Arminell, Vol. 1

“Miss Inglett – had Moses any personal hope to reach and establish himself in the land flowing with milk and honey, when he led Israel from the brick-kilns? He was to die within sight of the land, and not to set foot thereon.”

“But, Mr. Saltren; who are your Israel? Where are the brick-kilns? Who are the oppressors?”

“Can you ask?” The tutor paused and looked at the girl. “But I suppose you fail to see that the whole of the civilised world is an Egypt, in which some are task-masters and others slaves; some enjoy and others suffer. Miss Inglett – you have somehow invited my confidence, and I cannot withhold it. It is quite impossible that the world can go on as it has been, with one class drawing to itself all that life has to offer of happiness, and another class doomed to toil and hunger and sweat, and have nothing of the light and laughter of life.”

Arminell seated herself.

“Well,” she said, “as Giles is playing with his wooden animals, trotting out the contents of his ark; let us turn out some of the strange creatures that are stuffed in our skulls, and marshal them. I have been opening the window of my ark to-day, and sending forth enquiries, but not a blade of olive has been brought to me.”

“As for the ark of my head,” said the tutor with a bitter smile, “it is the reverse of that of Noah. He sent forth raven and dove, and the dove returned, but the raven remained abroad. With me, the dark thoughts fly over the flood and come home to roost; the dove-like ones – never.”

“I am rather disposed,” said Arminell, laughing, “to liken my head to a rookery in May. The matured thoughts are a-wing and wheeling, and the just fledged ones stand cawing at the edge of their nests, with fluttering wings, afraid to fly, and afraid to stay and be shot.”

“To be shot? – by whom?”

“Perhaps, by your wit. Perhaps by my lord’s blunderbuss.”

“I will not level any of my poor wit at them. Let your thoughts hop forth boldly that I may have a sight of them.”

An exclamation of distress from Giles.

“What is the matter?” asked Arminell, turning to her brother.

“The giraffe has broken his leg, and I want him to stand because he has such a long neck.”

“If you were manly, Giles, you would not say, the giraffe has broken his leg, but – I have broken the giraffe’s leg.”

“But I did not, Armie. He had been packed too tightly with the other beasts, and his leg was so bent that it broke.”

“Mend it with glue,” she advised.

“I can’t – it is wrong to melt glue on Sunday. Mamma would not like it.”

The conversation had been broken along with the giraffe’s leg, and neither Arminell nor young Saltren resumed it for some time. Presently the girl said, “Mr Saltren, do you know what sort of men Addison called Fribblers? They are among men what flirts are among women, drawing girls on and then disappointing them. There are plenty of flirts and fribblers in other matters. There are flirts and fribblers with great social and religious questions, who play with them, trifle with them, hover about them, simulate a lively interest in them, and then – when you expect of them a decision and action on that decision, away they fly in another direction, and shake all interest and inquiry out of their thoughts. I have no patience with such flirts or fribblers.” She spoke with a little bitterness. She was thinking of her step-mother. The tutor knew it, but did not allow her to see that he did.

“Do you not think,” he said, “that they fribble from a sense of incompetence to grapple with these questions? The problems interest them up to a certain point. Then they see that they are too large for them, or they entail consequences they shrink from accepting, consequences that will cost them too dear, and they withdraw.”

“Like the young man in the Gospel who went away sorrowful for he had great possessions. He was a fribbler.”

“Exactly. He was a fribbler. He was insincere and unheroic.”

“I could not fribble,” said Arminell vehemently. “If I see that a cause is right, I must pursue it at whatsoever consequence to myself. It is of the essence of humdrum to fribble. Do you know, Mr. Saltren, I have had a puzzling problem set before me to-day, and I shall have no rest till I have worked it out? Why is there so much wretchedness, so much inequality in the world?”

“Why was Giles’ giraffe’s leg broken?”

Arminell looked at him with surprise, suspecting that instead of answering her, he was about to turn off the subject with a joke.

