iii
it was an amazing week they spent in london. for a couple of days nelly was busied in getting “things” and “odds and ends,” and, to her credit, she dressed the part most admirably. she abjured all the imperial purples, the mediterranean blues, the shrieking lilacs that her class usually affects, and appeared at last a model of neat gaiety.
in the meantime, while these shopping expeditions were in progress, while nelly consulted with those tall, dark-robed, golden-haired and awful elegances which preside over the last mysteries of the draper and milliner, ambrose sat at home in little russell row and worked out the outlines of some fantasies that had risen in his mind. it was, in fact, during these days that he made the notes which were afterwards expanded into the curious defence of taverns, a book which is now rare and sought after by collectors. it is supposed that it was this work that was in poor palmer’s mind when the earnest man referred with a sort of gloomy reticence to meyrick’s later career. he had, in all probability, not read a line of it; but the title was certainly not a very pleasing one, judged by ordinary scholastic standards. and it must be said that the critical reception of the book was not exactly encouraging. one paper wondered candidly why such a book was ever written or printed; another denounced the author in good, set terms as an enemy of the great temperance movement; while a third, a monthly reviewer, declared that the work made his blood boil. yet even the severest moralists should have seen by the epigraph that the apes and owls and antiques hid mysteries of some sort, since a writer whose purposes were really evil and intemperate would never have chosen such a motto as: jalalúd-din praised the behaviour of the inebriated and drank water from the well. but the reviewers thought that this was unintelligible nonsense, and merely a small part of the writer’s general purpose to annoy.
the rough sketch is contained in the first of the note books, which are still unpublished, and perhaps are likely to remain so. meyrick jotted down his hints and ideas in the dingy “first floor front” of the bloomsbury lodging-house, sitting at the rosewood “davenport” which, to the landlady, seemed the last word in beautiful furniture.
the ménage rose late. what a relief it was to be free of the horrible bells that poisoned one’s rest at lupton, to lie in peace as long as one liked, smoking a matutinal cigarette or two to the accompaniment of a cup of tea! nelly was acquiring the art of the cigarette-smoker by degrees. she did not like the taste at all at first, but the wild and daring deviltry of the practice sustained her, and she persevered. and while they thus wasted the best hours of the day, ambrose would make to pass before the bottom of the bed a long procession of the masters, each uttering his characteristic word of horror and astonishment as he went by, each whirled away by some invisible power in the middle of a sentence. thus would enter chesson, fully attired in cassock, cap and gown:
“meyrick! it is impossible? are you not aware that such conduct as this is entirely inconsistent with the tone of a great public school? have the games . . . ” but he was gone; his legs were seen vanishing in a whirlwind which bore him up the chimney.
then horbury rose out of the carpet:
“plain living and clear thinking are the notes of the system. a spartan discipline — meyrick! do you call this a spartan discipline? smoking tobacco and reposing with . . . ” he shot like an arrow after the head.
“we discourage luxury by every means in our power. boy! this is luxury! boy, boy! you are like the later romans, boy! heliogabalus was accustomed . . . ” the chimney consumed palmer also; and he gave place to another.
“roughly speaking, a boy should be always either in school or playing games. he should never be suffered to be at a loose end. is this your idea of playing games? i tell you, meyrick . . . ”
the game amused nelly, more from its accompanying “business” and facial expression than from any particular comprehension of the dialogue. ambrose saw that she could not grasp all the comedy of his situations, so he invented an idyll between the doctor and a notorious and flamboyant barmaid at the “bell.” the fame of this lady ran great but not gracious through all lupton. this proved a huge success; beginning as a mere episode, it gathered to itself a complicated network of incidents and adventures, of wild attempts and strange escapes, of stratagems and ambushes, of disguises and alarms. indeed, as ambrose instructed nelly with great solemnity, the tale, at first an idyll, the simple, pastoral story of the loves of the shepherd chesson and the nymph bella, was rapidly becoming epical in its character. he talked of dividing it into twelve books! he enlarged very elaborately the defeat of the suitors. in this the dear old head, disguised as a bookmaker, drugged the whisky of the young bloods who were accustomed to throng about the inner bar of the “bell.” there was quite a long passage describing the compounding of the patent draught from various herbs, the enormous cook at the head’s house enacting a kind of canidia part, and helping in the concoction of the dose.
