Yeast: a Problem

At last, in despair of obtaining tidings of his cousin by any other method, Lancelot made up his mind to apply to a certain remarkable man, whose ‘conversion’ had preceded Luke’s about a year, and had, indeed, mainly caused it.

He went, . . . and was not disappointed.  With the most winning courtesy and sweetness, his story and his request were patiently listened to.

‘The outcome of your speech, then, my dear sir, as I apprehend it, is a request to me to send back the fugitive lamb into the jaws of the well-meaning, but still lupine wolf?’

This was spoken with so sweet and arch a smile, that it was impossible to be angry.

‘On my honour, I have no wish to convert him.  All I want is to have human speech of him—to hear from his own lips that he is content.  Whither should I convert him?  Not to my own platform—for I am nowhere.  Not to that which he has left, . . . for if he could have found standing ground there, he would not have gone elsewhere for rest.’

‘Therefore they went out from you, because they were not of you,’ said the ‘Father,’ half aside.

‘Most true, sir.  I have felt long that argument was bootless with those whose root-ideas of Deity, man, earth, and heaven, were as utterly different from my own, as if we had been created by two different beings.’

‘Do you include in that catalogue those ideas of truth, love, and justice, which are Deity itself?  Have you no common ground in them?’

‘You are an elder and a better man than I. . . .  It would be insolent in me to answer that question, except in one way, . . . and—’

‘In that you cannot answer it.  Be it so. . . .  You shall see your cousin.  You may make what efforts you will for his re-conversion.  The Catholic Church,’ continued he, with one of his arch, deep-meaning smiles, ‘is not, like popular Protestantism, driven into shrieking terror at the approach of a foe.  She has too much faith in herself, and in Him who gives to her the power of truth, to expect every gay meadow to allure away her lambs from the fold.’

‘I assure you that your gallant permission is unnecessary.  I am beginning, at least, to believe that there is a Father in Heaven who educates His children; and I have no wish to interfere with His methods.  Let my cousin go his way . . . he will learn something which he wanted, I doubt not, on his present path, even as I shall on mine.  “Se tu segui la tua stella” is my motto. . . .  Let it be his too, wherever the star may guide him.  If it be a will-o’-the-wisp, and lead to the morass, he will only learn how to avoid morasses better for the future.’

‘Ave Maris stella!  It is the star of Bethlehem which he follows . . . the star of Mary, immaculate, all-loving!’ . . .  And he bowed his head reverently.  ‘Would that you, too, would submit yourself to that guidance! . . .  You, too, would seem to want some loving heart whereon to rest.’ . . .

Lancelot sighed.  ‘I am not a child, but a man; I want not a mother to pet, but a man to rule me.’

Slowly his companion raised his thin hand, and pointed to the crucifix, which stood at the other end of the apartment.

‘Behold him!’ and he bowed his head once more . . . and Lancelot, he knew not why, did the same . . . and yet in an instant he threw his head up proudly, and answered with George Fox’s old reply to the Puritans,—

‘I want a live Christ, not a dead one. . . .  That is noble . . . beautiful . . . it may be true. . . .  But it has no message for me.’

‘He died for you.’

‘I care for the world, and not myself.’

‘He died for the world.’

‘And has deserted it, as folks say now, and become—an absentee, performing His work by deputies. . . .  Do not start; the blasphemy is not mine, but those who preach it.  No wonder that the owners of the soil think it no shame to desert their estates, when preachers tell them that He to whom they say, all power is given in heaven and earth, has deserted His.’

‘What would you have, my dear sir?’ asked the father.

‘What the Jews had.  A king of my nation, and of the hearts of my nation, who would teach soldiers, artists, craftsmen, statesmen, poets, priests, if priests there must be.  I want a human lord, who understands me and the millions round me, pities us, teaches us, orders our history, civilisation, development for us.  I come to you, full of manhood, and you send me to a woman.  I go to the Protestants, full of desires to right the world—and they begin to talk of the next life, and give up this as lost!’

A quiet smile lighted up the thin wan face, full of unfathomable thoughts; and he replied, again half to himself,—

‘Am I God, to kill or to make alive, that thou sendest to me to recover a man of his leprosy?  Farewell.  You shall see your cousin here at noon to-morrow.  You will not refuse my blessing, or my prayers, even though they be offered to a mother?’