“The world,” said Saltren, “is like Giles’ Noah’s Ark, packed full – over full – of creatures of all kinds, and packed so badly that they impinge on, bruise, and break each other. Not only is the giraffe’s leg broken, but so are the rim of Noah’s hat and the ear of the sheep, and the tusk of the elephant. It is a congeries of cripples. We may change their order, and we only make fresh abrasions. The proboscis of the elephant runs into the side of the lamb, and Noah’s hat has been knocked of by the tail of the raven. However you may assort the beasts, however carefully you may pack them, you cannot prevent their doing each other damage.”

Mr. Saltren turned to little Giles and said: —

“Bring us your box of bricks, my boy.”

“It is Sunday,” answered the child. “Mamma would not wish me to play with them.”

“I do not wish to make a Sabbath-breaker of you,” answered the tutor, “nor are your sister and I going to do other than build Babel with them – which is permissible of a Sunday.”

The little boy slid off his seat, went to his cupboard, and speedily produced the required box, which he gave to Mr. Saltren.

The tutor drew forth the lid. The bricks were all in place compacted in perfect order.

Then he said, with half-sneer, half-laugh, “There are no gaps between them. The whole assemblage firm as it were one block. Not a breakage anywhere, not room for a breakage.”

“No,” said Arminell, “of course not. They all fit exactly because they are all cubes. The bricks,” she laughed, “have no long necks like the giraffe, or legs or horns, or proboscis, or broad-brimmed hats, liable to be broken. Of course they fit together.”

“If you shake the ark – the least concussion produces a breakage, one or two beasts suffer. You may toss the box of bricks about; and nothing is hurt. Why?”

Arminell was impatient. “Of course the reason is plain.”

“The reason is plain. The bricks are all equal. If it were so in the world of men, there would be no jars, no fractures, no abrasions, but concord, compactness, peace.”

Arminell said nothing. She closed her eyes and sat looking at the bricks, then at the animals Giles had arranged.

The tutor said no more, but his eyes, bright and eager, were on the girl’s face.

Presently Arminell had gathered her thoughts together sufficiently to speak.

“That, then, is the solution you offer to my problem. But to me it does not seem solved. There the animals are. They are animals – and not bricks.”

“They are animals, true, but they must be shaken and shaken together, till all their excrescences are rubbed away, and then they will fit together and find sufficiency of room. That is how marbles are made. Shapeless masses of stone are put in a bag and rattled till all their edges and angles are rattled off.”

“What an ark would remain! You complain of some animals crippling others, this scheme of yours would involve a universal mutilation – the animals resolved into undistinguishable, shapeless, uninteresting trunks. The only creature that would come out scatheless would be the slug. All the rest would be levelled down to the condition of that creature – which is a digesting tube, and nothing more.” Then Arminell stood up. “It is time for me to be off,” she said; “her ladyship will be back from church, and oh! Mr. Saltren, I have interfered with the Psalms and Lessons.”

CHAPTER XI

IN THE AVENUE

According to the classic story, the Sphinx demanded of all who visited her the solution of an enigma – and that enigma was Man.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, on a quiet ordinary Sunday morning, Arminell, a young girl without experience, had been confronted with the Sphinx, and set the same enigma, an enigma involving others, like the perforated Chinese puzzle-balls, an enigma that has been essayed and answered repeatedly, yet always remains insoluble, that, as it has assumed fresh aspects, has developed new perplexities. Arminell had been wearied with the routine and restraint of social life, its commonplace duties and conventionalities, and had been fired with that generous though mistaken dislike to the insincerities and formalities of civilisation, so often found among the young – generous, because bred of truth; mistaken, because it ignores the fact that the insincerities impose on no one, and the formalities are made of mutual compromises, such as render life, social life, possible.

Arminell was in this rebellious mood, when she was brought face to face with a problem beyond her powers to unravel. She might as well, with a rudimentary knowledge of algebraic symbols, have been set to work out Euler’s proof of the Binomial Theorem. She was like Fatima when she opened Blue-Beard’s secret chamber, and saw in it an array of victims. Of these victims disclosed to her, one was Jingles, another Patience Kite; then came Captain Saltren and his wife; and next hung in the dismal cabinet of horrors, Samuel Ceely and Joan Melhuish. The world was indeed a Blue-Beard’s room. If you but turned the key you saw an array of misery and tearful faces, and hearts with blood distilling from them. It was more than that – it was a box with a Jack in it. She had touched the spring, and a monster had flown up in her face, not to be compressed and buttoned down again.