“mrs. belper,” the doctor would observe, “this is most gratifying. i had no idea that your knowledge of simples was so extensive. do i understand you to affirm that those few leaves which you hold in your hand will produce marked symptoms?”
“bless your dear ‘art, doctor chesson, and if you’ll forgive me for talking so to such a learned gentleman, and so good, i’m sure, but you’ll find there’s nothing in the world like it. often and often have i ‘eard my pore old mother that’s dead and gone these forty year come candlemas . . . ”
“mrs. belper, mrs. belper, i am surprised at you! are you not aware that the judicial committee of the privy council has pronounced the observance of the festival you so lightly name to be of a highly superstitious nature? your deceased mother, you were saying, will have entered into her reward forty years ago on february the second of next year? is not this the case?”
“these forty years came febbymas, i mean, and a good woman she was, and never have i seen a larger wart on the nose and her legs bad as bad for years and years!”
“these details, though, no doubt, of high personal interest, seem hardly germane to our present undertaking. however, mrs. belper, proceed in your remarks.”
“and thank you kindly, sir, and not forgetting you are a clergyman — but there! we can’t all of us be everything. and my pore mother, as i was saying, sir, she said, again and again, that if she’d been like some folks she’d a made a fortune in golden money from this very yarb i’m a-showing you, sir.”
“dear me, mrs. belper! you interest me deeply. i have often thought how wrong it is of us to neglect, as undoubtedly we do neglect, the bounteous gifts of the kindly earth. your lamented mother used this specific with remarkable success?”
“lord a mercy, doctor ‘chesson! elephants couldn’t a stood against it, nor yet whales, being as how it’s stronger than the strongest gunpowder that was ever brewed or blasted, and miles better than the nasty rubbidge you get in them doctors’ shops, and a pretty penny they make you pay for it and no better than calomel, if you ask me, sir. but be it the strongest of the strong, i’ll take my gospel oath it’s weak to what my pore mother made, and that anybody in much moddle parish would tell you, for man, woman or child who took one of mrs. marjoram’s mixtures and got over it, remember it, he would, until his dying day. and my pore old mother, she was that funny — never was a cheerfuller woman, i do believe, and when tom copus, the lame fiddler, he got married, pore mother! though she could hardly walk, her legs was that bad, come she would, and if she didn’t slip a little of the mixture into the beer when everybody was looking another way! pore, dear soul! as she said herself afterwards, ‘mirth becomes marriage,’ and so to be sure it does, and merry they all were that day that didn’t touch the beer, preferring spirits, which pore mother couldn’t get at, being locked up — a nasty, mean trick, i call it, and always will.”
“enough, mrs. belper, enough! you have amply satisfied me as to the potency of the late mrs. marjoram’s pharmacopoeia. we will, if you have no objection, mrs. belper, make the mixture — to use the words of shakespeare —‘slab and thick.’”
“and bless your kind ‘art, sir, and a good, kind master you’ve always been to me, if you ‘aven’t got enough ’ere to lay out all the lupton town, call me a dutchwoman, and that i never was, nor pore belper neither.”
“certainly not, mrs. belper. the dutch belong to a different branch of the great teutonic stock, or, if identity had ever existed, the two races have long been differentiated. i think, mrs. belper, that the most eminent physicians have recognised the beneficial effects of a gentle laxative during the treacherous (though delightful) season of spring?”
“law bless you, sir, you’re right, as you always are, or why, doctor? as my pore mother used to say when she made up the mixture: ‘scour ’em out is the right way about!’ and laugh she would as she pounded the stuff up till i really thought she would ‘a busted, and shaking like the best blancmanges all the while.”
“mrs. belper, you have removed a weight from my mind. you think, then, that i shall be freed from all unfair competition while i pay my addresses to my young friend, miss floyer?”
“as free you will be, doctor chesson, sir, as the little birds in the air; for not one of them young fellers will stand on his feet for days, and groans and ‘owls will be the best word that mortal man will speak, and bless you they will with their dying breath. so, sir, you’ll ‘ave the sweet young lady, bless her dear ‘art, all to yourself, and if it’s twins, don’t blame me!”
