Babylon. Volume 1

‘Churchill,’ the vicar once said to him sharply on such an occasion, ‘why don’t you mind when you’re spoken to? I said “Next!” Didn’t you hear me?’

‘I beg your pardon, zur – sir, I mean,’ Colin answered, relapsing for the moment into his original barbarism: ‘I heer’d you, but – but I was a-lookin’ at it and forgot, sir.’

The vicar gazed at the boy for a moment in mute astonishment. ‘Looking at it!’ he murmured at last, half to himself, with a curious curl about the corner of his mouth; ‘goodness gracious, what are we coming to next, I wonder! He was looking at my mezzotints! Extraordinary. Young Churchill looking at my mezzotints! – The next, you see, Colonel, is a very rare print by Cornelius Bloemart after Mieris. Exquisitely delicate engraving, as you observe; very remarkable purity and softness. A capital conjunction in fact: no burin but Bloemart’s could render so finely the delicate finish of Frans Mieris. The original is almost worthy of Gerard Douw; you’ve seen it, I dare say, at Leyden. Next, boy: next. – Looking at it! Well, I declare! He says he was looking at it! That man Churchill always was an ill-mannered, independent, upstanding sort of fellow, and after all what can you expect from his children?

In spite of occasional little episodes like this, however, Colin and the parson got on fairly well together in the long-run. The parson’s first task had been, of course, to take care that that boy’s language should be reduced to something like the queen’s English: and to that effect, Capel, the butler (better known in Wootton as the Dook, on account of his distinguished and haughtily aristocratic manners) had been instructed to point out to Colin the difference in pronunciation between the letters hess and zud, the grammatical niceties of this, these, those, they and them, and the formalities necessary to be used by men of low estate in humbly addressing their duly constituted pastors and masters. Colin, being naturally a quick boy, had soon picked up as much of all this as the Dook was able to teach him; and if there was still a considerable laxity in the matter of aspiration, and a certain irregularity in the matter of moods and tenses, that was really more the fault of the teacher than of the pupil. The Dook had been to London and even to Rome, and had picked up the elegant language of the best footmen in west-end society. Colin learnt just what the Dook taught him; he had left behind the crude West-Saxon of the court of King Alfred, on which he had been nurtured as his mother-tongue, and had almost progressed to the comparatively cultivated and cosmopolitan dialect of an ordinary modern English man-servant.

At first, little Minna was in no small degree contemptuous of Colin’s ‘vine new-vangled talkin’.’ ‘“Don’t you,” indeed,’ she cried one day in her supremely sarcastic little manner, when Colin had ventured to use that piece of superfine English in her very ears, instead of his native West-Saxon ‘don’t ‘ee;’ ‘vine things we’re comin’ to nowadays, Colin, wen the likes o’ thee goes sayin’ “don’t you.” I s’pose ‘ee want to grow up an’ be like the Dook, some o’ these vine days. Want to be a butler, an’ ‘old theeself so stiff, and talk that vine that plain volk can’t ‘ardly tell what thee’s talkin’ about. Gurt stoopid, I do call ‘ee.’ But Colin, in spite of ridicule, continued on his own way, and Minna, who had her pride and her little day-dreams on her own account, too, at last began to think that perhaps after all Colin might be in the right of it.

So, being a west-country girl with a mind of her own (like most of them), Minna set to work on her part also to correct and get rid of her pretty, melting native dialect. She went to school at the British National School (the vicar had carefully warded off that last disgrace of the age, the blatant board school, from his own village ); and even as Colin set himself to attain the lofty standard of excellence afforded him by the Dook, so did Minna do her best to follow minutely the voice and accent of the head pupil-teacher, who had actually been for three terms at the Normal College in London. There she had picked up a very noble vulgar London twang, learnt to pronounce ‘no’ as ‘na-o,’ and acquired the habit of invariably slurring over or dropping all her short unaccented syllables.

In all these splendid characteristics of the English language as currently spoken in the great metropolis, Minna endeavoured to the best of her ability to follow her leader; and at the end of a year she had so far succeeded that Colin himself complimented her on the immense advance she had lately made in her new linguistic studies.