How could the facts of existence be reconciled with the idea of Divine Justice? On one side were men and women born to wealth and position and happiness; on the other, men and women denied the least of the blessings of life. Why were some of God’s creatures petted and pampered, and others kicked about and maltreated? Was the world of men so made from the beginning, or had things so come about through man’s mismanagement, and if so, where was the over-ruling Providence which governed the world? When the Noah’s Ark arrived new from the great toy-shop whence issue the planets and spheres, were all the figures round and fitted together, only afterwards in the rearrangement to impinge on and mutilate each other? Or had they been all alike in the beginning and had developed their horns and proboscises, their tusks and broad-brimmed hats? Life is a sort of pantomime, that begins with a fairy tale, leads to a transformation scene, and ends, perhaps, with low comedy. In a moment when we least expect it, ensues a blaze of light, a spectacular arrangement of performers, and then, away fall the trappings of splendour, and forth, from under them, leap out harlequin, clown, and pantaloon. The knights cast off their silver armour, the fairies shed their gauzy wings, kings and queens depose their crowns and sceptres, and there are revealed to us ordinary men and women, with streaks of paint on their faces, and patches of powder in their hair, perpetrating dismal jokes, the point of which we fancy is levelled at ourselves.

To some men and women the transformation scene arrives late in life, but to all inevitably at some time; and then when the scene on the stage before us is changed, a greater transformation ensues within.

When we were children we believed that everything glittering was gold, that men were disinterested and women sincere. The transformation scene came on us, perhaps with coruscations of light and grouping of colours and actors, perhaps without, and went by, leaving us mistrustful of every person, doubtful of everything, sceptical, cynical, disenchanted. Is not – to take a crucial case – marriage itself a grand transformation scene that closes the idyl of youth, and opens the drama of middle age? We live for a while in a fairy world, the flowers blaze with the most brilliant colours, the air is spiced as the breezes of Ceylon, angels converse with men, and sing æthereal music, manna floats down from heaven, containing in itself all sweetness; sun and moon stand still o’er us, over against each other, not to witness a conflict, as of old in Ajalon, but to brighten and prolong the day of glamour. Then the bride appears before us, as Eve appeared to Adam, unutterably beautiful and perfect and innocent, and we kneel in a rapture, and dare not breathe, dare not speak, nor stir; and swoon in an ecstasy of wonder and adoration.

Then tingle the marriage bells. The transformation scene is well set with bridesmaids and orange-blossoms, and a wedding breakfast, postboys with favours, and a shower of rice, and then – ?

The fairy tale is over. The first part of the pantomime is over. The colours have lost their brilliancy, the flowers shrivel, the scents are resolved into smells of everyday life, broiled bacon, cabbage water, and the light is eclipsed as by a November fog. The men for the way-rate, the water-rate, and the gas-rate are urgent to have a word with us. There descend on our table at every quarter most bitter bills – those of the butcher and the green-grocer, the milliner’s little account, and the heavy itemless bill from the doctor. What shall we say about our Eve, the beautiful, the all-but divine, the ideal woman? The all-but divine turns out to have a touchy temper and a twanging tongue, falls out with her cook, dismisses her, and consequently serves you cold mutton and underboiled potatoes.

The transformation is complete, and how does it leave us? In a rage at our folly? Cursing our idealism? Rasped and irritable? Withdrawing more and more from the society of our Eve, and our Eden turned to an espalier garden, to our club? So it is in many cases. The transformation scene is a trial, and certain ones there are that never recover the shock of disenchantment; but there are others, on the other hand, who endure, and to them comes in the end a reward. These continue to sit in their box, listless, paring their nails, turning the programme face downwards. Half contemptuously, wholly void of interest, they lend a dull ear to what follows, and look on with a wondering eye, convinced that the rest is farce and buffoonery and a vexation of spirit, which must however be sat through; then, little by little fresh interests arise, tiny new actors invade the stage, with sweet but feeble voices, saying nothing of point, yet full of poetry. The magic begins to work once more, the little fingers weave a spell that lays hold of heart and brain, and conjures up a new world of fantasy. The flowers re-open and flush with colour, the balmy air fans our jaded faces, again the songs of angels reach our ears, the clouds dispel, the manna falls, Eve resumes her beauty, not the old beauty of childlike innocence and freshness, but that of ripened womanhood, of sweet maternity, of self-command and self-devotion.

