Yeast: a Problem

‘Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!’ said Claude, laughing.

‘I don’t care sixpence now for the ideal!  I want not beauty, but some beautiful thing—a woman perhaps,’ and he sighed.  ‘But at least a person—a living, loving person—all lovely itself, and giving loveliness to all things!  If I must have an ideal, let it be, for mercy’s sake, a realised one.’

Claude opened his sketch-book.

‘We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer.  But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these degenerate days—the two poles of beauty: the milieu of which would be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics.  Look at them!  Honoria the dark—symbolic of passionate depth; Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light!  Oh, that I were a Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in this piecemeal world!’

‘You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose, from both beauties?’

‘I hope so, for my own sake.  There is no path left to immortality, or bread either, now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.’

‘I envy you your path, when it leads through such Elysiums,’ said Lancelot.

‘Come here, gentlemen both!’ cried Argemone from the bridge.

‘Fairly caught!’ grumbled Lancelot.  ‘You must go, at least; my lameness will excuse me, I hope.’

The two ladies were accompanied by Bracebridge, a gazelle which he had given Argemone, and a certain miserable cur of Honoria’s adopting, who plays an important part in this story, and, therefore, deserves a little notice.  Honoria had rescued him from a watery death in the village pond, by means of the colonel, who had revenged himself for a pair of wet feet by utterly corrupting the dog’s morals, and teaching him every week to answer to some fresh scandalous name.

But Lancelot was not to escape.  Instead of moving on, as he had hoped, the party stood looking over the bridge, and talking—he took for granted, poor thin-skinned fellow—of him.  And for once his suspicions were right; for he overheard Argemone say—

‘I wonder how Mr. Smith can be so rude as to sit there in my presence over his stupid perch!  Smoking those horrid cigars, too!  How selfish those field-sports do make men!’

‘Thank you!’ said the colonel, with a low bow.  Lancelot rose.

‘If a country girl, now, had spoken in that tone,’ said he to himself, ‘it would have been called at least “saucy”—but Mammon’s elect ones may do anything.  Well—here I come, limping to my new tyrant’s feet, like Goethe’s bear to Lili’s.’

She drew him away, as women only know how, from the rest of the party, who were chatting and laughing with Claude.  She had shown off her fancied indifference to Lancelot before them, and now began in a softer voice—

‘Why will you be so shy and lonely, Mr. Smith?’

‘Because I am not fit for your society.’

‘Who tells you so?  Why will you not become so?’

Lancelot hung down his head.

‘As long as fish and game are your only society, you will become more and more morne and self-absorbed.’

‘Really fish were the last things of which I was thinking when you came.  My whole heart was filled with the beauty of nature, and nothing else.’

There was an opening for one of Argemone’s preconcerted orations.

‘Had you no better occupation,’ she said gently, ‘than nature, the first day of returning to the open air after so frightful and dangerous an accident?  Were there no thanks due to One above?’

Lancelot understood her.

‘How do you know that I was not even then showing my thankfulness?’

‘What! with a cigar and a fishing-rod?’

‘Certainly.  Why not?’

Argemone really could not tell at the moment.  The answer upset her scheme entirely.

‘Might not that very admiration of nature have been an act of worship?’ continued our hero.  ‘How can we better glorify the worker than by delighting in his work?’

‘Ah!’ sighed the lady, ‘why trust to these self-willed methods, and neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts?’

‘Every feeling, Miss Lavington?’

Argemone hesitated.  She had made the good old stock assertion, as in duty bound; but she could not help recollecting that there were several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table, which seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book.

‘My temple as yet,’ said Lancelot, ‘is only the heaven and the earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the sense to be silent, and “hear my mother sing;” my priests and preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud.  Am I not well enough furnished?  Do you want to reduce my circular infinite chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one?  My sphere harmonies to the Gregorian tones in four parts?  My world-wide priesthood, with their endless variety of costume, to one not over-educated gentleman in a white sheet?  And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies, and the blue-bells ringing God’s praises, as they do in “The story without an End,” for the gross reality of naughty charity children, with their pockets full of apples, bawling out Hebrew psalms of which they neither feel nor understand a word?’