“mrs. belper, your construction, if i may say so, is somewhat proleptic in its character. still, i am sure that your meaning is good. ha! i hear the bell for afternoon school.”
the doctor’s voice happened to be shrill and piercing, with something of the tone of the tooth-comb and tissue-paper; while the fat cook spoke in a suety, husky contralto. ambrose reproduced these peculiarities with the gift of the born mimic, adding appropriate antic and gesture to grace the show, and nelly’s appreciation of its humours was intense.
day by day new incidents and scenes were added. the head, in the pursuit of his guilty passion, hid in the coal-cellar of the “bell,” and, rustling sounds being heard, evaded detection for a while by imitating the barks of a terrier in chase of a rat. nelly liked to hear the “wuff! wuff! wuff!” which was introduced at this point. she liked also the final catastrophe, when the odd man of the “bell” burst into the bar and said: “dang my eyes, if it ain’t the doctor! i seed his cap and gown as he run round and round the coals on all fours, a-growling ‘orrible.” to which the landlady rejoined: “don’t tell your silly lies here! how could he growl, him being a clergyman?” and all the loafers joined in the chorus: “that’s right, tom; why do you talk such silly lies as that — him being a clergyman?”
they laughed so loud and so merrily over their morning tea and these lunacies that the landlady doubted gravely as to their marriage lines. she cared nothing; they had paid what she asked, money down in advance, and, as she said: “young gentlemen will have their fun with the young ladies — so what’s the good of talking?”
breakfast came at length. they gave the landlady a warning bell some half-hour in advance, so the odd food was, at all events, not cold. afterwards nelly sallied off on her shopping expeditions, which, as might have been expected, she enjoyed hugely, and ambrose stayed alone, with his pen and ink and a fat notebook which had captured his eye in a stationer’s window.
under these odd circumstances, then, he laid the foundations of his rare and precious defence of taverns, which is now termed by those fortunate enough to possess copies as a unique and golden treatise. though he added a good deal in later years and remodelled and rearranged freely, there is a certain charm of vigour and freshness about the first sketch which is quite delightful in its way. take, for example, the description of the whole world overwhelmed with sobriety: a deadly absence of inebriation annulling and destroying all the works and thoughts of men, the country itself at point to perish of the want of good liquor and good drinkers. he shows how there is grave cause to dread that, by reason of this sad neglect of the dionysiac mysteries, humanity is fast falling backward from the great heights to which it had ascended, and is in imminent danger of returning to the dumb and blind and helpless condition of the brutes.
“how else,” he says, “can one account for the stricken state in which all the animal world grows and is eternally impotent? to them, strange, vast and enormous powers and faculties have been given. consider, for example, the curious equipments of two odd extremes in this sphere — the ant and the elephant. the ant, if one may say so, is very near to us. we have our great centres of industry, our black country and our slaves who, if not born black, become black in our service. and the ants, too, have their black, enslaved races who do their dirty work for them, and are, perhaps, congratulated on their privileges as sharing in the blessings of civilisation — though this may be a refinement. the ant slaves, i believe, will rally eagerly to the defence of the nest and the eggs, and they say that the labouring classes are liberal to the core. nay; we grow mushrooms by art, and so they. in some lands, i think, they make enormous nests which are the nuisance and terror of the country. we have manchester and lupton and leeds, and many such places — one would think them altogether civilised.
“the elephant, again, has many gifts which we lack. note the curious instinct (or intuition, rather) of danger. the elephant knows, for example, when a bridge is unsafe, and refuses to pass, where a man would go on to destruction. one might examine in the same way all the creatures, and find in them singular capacities.
“yet — they have no art. they see — but they see not. they hear — and they hear not. the odour in their nostrils has no sweetness at all. they have made no report of all the wonders that they knew. their houses are, sometimes, as ingenious as a chemical works, but never is there any beauty for beauty’s sake.
“it is clear that their state is thus desolate, because of the heavy pall of sobriety that hangs over them all; and it scarcely seems to have occurred to our ‘temperance’ advocates that when they urge on us the example and abstinence of the beasts they have advanced the deadliest of all arguments against their nostrum. the laughing jackass is a teetotaller, doubtless, but no sane man should desire to be a laughing jackass.
“but the history of the men who have attained, who have done the glorious things of the earth and have become for ever exalted is the history of the men who have quested the cup. dionysius, said the greeks, civilised the world; and the bacchic mystery was, naturally, the heart and core of greek civilisation.