Colin’s greatest delight, however, was still to go down in the afternoon, when the vicar was out, to the brook in the meadow, and there mix up as of yore a good big batch of plastic clay with which to model what he used to call his little images. The Dook complained greatly of the clay, ‘a nasty dirty mess, indeed, to go an’ acshally bring into any gentleman’s house, let alone the vicar’s, and him no more nor a page neither!’ but Colin managed generally to appease his anger, and to gain a grudging consent at last for the clay to be imported into the house under the most stringent sumptuary conditions. The vicar must never see it coming or going; he mustn’t be allowed to know that the Dook permitted such goings-on in the house where he was major-domo. On that point Mr. Capel was severity itself. So when the images were fairly finished, Colin used to take them out surreptitiously at night, and then hand them over to Minna Wroe, who had quite a little museum of the young sculptor’s earliest efforts in her own bedroom. She had alike the Thetis after Thorwaldsen (a heathenish, scarce half-clad huzzy, who shocked poor Mrs. Churchill’s sense of propriety immensely, until she was solemnly assured that the original stood in the vicar’s study), and the Infant Samuel after the plaster cast on the cottage mantelpiece; as well as the bust of Miss Eva, the vicar’s favourite niece, studied from life as Colin stood behind her chair at night, or handed her the potatoes at dinner. If Miss Eva hadn’t been eighteen, and such a very grand young lady, little Minna might almost have been jealous of her. But as it was – why, Colin was only the page boy, and so really, after all, what did it matter?

For three years Colin continued at the vicarage, till he was full fifteen, and then an incident occurred which gave the first final direction to his artistic impulses.

One afternoon he had been down to the brook, talking as usual with his old playmate Minna (even fifteen and thirteen are not yet very dangerous ages), when he happened, in climbing up that well-known clay cliff, to miss his foothold on the sticky slippery surface, and fell suddenly into the bed of the stream below. His head was sadly cut by the flints at the bottom, and two neighbours picked him out and carried him between them up to the vicarage. There he was promptly laid upon his own bed, while Capel sent off hurriedly for the Wootton doctor to staunch the flow of blood from the ugly cut.

When the vicar heard of the accident from the Dook, he was sitting in the drawing-room listening to Miss Eva playing a then fashionable gavotte by a then fashionable composer. ‘Is he badly hurt, Capel?’ the vicar asked, with decorous show of interest.

‘Pretty bad, sir,’ the Dook answered in his official manner. ‘I should judge, sir, by the look of it, that the boy had cut a artery, sir, or summat of that sort; leastways, the wownd is bleeding most uncommon profusely.’

‘I’ll come and see him,’ the vicar said, with the air of a man who decorously makes a sacrifice to Christian principles. ‘You may tell the poor lad, Capel, that I’ll come and see him presently.’

‘And I will too,’ Eva put in quickly.

‘Eva, my dear!’ her uncle observed with chilling dignity. ‘You had better not. The sight would be a most unpleasant one for you. Indeed, for all of us. Capel, you may tell Churchill that I am coming to see him. Eva, I’m afraid I interrupted you: go on, my dear.’

Eva played out the gavotte to the end a little impatiently, and then the vicar rose after a minute or two of decent delay (one mustn’t seem in too great a hurry to sympathise with the accidents which may befall one’s poorer neighbours), and walked in his stately leisurely fashion towards the servants’ quarters. ‘Which is Churchill’s room, Capel?’ he asked as he went along. ‘Ah, yes, this one, to be sure. Poor lad, I hope he’s better now.’

But as soon as the vicar stood within the room, which he had never entered before since Colin had used it, he had hardly any eyes for the boy or the surgeon, and could scarcely even ask the few questions which decorum demanded as to his state and probable recovery.

For the walls of Colin Churchill’s bedroom were certainly of a sort gravely to surprise and disquiet the unsuspecting vicar. All round the room, a number of large sheets of paper hung, on which were painted in bright water-colours cartoon-like copies of the engravings which formed the chief decoration of the vicar’s drawing-room.

‘Who did these?’ he asked sternly.

‘Me, sir,’ the boy answered, trembling, from the bed.

The Reverend Philip Howard-Russell started visibly. He displayed astonishment even before his own servants. In truth, he was too good a judge of art not to see at a glance that the pictures were well drawn, and that the colouring, which was necessarily original, had been harmonised with native taste. All this was disquieting enough; but more disquieting than all was another work of art which hung right on the top of Colin’s bed-head. It was a composition in clay of the Four Seasons, reproduced in bas-relief from the mezzotint in the vicar’s portfolio, over which he now at once remembered Colin had so often and so constantly lingered.

Though he ought to have been looking at the boy, the vicar’s eyes were fixed steadily during almost all the interview on this singular bas-relief. If the water-colours had merit, the vicar, as a man of taste, could not conceal from himself the patent fact that the bas-relief showed positive signs of real genius. It was really most untoward, most disconcerting! A lad of that position in life to go and model a composition in relief from an engraving on the flat, and to do it well, too! The vicar had certainly never heard of anything like it!