‘I will refuse nothing in the form of human love.’  And the father blessed him fervently, and he went out. . . .

‘What a man!’ said he to himself, ‘or rather the wreck of what a man!  Oh, for such a heart, with the thews and sinews of a truly English brain!’

Next day he met Luke in that room.  Their talk was short and sad.  Luke was on the point of entering an order devoted especially to the worship of the Blessed Virgin.

‘My father has cast me out . . .  I must go to her feet.  She will have mercy, though man has none.’

‘But why enter the order?  Why take an irrevocable step?’

‘Because it is irrevocable; because I shall enter an utterly new life, in which old things shall pass away, and all things become new, and I shall forget the very names of Parent, Englishman, Citizen,—the very existence of that strange Babel of man’s building, whose roar and moan oppress me every time I walk the street.  Oh, for solitude, meditation, penance!  Oh, to make up by bitter self-punishment my ingratitude to her who has been leading me unseen, for years, home to her bosom!—The all-prevailing mother, daughter of Gabriel, spouse of Deity, flower of the earth, whom I have so long despised!  Oh, to follow the example of the blessed Mary of Oignies, who every day inflicted on her most holy person eleven hundred stripes in honour of that all-perfect maiden!’

‘Such an honour, I could have thought, would have pleased better Kali, the murder-goddess of the Thugs,’ thought Lancelot to himself; but he had not the heart to say it, and he only replied,—

‘So torture propitiates the Virgin?  That explains the strange story I read lately, of her having appeared in the Cevennes, and informed the peasantry that she had sent the potato disease on account of their neglecting her shrines; that unless they repented, she would next year destroy their cattle; and the third year, themselves.’

‘Why not?’ asked poor Luke.

‘Why not, indeed?  If God is to be capricious, proud, revengeful, why not the Son of God?  And if the Son of God, why not His mother?’

‘You judge spiritual feelings by the carnal test of the understanding; your Protestant horror of asceticism lies at the root of all you say.  How can you comprehend the self-satisfaction, the absolute delight, of self-punishment?’

‘So far from it, I have always had an infinite respect for asceticism, as a noble and manful thing—the only manful thing to my eyes left in popery; and fast dying out of that under Jesuit influence.  You recollect the quarrel between the Tablet and the Jesuits, over Faber’s unlucky honesty about St. Rose of Lima? . . .  But, really, as long as you honour asceticism as a means of appeasing the angry deities, I shall prefer to St. Dominic’s cuirass or St. Hedwiga’s chilblains, John Mytton’s two hours’ crawl on the ice in his shirt, after a flock of wild ducks.  They both endured like heroes; but the former for a selfish, if not a blasphemous end; the latter, as a man should, to test and strengthen his own powers of endurance. . . .  There, I will say no more.  Go your way, in God’s name.  There must be lessons to be learnt in all strong and self-restraining action. . . .  So you will learn something from the scourge and the hair-shirt.  We must all take the bitter medicine of suffering, I suppose.’

‘And, therefore, I am the wiser, in forcing the draught on myself.’

‘Provided it be the right draught, and do not require another and still bitterer one to expel the effects of the poison.  I have no faith in people’s doctoring themselves, either physically or spiritually.’

‘I am not my own physician; I follow the rules of an infallible Church, and the examples of her canonised saints.’

‘Well . . . perhaps they may have known what was best for themselves. . . .  But as for you and me here, in the year 1849. . . .  However, we shall argue on for ever.  Forgive me if I have offended you.’

‘I am not offended.  The Catholic Church has always been a persecuted one.’

‘Then walk with me a little way, and I will persecute you no more.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To . . .  To—’ Lancelot had not the heart to say whither.

‘To my father’s!  Ah! what a son I would have been to him now, in his extreme need! . . .  And he will not let me!  Lancelot, is it impossible to move him?  I do not want to go home again . . . to live there . . .  I could not face that, though I longed but this moment to do it.  I cannot face the self-satisfied, pitying looks . . . the everlasting suspicion that they suspect me to be speaking untruths, or proselytising in secret. . . .  Cruel and unjust!’

Lancelot thought of a certain letter of Luke’s . . . but who was he, to break the bruised reed?

‘No; I will not see him.  Better thus; better vanish, and be known only according to the spirit by the spirits of saints and confessors, and their successors upon earth.  No!  I will die, and give no sign.’

