never wonder what is round the next corner, and begin to prepare for unknown contingencies; but you wait till the corner is turned, and the contingency arrives, and pa.s.sively allow your mind to crystallise itself into a plan of action. At this moment, of course, I have no more notion what is going to happen to me than you have. Divest your mind, my friend, that I know anything more of the plot of this story of my life which you are reading than you do. I positively have not the slightest idea what either I or any of the ladies and gentlemen to whom I have introduced you are likely to do, or how it is all going to end. I have told you the mental process under which I act; and, of course, this is the mere record of those inspirations. Very often the most unlikely things occur to me all of a sudden: thus, while my mind was, as it were, trifling with the events which I have recounted, and throwing them into a variety of combinations, it flashed upon me in the most irrelevant manner that I would send 4000 anonymously to the Bishop of London's fund. In another second the unconscious train of thought which led me to this determination revealed itself. "Here," said I, "have I been attacking this poor colonial bishop and the Establishment to which he belongs, and what have I given him in return? I expose the abuses of his theological and ecclesiastical system, but I provide him with no remedy.

I fling one big stone at the crystal palace in which Protestantism is shrivelling away, and another big stone at the crystal palace in which Catholicism is rotting, and I offer them in exchange the cuc.u.mber-frame under which I am myself squatting uncomfortably. I owe them an apology.

Unfortunately I have not yet found either the man or the body of men who do not prefer hard cash to an apology--provided, of course, it be properly proportioned to the susceptibility of their feelings or the delicacy of their sense of honour. Fairly, now," I asked myself, "if it was put to the Bench of Bishops, would they consider 5000 sufficient to compensate the Church for the expressions I made use of to one of their order?" "More than sufficient," myself replied. "Then we will make it four thousand." But the whole merit of the action lies in the anonymous, and so n.o.body knows till they read this who it was made that munificent donation. That I should have afterwards changed my mind, and answered the advertis.e.m.e.nt of the committee, which appeared in the "agony" column of the 'Times,' who wanted to know how I wished the money applied, by a request that it should be paid back to my account at the Bank, does not affect the question; I merely wished to show the nature of my impulses, and the readiness with which I act upon them.

Some days elapsed after my arrival at Flityville before I felt moved to write to Grandon. The fact is, I was writing this record of my trials for the world in general, and did not know what to say to him in particular. At length, feeling that I owed him an explanation, I wrote as follows:--

"FLITYVILLE, _March 19_.

"You are doubtless surprised, my dear fellow," I began, "at my turning myself into a hermit at this most inopportune season of the year; but the fact is, that shortly after you left d.i.c.kiefield, I became so deeply impressed with the responsibility of the great work I had undertaken, that I perceived that a period of retirement and repose was absolutely necessary with a view to the elaboration of some system which should enable me to grapple with the great moral and social questions upon which I am engaged.

"Diverting my anxious gaze from Christendom generally, I concentrated it upon my own country, in the hope that I might discover the root of its disease. Morbid activity of the national brain, utterly deranged action of the national heart. Those were the symptoms--unmistakable. Proximate cause also not difficult to arrive at. Due to the noxious influence of tall chimneys upon broad acres, whereby the commercial effluvium of the Plutocracy has impregnated the upper atmosphere, and overpowered the enfeebled and enervated faculties of the aristocracy; l.u.s.t of gain has supervened upon love of ease. Hence the utter absence of those n.o.ble and generous impulses which are the true indications of healthy national life. Expediency has taken the place of principle; conscience has been crushed out of the system by calculation. The life-blood of the country, instead of bounding along its veins, creeps sluggishly through them, till it threatens to stagnate altogether, and congestion becomes imminent.