Argemone tried to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast.  Lancelot evidently meant it as such, but he eyed her all the while as if there was solemn earnest under the surface.

‘Oh, Mr. Smith!’ she said, ‘how can you dare talk so of a liturgy compiled by the wisest and holiest of all countries and ages!  You revile that of whose beauty you are not qualified to judge!’

‘There must be a beauty in it all, or such as you are would not love it.’

‘Oh,’ she said hopefully, ‘that you would but try the Church system!  How you would find it harmonise and methodise every day, every thought for you!  But I cannot explain myself.  Why not go to our vicar and open your doubts to him?’

‘Pardon, but you must excuse me.’

‘Why?  He is one of the saintliest of men!’

‘To tell the truth, I have been to him already.’

‘You do not mean it!  And what did he tell you?’

‘What the rest of the world does—hearsays.’

‘But did you not find him most kind?’

‘I went to him to be comforted and guided.  He received me as a criminal.  He told me that my first duty was penitence; that as long as I lived the life I did, he could not dare to cast his pearls before swine by answering my doubts; that I was in a state incapable of appreciating spiritual truths; and, therefore, he had no right to tell me any.’

‘And what did he tell you?’

‘Several spiritual lies instead, I thought.  He told me, hearing me quote Schiller, to beware of the Germans, for they were all Pantheists at heart.  I asked him whether he included Lange and Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his life.  He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly.  He called Boehmen a theosophic Atheist.  I should have burst out at that, had I not read the very words in a High Church review the day before, and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood which he was retailing.  Whenever I feebly interposed an objection to anything he said (for, after all, he talked on), he told me to hear the Catholic Church.  I asked him which Catholic Church?  He said the English.  I asked him whether it was to be the Church of the sixth century, or the thirteenth, or the seventeenth or the eighteenth?  He told me the one and eternal Church which belonged as much to the nineteenth century as to the first.  I begged to know whether, then, I was to hear the Church according to Simeon, or according to Newman, or according to St. Paul; for they seemed to me a little at variance?  He told me, austerely enough, that the mind of the Church was embodied in her Liturgy and Articles.  To which I answered, that the mind of the episcopal clergy might, perhaps, be; but, then, how happened it that they were always quarrelling and calling hard names about the sense of those very documents?  And so I left him, assuring him that, living in the nineteenth century, I wanted to hear the Church of the nineteenth century, and no other; and should be most happy to listen to her, as soon as she had made up her mind what to say.’

Argemone was angry and disappointed.  She felt she could not cope with Lancelot’s quaint logic, which, however unsound, cut deeper into questions than she had yet looked for herself.  Somehow, too, she was tongue-tied before him just when she wanted to be most eloquent in behalf of her principles; and that fretted her still more.  But his manner puzzled her most of all.  First he would run on with his face turned away, as if soliloquising out into the air, and then suddenly look round at her with most fascinating humility; and, then, in a moment, a dark shade would pass over his countenance, and he would look like one possessed, and his lips wreathe in a sinister artificial smile, and his wild eyes glare through and through her with such cunning understanding of himself and her, that, for the first time in her life, she quailed and felt frightened, as if in the power of a madman.  She turned hastily away to shake off the spell.

He sprang after her, almost on his knees, and looked up into her beautiful face with an imploring cry.

‘What, do you, too, throw me off?  Will you, too, treat the poor wild uneducated sportsman as a Pariah and an outcast, because he is not ashamed to be a man?—because he cannot stuff his soul’s hunger with cut-and-dried hearsays, but dares to think for himself?—because he wants to believe things, and dare not be satisfied with only believing that he ought to believe them?’

She paused, astonished.

‘Ah, yes,’ he went on, ‘I hoped too much!  What right had I to expect that you would understand me?  What right, still more, to expect that you would stoop, any more than the rest of the world, to speak to me, as if I could become anything better than the wild hog I seem?  Oh yes!—the chrysalis has no butterfly in it, of course!  Stamp on the ugly motionless thing!  And yet—you look so beautiful and good!—are all my dreams to perish, about the Alrunen and prophet-maidens, how they charmed our old fighting, hunting forefathers into purity and sweet obedience among their Saxon forests?  Has woman forgotten her mission—to look at the heart and have mercy, while cold man looks at the act and condemns?  Do you, too, like the rest of mankind, think no-belief better than misbelief; and smile on hypocrisy, lip-assent, practical Atheism, sooner than on the unpardonable sin of making a mistake?  Will you, like the rest of this wise world, let a man’s spirit rot asleep into the pit, if he will only lie quiet and not disturb your smooth respectabilities; but if he dares, in waking, to yawn in an unorthodox manner, knock him on the head at once, and “break the bruised reed,” and “quench the smoking flax”?  And yet you churchgoers have “renounced the world”!’