‘I must see somewhat more of you, indeed.’

‘I will meet you here, then, two hours hence.  Near that house—even along the way which leads to it—I cannot go.  It would be too painful: too painful to think that you were walking towards it,—the old house where I was born and bred . . . and I shut out,—even though it be for the sake of the kingdom of heaven!’

‘Or for the sake of your own share therein, my poor cousin!’ thought Lancelot to himself, ‘which is a very different matter.’

‘Whither, after you have been—?’  Luke could not get out the word home.

‘To Claude Mellot’s.’

‘I will walk part of the way thither with you.  But he is a very bad companion for you.’

‘I can’t help that.  I cannot live; and I am going to turn painter.  It is not the road in which to find a fortune; but still, the very sign-painters live somehow, I suppose.  I am going this very afternoon to Claude Mellot, and enlist.  I sold the last of my treasured MSS. to a fifth-rate magazine this morning, for what it would fetch.  It has been like eating one’s own children—but, at least, they have fed me.  So now “to fresh fields and pastures new.”’

CHAPTER XV: DEUS E MACHINÂ

When Lancelot reached the banker’s a letter was put into his hand; it bore the Whitford postmark, and Mrs. Lavington’s handwriting.  He tore it open; it contained a letter from Argemone, which, it is needless to say, he read before her mother’s:—

‘My beloved! my husband!—Yes—though you may fancy me fickle and proud—I will call you so to the last; for were I fickle, I could have saved myself the agony of writing this; and as for pride, oh! how that darling vice has been crushed out of me!  I have rolled at my mother’s feet with bitter tears, and vain entreaties—and been refused; and yet I have obeyed her after all.  We must write to each other no more.  This one last letter must explain the forced silence which has been driving me mad with fears that you would suspect me.  And now you may call me weak; but it is your love which has made me strong to do this—which has taught me to see with new intensity my duty, not only to you, but to every human being—to my parents.  By this self-sacrifice alone can I atone to them for all my past undutifulness.  Let me, then, thus be worthy of you.  Hope that by this submission we may win even her to change.  How calmly I write! but it is only my hand that is calm.  As for my heart, read Tennyson’s Fatima, and then know how I feel towards you!  Yes, I love you—madly, the world would say.  I seem to understand now how women have died of love.  Ay, that indeed would be blessed; for then my spirit would seek out yours, and hover over it for ever!  Farewell, beloved! and let me hear of you through your deeds.  A feeling at my heart, which should not be, although it is, a sad one, tells me that we shall meet soon—soon.’

Stupefied and sickened, Lancelot turned carelessly to Mrs. Lavington’s cover, whose blameless respectability thus uttered itself:—

‘I cannot deceive you or myself by saying I regret that providential circumstances should have been permitted to break off a connection which I always felt to be most unsuitable; and I rejoice that the intercourse my dear child has had with you has not so far undermined her principles as to prevent her yielding the most filial obedience to my wishes on the point of her future correspondence with you.  Hoping that all that has occurred will be truly blessed to you, and lead your thoughts to another world, and to a true concern for the safety of your immortal soul,

‘I remain, yours truly,

‘C.  LAVINGTON.’

‘Another world!’ said Lancelot to himself.  ‘It is most merciful of you, certainly, my dear madame, to put one in mind of the existence of another world, while such as you have their own way in this one!’ and thrusting the latter epistle into the fire, he tried to collect his thoughts.

What had he lost?  The oftener he asked himself, the less he found to unman him.  Argemone’s letters were so new a want, that the craving for them was not yet established.  His intense imagination, resting on the delicious certainty of her faith, seemed ready to fill the silence with bright hopes and noble purposes.  She herself had said that he would see her soon.  But yet—but yet—why did that allusion to death strike chilly through him?  They were but words,—a melancholy fancy, such as women love at times to play with.  He would toss it from him.  At least here was another reason for bestirring himself at once to win fame in the noble profession he had chosen.

And yet his brain reeled as he went upstairs to his uncle’s private room.

There, however, he found a person closeted with the banker, whose remarkable appearance drove everything else out of his mind.  He was a huge, shaggy, toil-worn man, the deep melancholy earnestness of whose rugged features reminded him almost ludicrously of one of Land-seer’s bloodhounds.  But withal there was a tenderness—a genial, though covert humour playing about his massive features, which awakened in Lancelot at first sight a fantastic longing to open his whole heart to him.  He was dressed like a foreigner, but spoke English with perfect fluency.  The banker sat listening, quite crestfallen, beneath his intense and melancholy gaze, in which, nevertheless, there twinkled some rays of kindly sympathy.