"Looked at from what I may term 'externals,' we simply present to the world at large the ign.o.ble spectacle of a nation of usurers trembling over our money-bags; looked at from internals, I perceive that we are suffering from a moral opiate, to the action of which I attribute the unhappy complaints that I have endeavoured to describe. This pernicious narcotic has been absorbed by us for hundreds of years unsuspected and unperceived under the guise of a popular theology. We have become so steeped in the insane delusion, now many centuries old, that we are a Christian nation, that I antic.i.p.ate with dread the reaction which will take place when men awaken to the true character of the religious quackery with which they have been duped, and, overlooking in their frenzy the distinction which exists between ancient and modern Christianity, will repudiate the former with horror, which, after all, does not deserve to be condemned, for it has never yet been tried as a political system in any country. Individuals only profess to be theoretically governed by it. Nor would it be possible, as society is at present const.i.tuted, for any man to carry out its principles in daily life. That any statesman would be instantly ruined who should openly announce that he intended to govern the country on purely Christian principles, may be made clear to the simplest comprehension. For instance, imagine our Foreign Minister getting up in the House of Commons and justifying his last stroke of foreign policy upon the ground that we should 'love our neighbours better than ourselves, or penning a despatch to any power that we felt 'persecuted' by blessing it. When do we even do good to anybody in our national capacity, much less to them 'that hate us'? We certainly pray like Chinamen when we want to propitiate an angry Deity about the cattle-plague; but who ever heard of 'a form of prayer to be used' for nations 'who despitefully use us.'

Fancy the Chancellor of the Exchequer informing us that instead of laying up for the nation treasures upon earth, he proposed realising all that the country possessed and giving it to the poor. Christian Churchmen and statesmen do not therefore sufficiently believe in the power and efficacy of the Christian moral code to trust the nation to it alone. Hence they have invented ecclesiastical organisations and theological dogmas as anodynes; and the people have been lulled into security by the singular notion, that if they supported the one and professed to believe in the other, they were different from either Mohammedans or Bhuddists. In a word, it is the curse of England that its intellect can see truths which its heart will not embody. The more I think of it the more I am disposed to risk the a.s.sertion, that if, as is supposed, the moral code called Christian is divine, it is only not practicable, literally, by the nation for lack of national heart-faith.

I tell you this in confidence, for I am already considered so wild and visionary upon all these matters, and so thoroughly unsound, that I should not like it to be generally known, for fear of its injuring my political prospects. In the mean time it will very much a.s.sist me in arriving at some of my conclusions, if you will kindly procure for me, from any leading member of the Legislature, lay or clerical, answers to the following questions:--

"First, Whether Jonah could possibly have had anything to say to Nineveh which would not apply with equal force to this Christian metropolis?--and if so, What?

"Second, Specify the sins which were probably committed in Chorazin or Bethsaida, but which have not yet been perpetrated in London.

"Third, As statecraft (a.s.sisted by priestcraft) consists not in making the State better but richer, explain why it is easier for a collection of rich men--called a nation--to be saved, than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but not so easy for one man.

"Fourth, Does the saying that the love of money is the root of all evil apply to a nation as well as to an individual?--and if not, how does it happen that the more we acc.u.mulate wealth, the more we increase poverty and misery and crime?

"That is enough for the present. But oh! what a string of questions I could propound to these stumbling pagans, stupefied by the fatuous superst.i.tion that their country is safer than other countries which have come to judgment, because they are called by a particular name! Is there among them all not the faintest consciousness of an impending doom? or is the potency of the drug such that it is impossible to raise a cry loud enough to rouse them? Why will they go on vainly trying to solve the impossible problem of Government, never seeing that whatever system is introduced is merely a rearrangement of sinners; that voters are like cards--the more you shuffle them the dirtier they get; and that it is of no use agitating for a reform in the franchise without first agitating for a reform in the consciences of those who are to exercise it, and in the fundamental principles of the policy upon which we are to be governed.

"Wisely saith the greatest poet of the age, as yet, alas! unknown to fame:--

"Reformers fail because they change the letter, And not the spirit, of the world's design.

Tyrant and slave create the scourge and fetter-- As is the worshipper, will be the shrine.

The ideal fails, though perfect were the plan, World-harmony springs through the perfect man.

We burn out life in hot impatient striving; We dash ourselves against the hostile spears: The bale-tree, that our naked hands are riving, Unites to crush us. Ere our manhood's years, We sow the rifled blossoms of the prime, Then fruitlessly are gathered out of time.