We sit hushed with our head in our hands, and look with intense eye, and listen with sharpened ear, and the tears rise and run down our cheeks. We have forgotten the old Eden with its fantastic imaginations, in the more matured, the richer, the fuller, and above all the more real paradise that is now revealed.

In the case of Arminell Inglett there was no enchantment of colour, no setting of tableau, for the transformation scene; it came on her suddenly but also quietly. In one day, on a quiet country Sunday, when she walked out of the dull and stuffy school, she passed, as it were, through a veil, out of childland into the realm of Sphinx.

In the evening, after a dull dinner, instead of remaining in the drawing-room with my lady, who had taken up a magazine, Arminell put a shawl over her head and shoulders, went forth into the garden, and thence to the avenue.

The evening was pleasantly warm, the weather beautiful; beneath the trees the dew did not fall heavily. A new moon was shining. The girl thought over what she had heard and seen that day – over the troubles and wrongs of Captain Saltren, driven from his occupation, and yet chained to the house that was his own, and with which he would not part; over the defiant scepticism of Patience Kite, at war in heart with God and man; over the suffering lives of Samuel and Joan, united in heart, yet severed by fate, looking to a common grave as the marriage bed, and Arminell felt almost contempt for these latter, because they accepted their lot without resentment. She thought over what young Mr. Saltren had said about his own position, and she was able to understand that it was one of difficulty and discomfort.

Then she turned her mind to the Sunday-school, where, whilst outside of it, within the narrow confines of Orleigh parish, there was so much of trouble and perplexity, my lady was placidly teaching the children to recite as parrots the names of the books of the Apocrypha, which they were not to read for the establishment of doctrine, and Captain Tubb was enunciating arrant nonsense about the names of the Sundays preceding Lent.

The avenue was composed of ancient oaks. It was reached from the garden, which intervened between the house and it. The avenue was not perfectly in line, because the lay of the land did not admit of its being carried at great length without a curve, following the slope of the hill that rose above it, and fell away below in park-land to the river.

The walk was gravelled with white spar. It commanded an exquisite view down the valley of the Ore, over rich meadow-land and pasture, dotted with clumps of trees, beech, chestnut, and Scotch pine. A line of alders marked the course of the river, to where, by means of a dam, it had been widened into a lake. On the further side of the river, the ground gently rose in grassy sweeps to the wooded hills. To the south-west the river wound away about shoulders of richly-clothed hills, closing in on each other, fold on fold. The avenue was most delightful in the evening when the setting sun gilded the valley with its slant beams, turned the trunks of the pines scarlet, and cast the shadows of the park trees a purple blue on the illuminated grass.

Oaks do not readily accommodate themselves to form avenues, they are contorted, gnarled, consequently oak avenues are rarely met with. That at Orleigh had the charm of being uncommon.

The evening was still, the sky was full of light, so much so that the stars hardly showed. The light spread as a veil from the north, from behind the Orleigh woods, and reflected itself in the dew that bathed the grass. Arminell was attached to this walk, in great measure because she could at almost all times saunter in it undisturbed.

She had not, however, on this occasion, been in it half an hour, before she saw her father coming to her. He had left his wine; there were, as it happened, no guests in the house, and he and the tutor had not many topics in common.

“Well, Armie!” he said, “I have come out to have a cigar, and lean on you. My lady told me I should find you here.”

“And, papa, I am so glad you have come, for I want to have a word with you.”

“About what, child?” Lord Lamerton was a direct man – a man in his position must be direct to get through all the business that falls to him, business which he cannot escape from, however much he may desire it.

“Papa,” said Arminell, “it is about the Saltrens.”

“What about them?”

“If you give up the manganese – what is Captain Saltren to do?”

“Stephen will find work somewhere, never fear.”

“But he cannot leave his house.”

“That he will have to sell; the railway company want to cross Chillacombe at that point. He will get a good price, far beyond the value of the house and plot of land.”