‘It was all those foreign railways,’ said Mr. Smith pensively.

‘And it serves you quite right,’ answered the stranger.  ‘Did I not warn you of the folly and sin of sinking capital in foreign countries while English land was crying out for tillage, and English poor for employment?’

‘My dear friend’ (in a deprecatory tone), ‘it was the best possible investment I could make.’

‘And pray, who told you that you were sent into the world to make investments?’

‘But—’

‘But me no buts, or I won’t stir a finger towards helping you.  What are you going to do with this money if I procure it for you?’

‘Work till I can pay back that poor fellow’s fortune,’ said the banker, earnestly pointing to Lancelot.  ‘And if I could clear my conscience of that, I would not care if I starved myself, hardly if my own children did.’

‘Spoken like a man!’ answered the stranger; ‘work for that and I’ll help you.  Be a new man, once and for all, my friend.  Don’t even make this younker your first object.  Say to yourself, not “I will invest this money where it shall pay me most, but I will invest it where it shall give most employment to English hands, and produce most manufactures for English bodies.”  In short, seek first the kingdom of God and His justice with this money of yours, and see if all other things, profits and suchlike included, are not added unto you.’

‘And you are certain you can obtain the money?’

‘My good friend the Begum of the Cannibal Islands has more than she knows what to do with; and she owes me a good turn, you know.’

‘What are you jesting about now?’

‘Did I never tell you?  The new king of the Cannibal Islands, just like your European ones, ran away, and would neither govern himself nor let any one else govern; so one morning his ministers, getting impatient, ate him, and then asked my advice.  I recommended them to put his mother on the throne, who, being old and tough, would run less danger; and since then everything has gone on smoothly as anywhere else.’

‘Are you mad?’ thought Lancelot to himself, as he stared at the speaker’s matter-of-fact face.

‘No, I am not mad, my young friend,’ quoth he, facing right round upon him, as if he had divined his thoughts.

‘I—I beg your pardon, I did not speak,’ stammered Lancelot, abashed at a pair of eyes which could have looked down the boldest mesmerist in three seconds.

‘I am perfectly well aware that you did not.  I must have some talk with you: I’ve heard a good deal about you.  You wrote those articles in the – Review about George Sand, did you not?’

‘I did.’

‘Well, there was a great deal of noble feeling in them, and a great deal of abominable nonsense.  You seem to be very anxious to reform society?’

‘I am.’

‘Don’t you think you had better begin by reforming yourself?’

‘Really, sir,’ answered Lancelot, ‘I am too old for that worn-out quibble.  The root of all my sins has been selfishness and sloth.  Am I to cure them by becoming still more selfish and slothful?  What part of myself can I reform except my actions? and the very sin of my actions has been, as I take it, that I’ve been doing nothing to reform others; never fighting against the world, the flesh, and the devil, as your Prayer-book has it.’

‘My Prayer-book?’ answered the stranger, with a quaint smile.

‘Upon my word, Lancelot,’ interposed the banker, with a frightened look, ‘you must not get into an argument: you must be more respectful: you don’t know to whom you are speaking.’

‘And I don’t much care,’ answered he.  ‘Life is really too grim earnest in these days to stand on ceremony.  I am sick of blind leaders of the blind, of respectable preachers to the respectable, who drawl out second-hand trivialities, which they neither practise nor wish to see practised.  I’ve had enough all my life of Scribes and Pharisees in white cravats, laying on man heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and then not touching them themselves with one of their fingers.’

‘Silence, sir!’ roared the banker, while the stranger threw himself into a chair, and burst into a storm of laughter.

‘Upon my word, friend Mammon, here’s another of Hans Andersen’s ugly ducks!’

‘I really do not mean to be rude,’ said Lancelot, recollecting himself, ‘but I am nearly desperate.  If your heart is in the right place, you will understand me! if not, the less we talk to each other the better.’

‘Most true,’ answered the stranger; ‘and I do understand you; and if, as I hope, we see more of each other henceforth, we will see if we cannot solve one or two of these problems between us.’

