CHAPTER II

THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE

The fair dealing with readers demands of us, that a narrative shall not

proceed at slower pace than legs of a man in motion; and we are still but

little more than midway across London Bridge. But if a man's mind is to

be taken as a part of him, the likening of it, at an introduction, to an

army on the opening march of a great campaign, should plead excuses for

tardy forward movements, in consideration of the large amount of matter

you have to review before you can at all imagine yourselves to have made

his acquaintance. This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride

the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man's mind at home

while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be rapid.

Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the

governing element in the composition of man, and of hid present business

here. The Tale inspirits one's earlier ardours, when we sped without

baggage, when the Impossible was wings to imagination, and heroic

sculpture the simplest act of the chisel. It does not advance, 'tis true;

it drives the whirligig circle round and round the single existing

central point; but it is enriched with applause of the boys and girls of

both ages in this land; and all the English critics heap their honours on

its brave old Simplicity: our national literary flag, which signalizes us

while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows. One may sigh for

it. An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to

see with distinctness, that man is not as much comprised in external

features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the fuller

portraiture.

After his ineffectual catching at the volatile idea, Mr. Radnor found

repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother. They had begged

him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken kerchief

for the throat. Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since

boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal month,

the white of the daisied meadow, and although he owned a light overcoat

to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to wear it for

protection. His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever the tender

request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to the control

of garments. Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over the couple

beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced waistcoat,

exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on Norwegian

peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh--horrid women of the whistling

clouts, in the pay of our doctors. He braved them; he starved the

profession. He was that man in fifty thousand who despises hostile

elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a sneezing and tumbled

host, as a lighthouse overhead of breezy fleets. The coursing of his

blood was by comparison electrical; he had not the sensation of cold,

other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse him; and so quick

was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act, that the three

successive tributaries of conduct appeared as an irreflective flash and a

gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him and

his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding.

Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so,

with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are

reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small band

of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish in

their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord,

with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad step

chargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall we not

have them turned out? He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his buoying

constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it was not, as

one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us explain to

our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in; a step

deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed: it was a

step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step; and having

youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance; and

secondly, and O how deeply truly! Love. Deep true love, proved by years,

is the advocate.

He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate's

exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them

only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by

those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.

To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.

As to that, there is no doubt: whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they

do, acquit they justify.

Whom they justify, they compliment.

They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinctions, as the

world is.

What, to them, is the spot of the error?--admitting it as an error. They

know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature. We stand forth to plead

it in proof of an adherence to Nature's laws: we affirm, that far from a

defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility. On the beloved

who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility. Our world

has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot brand an

angel.

This was another favourite sentence of Love's grand oration for the

defence. So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the

case, that they all, when the sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel,

and they smiled.

They do not smile on the condemnable.

She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him. And who,

calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful!

Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he flew

to it, he breathed, dispensed it. How conceive the clear-sighted

celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate? Not they. He knew,

for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield him

subservient responses. The world, or Puritanic members of it, had pushed

him to the trial once or twice--or had put on an air of doing so;

creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his

daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet

lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good

example to shine in the sun.

He had a secret for them.

Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his

baritone--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate

notes--should be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that

secret: there was matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in

it. And during the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast

thought on a secret so palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition

and a long year's prospect of the present day! It seemed to have been

knocked clean out of it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say. Nor had any

combinations upon the theme of business displaced it. Just before the

fall, the whole drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to

his eyes as a scene on a stage.

He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission

that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than

the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as

feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic

globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything. Only, Sanity does

not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.

Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely

little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white

waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City

Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in

its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas

of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he stood

contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic countenance,

from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a novelty to him;

unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often traversed, equally

careful that his hesitation should not be seen. A trifle more

impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and magnum of

pursiness barring the City against him. He could have laughed aloud at

the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment at London's

sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as well by the singular fit of

timidity enchaining him. Cart, omnibus, cab, van, barrow, donkey-tray,

went by in strings, broken here and there, and he could not induce his

legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened to a warning that he

would be down again if he tried it, among those wheels; and his nerves

clutched him, like a troop of household women, to keep him from the

hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth;

and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of the rutted line, you

are food for lion and jackal--the forces of the world will have you in

their mandibles.

An idea was there too; but it would not accept pursuit.

'A pretty scud overheard?' said a voice at his ear.

'For fine!--to-day at least,' Mr. Radnor affably replied to a stranger;

and gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and

laughed: 'You?' He straightened his back immediately to cross the road,

dismissing nervousness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van:

'Anything doing in the City?' For Mr. Fenellan's proper station faced

Westward.

The reply was deferred until they had reached the pavement, when Mr.

Fenellan said: 'I'll tell you,' and looked a dubious preface, to his

friend's thinking.

But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots on

the coat.

'We'll lunch; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then,' said Mr. Radnor,

adding within himself: 'Emptiness! want of food!' to account for recent

ejaculations and qualms. He had not eaten for a good four hours.

Fenellan's tone signified to his feverish sensibility of the moment, that

the matter was personal; and the intimation of a touch on domestic

affairs caused sinkings in his vacuity, much as though his heart were

having a fall.

He mentioned the slip on the bridge, to explain his: need to visit a

haberdasher's shop, and pointed at the waistcoat.

Mr. Fenellan was compassionate over the 'Poor virgin of the smoky city!'

'They have their ready-made at these shops--last year's: perhaps, never

mind, do for the day,' said Mr. Radnor, impatient for eating, now that he

had spoken of it. 'A basin of turtle; I can't wait. A brush of the coat;

mud must be dry by this time. Clear turtle, I think, with a bottle of the

Old Veuve. Not bad news to tell? You like that Old Veuve?'

'Too well to tell bad news of her,' said Mr. Fenellan in a manner to

reassure his friend, as he intended. 'You wouldn't credit it for the

Spring of the year, without the spotless waistcoat?'

'Something of that, I suppose.' And so saying, Mr. Radnor entered the

shop of his quest, to be complimented by the shopkeeper, while the

attendants climbed the ladder to upper stages for white-waistcoat boxes,

on his being; the first bird of the season; which it pleased him to hear;

for the smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone to

this brightly-constituted gentleman.