‘What do you want, in Heaven’s name?’ asked Argemone, half terrified.

‘I want you to tell me that.  Here I am, with youth, health, strength, money, every blessing of life but one; and I am utterly miserable.  I want some one to tell me what I want.’

‘Is it not that you want—religion?’

‘I see hundreds who have what you call religion, with whom I should scorn to change my irreligion.’

‘But, Mr. Smith, are you not—are you not wicked?—They tell me so,’ said Argemone, with an effort, ‘And is that not the cause of your disease?’

Lancelot laughed.

‘No, fairest prophetess, it is the disease itself.  “Why am I what I am, when I know more and more daily what I could be?”—That is the mystery; and my sins are the fruit, and not the root of it.  Who will explain that?’

Argemone began,—

‘The Church—’

‘Oh, Miss Lavington,’ cried he, impatiently, ‘will you, too, send me back to that cold abstraction?  I came to you, however presumptuous, for living, human advice to a living, human heart; and will you pass off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man’s mouth has a different meaning?  In one book, meaning a method of education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system of polity,—only it has never been realised;—now a set of words written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and apostates; now a universal idea; now the narrowest and most exclusive of all parties.  Really, before you ask me to hear the Church, I have a right to ask you to define what the Church is.’

‘Our Articles define it,’ said Argemone drily.

‘The “Visible Church,” at least, it defines as “a company of faithful men, in which,” etc.  But how does it define the “Invisible” one?  And what does “faithful” mean?  What if I thought Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their way, and better members of the “Invisible Church,” than the torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing bothways Protestant-Manichee Taylor?’

It was lucky for the life of young Love that the discussion went no further: Argemone was becoming scandalised beyond all measure.  But, happily, the colonel interposed,—

‘Look here; tell me if you know for whom this sketch is meant?’

‘Tregarva, the keeper: who can doubt?’ answered they both at once.

‘Has not Mellot succeeded perfectly?’

‘Yes,’ said Lancelot.  ‘But what wonder, with such a noble subject!  What a grand benevolence is enthroned on that lofty forehead!’

‘Oh, you would say so, indeed,’ interposed Honoria, ‘if you knew him!  The stories that I could tell you about him!  How he would go into cottages, read to sick people by the hour, dress the children, cook the food for them, as tenderly as any woman!  I found out, last winter, if you will believe it, that he lived on bread and water, to give out of his own wages—which are barely twelve shillings a week—five shillings a week for more than two months to a poor labouring man, to prevent his going to the workhouse, and being parted from his wife and children.’

‘Noble, indeed!’ said Lancelot.  ‘I do not wonder now at the effect his conversation just now had on me.’

‘Has he been talking to you?’ said Honoria eagerly.  ‘He seldom speaks to any one.’

‘He has to me; and so well, that were I sure that the poor were as ill off as he says, and that I had the power of altering the system a hair, I could find it in my heart to excuse all political grievance-mongers, and turn one myself.’

Claude Mellot clapped his white woman-like hands.

‘Bravo! bravo!  O wonderful conversion!  Lancelot has at last discovered that, besides the “glorious Past,” there is a Present worthy of his sublime notice!  We may now hope, in time, that he will discover the existence of a Future!’

‘But, Mr. Mellot,’ said Honoria, ‘why have you been so unfaithful to your original? why have you, like all artists, been trying to soften and refine on your model?’

‘Because, my dear lady, we are bound to see everything in its ideal—not as it is, but as it ought to be, and will be, when the vices of this pitiful civilised world are exploded, and sanitary reform, and a variety of occupation, and harmonious education, let each man fulfil in body and soul the ideal which God embodied in him.’