He said a few words of decorously conventional encouragement to Colin, told the surgeon he was delighted to hear the wound was not a serious one, and then beckoned the Dook quietly out of the room as he himself took his departure.

‘Capel,’ he said, in a low voice on the landing, ‘what on earth is the meaning of that – ur – that panel at Churchill’s bedside?’

‘Well, sir, the boy likes to make a mess with mud and water, you see,’ the butler answered submissively, ‘and I didn’t like to prevent him, because he’s a well-conducted lad in gen’ral, sir, and he seems to have took a awful fancy to this sort of imaging. I hope there ain’t no harm done, sir. I never allows him to make a mess with it.’

‘Not at all, not at all, Capel,’ the vicar continued, frowning slightly. ‘No harm in the world in his amusing himself so, of course; still’ – and this the vicar added to himself as though it were a peculiarly aggravating piece of criminality – ‘there’s no denying he has reproduced that mezzotint in really quite a masterly manner.’

The vicar went back to the drawing-room with a distressed and puzzled look upon his clean-shaven clear-cut countenance. ‘Is he badly hurt, uncle?’ asked Eva. ‘No, my dear,’ the vicar replied, testily; ‘nothing to speak of; but I’m afraid he has made himself a very singular and excellent bas-relief.’

‘A what?’ cried Eva, imagining to herself that she had overlooked the meaning of some abstruse medical term which sounded strangely artistic to her unaccustomed ears.

‘A bas-relief,’ the vicar repeated, in a disgusted tone. ‘Yes, my dear, I’m not surprised you should be astonished at it, but I said a bas-relief. He has reproduced my Bologna Four Seasons in clay, and what’s worse, Eva, he has really done it extremely well too, confound him.’

It was only on very rare occasions that the vicar allowed himself the use of such doubtful expressions, and even then he employed them in his born capacity as a Howard-Russell rather than in his acquired one as a clergyman of the Church of England.

‘Eva, my dear,’ he said again after a long pause, ‘the boy’s head is bandaged now, and after all there’s really nothing in any way in his condition to shock you. It might be as well, perhaps, if you were to go to see him, and ask Mr. Walkem whether the cook ought to make him anything in the way of jelly or beef-tea or any stuff of that sort, you know. These little attentions to one’s dependents in illness are only Christian, only Christian. And, do you know, Eva, you might at the same time just glance at the panel by the bed-head, and tell me by-and-by what you think of it. I’ve great confidence in your judgment, my dear, and after all it mayn’t perhaps be really quite so good as I’m at first sight inclined to believe it.’

When niece and uncle met again at dinner, Eva unhesitatingly proclaimed her opinion that the bas-relief was very clever (a feminine expression for every degree of artistic or intellectual merit, not readily apprehended by the ridiculous hair-splitting male intelligence). The vicar moved uneasily in his chair. This was most disconcerting. What on earth was he to do with the boy? As a man of taste, he felt that he mustn’t keep a possible future Canova blacking boots in his back kitchen; as a Christian minister, he felt that he must do the best he could to advance the position of all his parishioners; yet finally, as a loyal member of this commonwealth, he felt that he ought not to countenance people of that position in life in having tastes and occupations above their natural station. Old Churchill’s son, too! Could anything be more annoying? ‘What on earth ought we to do with him, Eva?’ he asked doubtfully.

‘Send him to London to some good artist, and see what he can make of him,’ Eva replied with astonishing promptitude. (It’s really wonderful how young people of the present day will undertake to solve the most difficult practical problems off-hand, as if there were absolutely nothing in them.)

The vicar glanced towards the Dook uneasily. ‘It’s a very extraordinary thing,’ he said, ‘for a lad of his class to go and dream of going and doing. I may be old-fashioned, Eva, my dear, but I don’t quite like it. I won’t deny that I don’t quite like it.’

‘Haven’t I read somewhere,’ Eva went on innocently, ‘that Giotto or somebody was a peasant boy who fed sheep, and that some one or other, Cimabue, I think (only I don’t know how to pronounce his name properly), saw some drawings he’d made with a bit of charcoal on some rock, and took him for his pupil, and made him into, oh, such a great painter?

I know it was such a delightfully romantic story, wherever I read it.’