At this moment Lancelot was summoned downstairs, and found, to his great pleasure, Tregarva waiting for him.  That worthy personage bowed to Lancelot reverently and distantly.

‘I am quite ashamed to intrude myself upon you, sir, but I could not rest without coming to ask whether you have had any news.’—He broke down at this point in the sentence, but Lancelot understood him.

‘I have no news,’ he said.  ‘But what do you mean by standing off in that way, as if we were not old and fast friends?  Remember, I am as poor as you are now; you may look me in the face and call me your equal, if you will, or your inferior; I shall not deny it.’

‘Pardon me, sir,’ answered Tregarva; ‘but I never felt what a real substantial thing rank is, as I have since this sad misfortune of yours.’

‘And I have never till now found out its worthlessness.’

‘You’re wrong, sir, you are wrong; look at the difference between yourself and me.  When you’ve lost all you have, and seven times more, you’re still a gentleman.  No man can take that from you.  You may look the proudest duchess in the land in the face, and claim her as your equal; while I, sir,—I don’t mean, though, to talk of myself—but suppose that you had loved a pious and a beautiful lady, and among all your worship of her, and your awe of her, had felt that you were worthy of her, that you could become her comforter, and her pride, and her joy, if it wasn’t for that accursed gulf that men had put between you, that you were no gentleman; that you didn’t know how to walk, and how to pronounce, and when to speak, and when to be silent, not even how to handle your own knife and fork without disgusting her, or how to keep your own body clean and sweet—Ah, sir, I see it now as I never did before, what a wall all these little defects build up round a poor man; how he longs and struggles to show himself as he is at heart, and cannot, till he feels sometimes as if he was enchanted, pent up, like folks in fairy tales, in the body of some dumb beast.  But, sir,’ he went on, with a concentrated bitterness which Lancelot had never seen in him before, ‘just because this gulf which rank makes is such a deep one, therefore it looks to me all the more devilish; not that I want to pull down any man to my level; I despise my own level too much; I want to rise; I want those like me to rise with me.  Let the rich be as rich as they will.—I, and those like me, covet not money, but manners.  Why should not the workman be a gentleman, and a workman still?  Why are they to be shut out from all that is beautiful, and delicate, and winning, and stately?’

‘Now perhaps,’ said Lancelot, ‘you begin to understand what I was driving at on that night of the revel?’

‘It has come home to me lately, sir, bitterly enough.  If you knew what had gone on in me this last fortnight, you would know that I had cause to curse the state of things which brings a man up a savage against his will, and cuts him off, as if he were an ape or a monster, from those for whom the same Lord died, and on whom the same Spirit rests.  Is that God’s will, sir?  No, it is the devil’s will.  “Those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder.”’

Lancelot coloured, for he remembered with how much less reason he had been lately invoking in his own cause those very words.  He was at a loss for an answer; but seeing, to his relief, that Tregarva had returned to his usual impassive calm, he forced him to sit down, and began questioning him as to his own prospects and employment.

About them Tregarva seemed hopeful enough.  He had found out a Wesleyan minister in town who knew him, and had, by his means, after assisting for a week or two in the London City Mission, got some similar appointment in a large manufacturing town.  Of the state of things he spoke more sadly than ever.  ‘The rich cannot guess, sir, how high ill-feeling is rising in these days.  It’s not only those who are outwardly poorest who long for change; the middling people, sir, the small town shopkeepers especially, are nearly past all patience.  One of the City Mission assured me that he has been watching them these several years past, and that nothing could beat their fortitude and industry, and their determination to stand peaceably by law and order; but yet, this last year or two, things are growing too bad to bear.  Do what they will, they cannot get their bread; and when a man cannot get that, sir—’

‘But what do you think is the reason of it?’

‘How should I tell, sir?  But if I had to say, I should say this—just what they say themselves—that there are too many of them.  Go where you will, in town or country, you’ll find half-a-dozen shops struggling for a custom that would only keep up one, and so they’re forced to undersell one another.  And when they’ve got down prices all they can by fair means, they’re forced to get them down lower by foul—to sand the sugar, and sloe-leave the tea, and put—Satan only that prompts ’em knows what—into the bread; and then they don’t thrive—they can’t thrive; God’s curse must be on them.  They begin by trying to oust each other, and eat each other up; and while they’re eating up their neighbours, their neighbours eat up them; and so they all come to ruin together.’