‘Fourierist!’ cried Lancelot, laughing.  ‘But surely you never saw a face which had lost by wear less of the divine image?  How thoroughly it exemplifies your great law of Protestant art, that “the Ideal is best manifested in the Peculiar.”  How classic, how independent of clime or race, is its bland, majestic self-possession! how thoroughly Norse its massive squareness!’

‘And yet, as a Cornishman, he should be no Norseman.’

‘I beg your pardon!  Like all noble races, the Cornish owe their nobleness to the impurity of their blood—to its perpetual loans from foreign veins.  See how the serpentine curve of his nose, his long nostril, and protruding, sharp-cut lips, mark his share of Phœnician or Jewish blood! how Norse, again, that dome-shaped forehead! how Celtic those dark curls, that restless gray eye, with its “swinden blicken,” like Von Troneg Hagen’s in the Niebelungen Lied!’

He turned: Honoria was devouring his words.  He saw it, for he was in love, and young love makes man’s senses as keen as woman’s.

‘Look! look at him now!’ said Claude, in a low voice.  ‘How he sits, with his hands on his knees, the enormous size of his limbs quite concealed by the careless grace, with his Egyptian face, like some dumb granite Memnon!’

‘Only waiting,’ said Lancelot, ‘for the day-star to arise on him and awake him into voice.’

He looked at Honoria as he spoke.  She blushed angrily; and yet a sort of sympathy arose from that moment between Lancelot and herself.

Our hero feared he had gone too far, and tried to turn the subject off.

The smooth mill-head was alive with rising trout.

‘What a huge fish leapt then!’ said Lancelot carelessly; ‘and close to the bridge, too!’

Honoria looked round, and uttered a piercing scream.

‘Oh, my dog! my dog!  Mops is in the river!  That horrid gazelle has butted him in, and he’ll be drowned!’

Alas! it was too true.  There, a yard above the one open hatchway, through which the whole force of the stream was rushing, was the unhappy Mops, alias Scratch, alias Dirty Dick, alias Jack Sheppard, paddling, and sneezing, and winking, his little bald muzzle turned piteously upward to the sky.

‘He will be drowned!’ quoth the colonel.

There was no doubt of it; and so Mops thought, as, shivering and whining, he plied every leg, while the glassy current dragged him back and back, and Honoria sobbed like a child.

The colonel lay down on the bridge, and caught at him: his arm was a foot too short.  In a moment the huge form of Tregarva plunged solemnly into the water, with a splash like seven salmon, and Mops was jerked out over the colonel’s head high and dry on to the bridge.

‘You’ll be drowned, at least!’ shouted the colonel, with an oath of Uncle Toby’s own.

Tregarva saw his danger, made one desperate bound upward, and missed the bridge.  The colonel caught at him, tore off a piece of his collar—the calm, solemn face of the keeper flashed past beneath him, and disappeared through the roaring gate.

They rushed to the other side of the bridge—caught one glimpse of a dark body fleeting and roaring down the foam-way.  The colonel leapt the bridge-rail like a deer, rushed out along the buck-stage, tore off his coat, and sprung headlong into the boiling pool, ‘rejoicing in his might,’ as old Homer would say.

Lancelot, forgetting his crutches, was dashing after him, when he felt a soft hand clutching at his arm.

‘Lancelot!  Mr. Smith!’ cried Argemone.  ‘You shall not go!  You are too ill—weak—’

‘A fellow-creature’s life!’

‘What is his life to yours?’ she cried, in a tone of deep passion.  And then, imperiously, ‘Stay here, I command you!’

The magnetic touch of her hand thrilled through his whole frame.  She had called him Lancelot!  He shrank down, and stood spell-bound.

‘Good heavens!’ she cried; ‘look at my sister!’

Out on the extremity of the buck-stage (how she got there neither they nor she ever knew) crouched Honoria, her face idiotic with terror, while she stared with bursting eyes into the foam.  A shriek of disappointment rose from her lips, as in a moment the colonel’s weather-worn head reappeared above, looking for all the world like an old gray shiny-painted seal.

‘Poof! tally-ho!  Poof! poof!  Heave me a piece of wood, Lancelot, my boy!’  And he disappeared again.