The vicar coughed drily. ‘That was in the thirteenth century, my dear,’ he said, in his coldest and most repressive tone. ‘The thirteenth century was a very long time ago, Eva. Society hadn’t organised itself then, as it has done in our own day. Besides, the story has been critically doubted. Ci-ma-bu-e,’ and the vicar dwelt carefully on each syllable of the name with a little distinct intonation which mutely corrected Eva’s faulty Italian without too obtrusively exciting the butler’s attention, ‘had probably very little to do with discovering Giot-to. – Capel, this is not the green seal claret. Go and decant some green seal at once, will you. – My dear, this is a discussion which had better not be carried on before the servants.’

In three days more the Dook was regaling the gossips of the White Lion with the whole story how the vicar, with his usual artistic sensibility, had discovered merit in that lad of Churchill’s, and had found out as the thing the lad had made out of mud were really what they call a bas-relief, ‘which I’ve seen ‘em, of course,’ said the Dook, loftily, ‘in lots of palaces in Italy, carved by Jotter, and Bonnomey, and Jamberty, and all them old swells; but I never took much notice of this one o’ young Churchill’s, naterally, till the vicar came in; and then, as soon as ever he clapped eyes on it, he says at once to me, “Capel,” says he, “that’s a bas-relief.” And then, I remembered as I’d seen just the same sort of things, as I was sayin’, over in Italy, by the cart-load; but, Lord, who’d have ever thought old Sam Churchill’s son could ever ha’ done one! And now the vicar’s asted Sam to let him get the boy apprenticed to a wood-carver: and Sam’s give his consent; and next week the boy’s going off to Exeter, and going to make his fortune as sure as there’s apples in Herefordshire.’

The idea of the wood-carver may be considered as a sort of compromise on the vicar’s part between his two duties, as a munificent discoverer of rising talent, and a judicious represser of the too-aspiring lower orders. A wood-carver’s work is in a certain sense artistic, and yet it isn’t anything more, as a rule, than a decent handicraft. The vicar rather prided himself upon this clever sop to both his consciences: he chuckled inwardly over the impartial manner in which he had managed to combine the recognition of plastic merit with the equal recognition of profound social disabilities. Eva, to be sure, had stood out stoutly against the wood-carving, and had pleaded hard for a sculptor in London: but the vicar disarmed her objections somewhat by alleging the admirable precedent of Grinling Gibbons. ‘Gibbons, you know, my dear, rose to the very first rank as a sculptor from his trade as a wood-carver. Pity to upset the boy’s mind by putting him at once to a regular artist. If there’s really anything in him, he’ll rise at last; if not, it would only do him harm to encourage him in absurd expectations.’ Oh, wise inverted Gamaliels! you too in your decorous way, with your topsyturvy opportunism, cannot wholly escape the charge of quenching the spirit.

CHAPTER VI. ENTER A NEW ENGLANDER

Hiram Winthrop’s emancipation had come a little earlier, and it had come after this fashion.

It was early spring along the lake shore, and Hiram had wandered out, alone as usual, into the dense marshy scrub that fringed the Creek, near the spot where it broadens and deepens into a long blue bay of still half-frozen and spell-bound Ontario. The skunk-cabbage was coming into flower! It was early spring, and the boy’s heart was glad within him, as though the deacon, and the cord-wood, and the coming drudgery of hoeing and weeding had never existed. Perhaps, now, he should see the trappers again. He wandered on among the unbroken woods, just greening with the wan fresh buds, and watched the whole world bursting into life again after its long wintry interlude; as none have ever seen it waken save those who know the great icy lake country of North America. The signs of quickening were frequent in the underbrush. The shrill peep of the tree-frog came to him from afar through the almost silent woodland. The drumming of the redheaded woodpecker upon the hickory trunks showed that the fat white grubs were now hatching and moving underneath the bark Close to the water’s edge he scared up a snipe; and then, again, a little farther, he saw a hen hawk rise with sudden flappings from the clam-shell mound. Hark, too; that faint, swelling, distant beat! surely it was a partridge! He looked up into the trees, and searched for it diligently: and there true enough, settling, after the transatlantic manner, on a tall butternut (oh, heterodox bird!), he caught a single glimpse of the beautiful fluttering creature, as it took its perch lightly upon the topmost branches.