“Papa – must the manganese be given up?”

“Of course it must. I have no intention of allowing myself to be undermined.”

“But it is so cruel to the men who worked on it.”

“Manganese no longer pays for working. There has been a loss on the mine for the last five years. We are driven out of the market by the Eiffel manganese. The Germans work at less wage, and our men refuse to have their wage reduced.”

“But what are the miners to do?”

“They were given warning that the mine would be closed, as long as five years ago; and the warning has been renewed every year since. They have known that they must seek employment elsewhere. They will have to go after work, work will not come to them – it is the same in every trade. All businesses are liable to fluctuations, some to extinction. When the detonating cap was invented, the old trade of flint chipping on the Sussex downs began to languish; with the discovery of the lucifer match it expired altogether. When adhesive envelopes were introduced, the wafer-makers and sealing-wax makers were thrown out of work, and the former trade was killed outright. I was wont to harvest oak-bark annually, and put many hundreds of pounds in my pocket. Now the Americans have superseded tan by some chemical composition, and there is no further sale for bark. I am so many hundreds of pounds the poorer.”

“Yes, papa, that is true enough, but you have a resisting power in you that others have not. You have your rents and other sources of income to fall back on; these poor tradesmen and miners and artizans have none. I have read that in Manitoba the secret of the magnificent corn crops is found in this, that the ground is frozen in winter many feet deep, and remains frozen in the depths all summer, but gradually thaws and sends up from below the released water to nourish the roots of the wheat, which are thus fed by an unfailing subterranean fountain. It is so with you, you are always heavy in purse and flush in pocket, because you also have your sources always oozing up under your roots.”

“My dear Armie, my subterranean source – the manganese – is exhausted; for five years instead of being a source it has been a sink.”

“Whereas,” continued Arminell, “the poor and the artizan lie on shelfy rock, with shallow soil above it. A drought – a week of sun – and they are parched up and perish.”

“My dear girl, the analogy is false. The difference between us is between the rooted and the movable creature. Do not they live on us, eat us, consume our superfluity? We are vegetables – that root in the soil, and the tradesmen and artizans nibble and browse on us. The richer our leaf, the more succulent our juices, the more nutriment we supply to them. When they have eaten us down to the soil, they move off to other pastures and nibble and browse there. When we have recovered, and send up fresh shoots, back they come, munch, munch, munch. If one supply fails, others open. There is equipoise – I dare say there are twice as many hands employed in making matches and adhesive envelopes now, as there were of old chipping flints and making wafers.”

“That may be, but the drying up of one spring before another opens must cause distress. Where is that other one, that the necessitous may drink of it? Ishmael was dying of thirst in the desert on his mother Hagar’s lap, within a stone’s throw of a well of which neither knew till it was shown them by an angel.”

“Of course there is momentary distress, but the means of locomotion are now so great that every man can go about in quest of work. Things always right themselves in the end.”

“They do not right themselves without the crushing and killing of some in the process. Tell me, papa, how is this to be explained? I have to-day encountered two poor creatures who have loved each other for twenty years, and are too abject in their poverty to be able even now to marry. No fault of either accounts for this. Accident, misfortune, divide them – such things ought not to be.”

“But they are – they cannot be helped.”

“They ought not to be – there must be fault somewhere. Either Providence in ruling destinies rules them crooked, or the social arrangements brought about by civilization are to blame.”

“Here, Armie, I cannot follow you. I am content with the providential ordering of the world.”

“Of course you are, papa, on fifty thousand a year.”

“You interrupt me. I say I am content with the social structure as built up by civilization.”

“I have no doubt about it – you are a peer. But what I want to know is, how do the providential and social arrangements look to the Fredericks with the Empty Pockets, not what aspect they wear to Maximilian and Le Grand Monarque. Do you suppose that Captain Saltren is content that his livelihood should be snatched from him; or Patience Kite that her father and mother should have died, leaving her in infancy a waif; or Samuel Ceely, that he should have blown off his hand and blown away his life’s happiness with it, and dislocated his hip and put his fortunes for ever out of joint thereby, so as to be for ever incapacitated from making himself a home, and having a wife and little children to cling about his neck and call him father?”