They looked round, there was not a loose bit near.  Claude ran off towards the house.  Lancelot, desperate, seized the bridge-rail, tore it off by sheer strength, and hurled it far into the pool.  Argemone saw it, and remembered it, like a true woman.  Ay, be as Manichæan-sentimental as you will, fair ladies, physical prowess, that Eden-right of manhood, is sure to tell upon your hearts!

Again the colonel’s grizzled head reappeared,—and, oh joy! beneath it a draggled knot of black curls.  In another instant he had hold of the rail, and quietly floating down to the shallow, dragged the lifeless giant high and dry on a patch of gravel.

Honoria never spoke.  She rose, walked quietly back along the beam, passed Argemone and Lancelot without seeing them, and firmly but hurriedly led the way round the pool-side.

Before they arrived at the bank, the colonel had carried Tregarva to it.  Lancelot and two or three workmen, whom his cries had attracted, lifted the body on to the meadow.

Honoria knelt quietly down on the grass, and watched, silent and motionless, the dead face, with her wide, awestruck eyes.

‘God bless her for a kind soul!’ whispered the wan weather-beaten field drudges, as they crowded round the body.

‘Get out of the way, my men!’ quoth the colonel.  ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.’  And he packed off one here and another there for necessaries, and commenced trying every restorative means with the ready coolness of a practised surgeon; while Lancelot, whom he ordered about like a baby, gulped down a great choking lump of envy, and then tasted the rich delight of forgetting himself in admiring obedience to a real superior.

But there Tregarva lay lifeless, with folded hands, and a quiet satisfied smile, while Honoria watched and watched with parted lips, unconscious of the presence of every one.

Five minutes!—ten!

‘Carry him to the house,’ said the colonel, in a despairing tone, after another attempt.

‘He moves!’  ‘No!’  ‘He does!’  ‘He breathes!’  ‘Look at his eyelids!’

Slowly his eyes opened.

‘Where am I?  All gone?  Sweet dreams—blessed dreams!’

His eye met Honoria’s.  One big deep sigh swelled to his lips and burst.  She seemed to recollect herself, rose, passed her arm through Argemone’s, and walked slowly away.

CHAPTER IV: AN ‘INGLORIOUS MILTON’

Argemone, sweet prude, thought herself bound to read Honoria a lecture that night, on her reckless exhibition of feeling; but it profited little.  The most consummate cunning could not have baffled Argemone’s suspicions more completely than her sister’s utter simplicity.  She cried just as bitterly about Mops’s danger as about the keeper’s, and then laughed heartily at Argemone’s solemnity; till at last, when pushed a little too hard, she broke out into something very like a passion, and told her sister, bitterly enough, that ‘she was not accustomed to see men drowned every day, and begged to hear no more about the subject.’  Whereat Argemone prudently held her tongue, knowing that under all Honoria’s tenderness lay a volcano of passionate determination, which was generally kept down by her affections, but was just as likely to be maddened by them.  And so this conversation only went to increase the unconscious estrangement between them, though they continued, as sisters will do, to lavish upon each other the most extravagant protestations of affection—vowing to live and die only for each other—and believing honestly, sweet souls, that they felt all they said; till real imperious Love came in, in one case of the two at least, shouldering all other affections right and left; and then the two beauties discovered, as others do, that it is not so possible or reasonable as they thought for a woman to sacrifice herself and her lover for the sake of her sister or her friend.  Next morning Lancelot and the colonel started out to Tregarva’s cottage, on a mission of inquiry.  They found the giant propped up in bed with pillows, his magnificent features looking in their paleness more than ever like a granite Memnon.  Before him lay an open Pilgrim’s Progress, and a drawer filled with feathers and furs, which he was busily manufacturing into trout flies, reading as he worked.  The room was filled with nets, guns, and keepers’ tackle, while a well-filled shelf of books hung by the wall.

‘Excuse my rising, gentlemen,’ he said, in his slow, staid voice, ‘but I am very weak, in spite of the Lord’s goodness to me.  You are very kind to think of coming to my poor cottage,’

‘Well, my man,’ said the colonel, ‘and how are you after your cold bath?  You are the heaviest fish I ever landed!’

‘Pretty well, thank God, and you, sir.  I am in your debt, sir, for the dear life.  How shall I ever repay you?’