It was so delightful, all of it, that Hiram never thought of the time or his dinner, but simply wandered on, as a boy will, for hour after hour in that tangled woodland. What did he care, in the joy of his heart, for the coming beating? His one idea was to see the trappers. At last, he saw an unwonted sight through the trees – two men actually pushing their way along beside the river. His heart beat fast within him: could they be the trappers? Spurred on by that glorious possibility, he crept up quickly and noiselessly behind them. The men were talking quite loud to one another: no, they couldn’t be trappers: trappers always go softly, and speak in a whisper. But if they weren’t trappers, what on earth could they be do down here in the unbroken forest? Not felling wood, that was clear; for they had no axes with them, and they walked along without ever observing the lie of the timber. Not going to survey wild lands, for they had none of those strange measuring things with them (Hiram was innocent of the name theodolite) that surveyors are always peeping and squinting through. Not gunning either, for they had no guns, but only simple stout walking-sticks. ‘Sech a re-markable, on-common circumstance I never saw, and that’s true as Judges,’ Hiram said to himself, as he watched them narrowly. He would jest listen to what they were sayin’, and see if he could make out what on airth they could be doin’ down in them woods thar.

‘When I picked him up,’ one of the men was saying to the other, in a clear, distinct, delicate tone, such as Hiram had never heard before, ‘I saw it was a wounded merganser, winged by some bad shot, and fallen into the water to die alone. I never saw anything more beautiful than its long slender vermilion bill, the very colour of red sealing wax; and its clean bright orange legs and feet; and its pure white breast just tinged at the tip of each feather with faint salmon, or a dainty buff inclining to salmon. I was sorry I hadn’t got my colours with me: I’d have given anything to be able to paint him, then and there.’

Hiram could hardly contain himself with mingled awe, delight, and astonishment. He wanted to call out on the spur of the moment ‘I know that thar bird. I know him. ‘Tain’t called that name you give him, down our section, though. We call him a fisherman diver.’ But he didn’t dare to in his perfect transport of surprise and amazement. It wasn’t the strange person’s tone alone that pleased him so much, though he felt, in a vague indefinable way, that there was something very beautiful and refined and exquisitely modulated in it – the voice being in fact the measured, clearly articulate voice of a cultivated New England gentleman, such as he had never before met in his whole lifetime: it wasn’t exactly that, though that was in itself sufficiently surprising: it was the astounding fact that there was a full-grown, decently clad man, not apparently a lunatic or an imbecile, positively interesting himself in such childish things as the very colours and feathers of a bird, just the same as he, Hiram Winthrop, might have done in the blackberry bottom. The deacon never talked about the bill of a merganser! The deacon never noticed the dainty buff on the breast, inclining to salmon! The deacon never expressed any burning desire to pull out his brushes and paint it! All the men he had ever yet seen in Geauga County would have regarded the colours on the legs of a bird as wholly beneath their exalted and dignified adult consideration. Corn and pork were the objects that engaged their profound intellects, not birds and insects. Hiram had always imagined that an interest in such small things was entirely confined to boys and infants. That grown men could care to talk about them was an idea wholly above his limited experience, and almost above what the deacon would have called his poor finite comprehension.

‘Yes,’ the other answered him, even before Hiram could recover from his first astonishment. ‘It’s a lovely bird. I’ve tried to sketch him myself more than once. And have you ever noticed, Audouin, the peculiar way the tints are arranged on the back of the neck? The crest’s black, you know, glossed with green; but the nape’s white; and the colours don’t merge into one another, as you might expect, but cease abruptly with quite a hard line of demarcation at the point of junction.’

‘Jest for all the world as ef they was sewed together,’ Hiram murmured to himself inaudibly, still more profoundly astonished at this incredible and totally unexpected phenomenon. Then there were two distinct and separate human beings in the world, it seemed, who were each capable of paying attention to the coloration of a common merganser. As Hiram whispered awestruck to his own soul, ‘most mirac’lous!’

He followed them up a little farther, hanging anxiously on every word, and to his continued astonishment heard them notice to one another such petty matters as the flowering of the white maples, the twittering of the red-polls among the fallen pine-needles, the wider and ever wider circles on the water where the pickerel had leaped, nay, even the tracks left upon the soft clay that marked the nightly coming and going of the stealthy wood-chuck. Impossible: unimaginable: utterly un-diaconal: but still true! Hiram’s spirit was divided within him. At last the one who was addressed as Audouin said casually to his companion, ‘Let’s sit down here, Professor, and have our lunch. I love this lunching in the open woods. It brings us nearer to primitive nature. I suppose the chord it strikes within us is the long latent and unstruck chord of hereditary habit and feeling. It’s centuries since our old English ancestors lived that free life in the open woods of the Teutonic mainland; but the unconscious memory of it reverberates dimly still, I often think, through all our nature, and comes out in the universal love for escape from conventionality to the pure freedom of an open-air existence.’