We seek to change souls all unripe for changes; We build upon a treacherous human soil Of moral quicksand, and the world avenges Its crime upon us, while we vainly toil.

In the black coal-pit of the popular heart Rain falls, light kindles, but no flowers upstart.

Know this! For men of ign.o.ble affection, The social scheme that is, were better far Than the orbed sun's most exquisite perfection, Man needs not heaven till he revolves a star.

Why seek to win the mad world from its strife?

Grow perfect in the sanity of life."[2]

[Footnote 2: 'The Great Republic: a Poem of the Sun.' By Thomas Lake Harris. New York and London: published by the "The Brotherhood of the New Life."]

"Ah, my dear friend! how often, from my humble seat below the gangway, have I gazed upon the Treasury Bench, and wondered how it was that right hon. gentlemen, struggling to retain their dignity by sitting on each other's knees, did not perceive that the reason why great reforms perpetually fail is, not because they have not their root in some radical injustice--not because the despotisms against which they rise are in themselves right--but because those who attempt to inaugurate new and better conditions upon the surfaces of society are themselves, for the most part, desolate, darkened, and chaotic within! I am under the impression, therefore, that no reform-agitation will ever do good which is not preceded by an agitation, throughout the length and breadth of the land, in favour of the introduction, for the first time, of this old original moral code, not merely into the government of the country, but into the life of every individual. Unless that is done, and done speedily, those who are now morally stupefied will die in their torpor, and the rest who are harmless lunatics will become gibbering and shrieking demoniacs.--

Yours affectionately,

"F. V."

I had become so absorbed by the train of considerations into which I had been led, that I never thought of mentioning to Grandon the circ.u.mstances which attended my departure from d.i.c.kiefield. It was not until after I had posted my letter that it occurred to me how singular, considering the last words which pa.s.sed between us, this silence would appear. If to be odd has its drawbacks, it also has its advantages; and I felt that Grandon would be as unable to draw any conclusions from my silence as from any other erratic act of my life. After all, what could I have said? It will be time, I thought, to venture upon that very delicate ground when I get his reply. But this I was destined never to receive, and the questions I had propounded are likely to remain unanswered, for on the very next day I received the following telegram from Lady Broadhem:--

"Your immediate presence here is absolutely necessary. Delay will be fatal.

"MARY BROADHEM.

"GROSVENOR SQUARE, _20th March_."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

PART III.

SUICIDE.

PICCADILLY, _April_.

Considering the extent to which I have been digressing, it will be perhaps desirable, before I plunge again into the stormy current of my narrative, to define in a few words what, in the language of diplomacy, is termed "the situation." After I have done so, I shall feel much obliged if you will kindly "grasp" it. Briefly, it is as follows: I am telegraphed for in frantic terms by an old lady who is under the firm impression that I am engaged to be married to her daughter. I am violently in love with that daughter, but for certain reasons I have felt it my duty to account for my extraordinary conduct by informing her confidentially that I have occasional fits of temporary insanity. That daughter, I am positively a.s.sured by her mother, is no less violently attached to my most dear and intimate friend. My most dear and intimate friend returns the affection. Mamma threatens that if I do not marry her daughter, rather than allow my most dear and intimate friend to do so, she will ally the young lady to an affluent native of Bombay. So much is known. On the following points I am still in the dark:--

First, What on earth does Lady Broadhem mean by telling me to come immediately, as delay may be fatal?--to whom? to me or to Lady Ursula, or herself? My knowledge of her ladyship induces me to incline towards the latter hypothesis; the suspense is, however, none the less trying.

Second, Does Lady Ursula imagine that I know how she and Grandon feel towards each other?

Third, Is Grandon under the impression that I have actually proposed and been accepted by Lady Ursula?

Fourth, Does my conduct occasionally amount to something more than eccentricity or not?

Fifth--and this was very unpleasant--Shall I find Grandon at our joint abode? And if so, what shall I say to him?

Sixth, Have Grandon and Lady Ursula met, and did anything pa.s.s between them?