“note the similitudes of vine and vineyard in old testament.
“note the quest of the san graal.
“note rabelais and la dive bouteille.
“place yourself in imagination in a gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century and assist at high mass. then go to the nearest little bethel, and look, and listen. consider the difference in the two buildings, in those who worship in one and listen and criticise in the other. you have the difference between the inebriated and the sober, displayed in their works. as little bethel is to tintern, so is sobriety to inebriation.
“modern civilisation has advanced in many ways? yes. bethel has a stucco front. this material was quite unknown to the builders of tintern abbey. advanced? what is advancement? freedom from excesses, from extravagances, from wild enthusiasms? small protestant tradesmen are free from all these things, certainly. but is the joy of adulteration to be the last goal, the final initiation of the race of men? c?lumque tueri— to sand the sugar?
“the flagons of the song of songs did not contain ginger-beer.
“but the worst of it is we shall not merely descend to the beasts. we shall fall very far below the beasts. a black fellow is good, and a white fellow is good. but the white fellow who ‘goes fantee’ does not become a negro — he becomes something infinitely worse, a horrible mass of the most putrid corruption.
“if we can clear our minds of the horrible cant of our ‘civilisation,’ if we can look at a modern ‘industrial centre’ with eyes purged of illusions, we shall have some notion of the awful horror to which we are descending in our effort to become as the ants and bees — creatures who know nothing of
calix inebrians.
“i doubt if we can really make this effort. blacks, stinks, desolations, poisons, hell’s nightmare generally have, i suspect, worked themselves into the very form and mould of our thoughts. we are sober, and perhaps the tavern door is shut for ever against us.
“now and then, perhaps, at rarer and still rarer intervals, a few of us will hear very faintly the far echoes of the holy madness within the closed door:
“when up the thyrse is raised, and when the sound
of sacred orgies flies ‘around, around.‘
“which is the sonus epulantium in ?terno convivio.
“but this we shall not be able to discern. very likely we shall take the noise of this high choir for the horrid mirth of hell. how strange it is that those who are pledged officially and ceremonially, as it were, to a rite of initiation which figures certainly a feast, should in all their thoughts and words and actions be continually blaspheming and denying all the uses and ends of feastings and festivals.
“this is not the refusal of the species for the sake of enjoying perfectly the most beautiful and desirable genus; it is the renouncing of species and genus, the pronouncing of good to be evil. the universal being denied, the particular is degraded and defiled. what is called ‘the drink curse’ is the natural and inevitable result and sequence of the ‘protestant reformation.’ if the clear wells and fountains of the magic wood are buried out of sight, then men (who must have drink) will betake them to the slime ponds and poison pools.
“in the graal books there is a curse — an evil enchantment — on the land of logres because the mystery of the holy vessel is disregarded. the knight sees the dripping spear and the shining cup pass before him, and says no word. he asks no question as to the end and meaning of this ceremony. so the land is blasted and barren and songless, and those who dwell in it are in misery.
“every day of our lives we see the graal carried before us in a wonderful order, and every day we leave the question unasked, the mystery despised and neglected. yet if we could ask that question, bowing down before these heavenly and glorious splendours and hallows — then every man should have the meat and drink that his soul desired; the hall would be filled with odours of paradise, with the light of immortality.
“in the books the graal was at last taken away because of men’s unworthiness. so it will be, i suppose. even now, the quester’s adventure is a desperate one — few there be that find it.
“ventilation and sanitation are well enough in their way. but it would not be very satisfactory to pass the day in a ventilated and sanitated hell with nothing to eat or drink. if one is perishing of hunger and thirst, sanitation seems unimportant enough.
“how wonderful, how glorious it would be if the kingdom of the great drinkers could be restored! if we could only sweep away all the might of the sober ones — the factory builders, the poison makers, the politicians, the manufacturers of bad books and bad pictures, together with little bethel and the morality of mr. mildmay, the curate (a series of negative propositions)— then imagine the great light of the great inebriation shining on every face, and not any work of man’s hands, from a cathedral to a penknife, without the mark of the tavern upon it! all the world a great festival; every well a fountain of strong drink; every river running with the new wine; the sangraal brought back from sarras, restored to the awful shrine of cor-arbennic, the oracle of the dive bouteille once more freely given, the ruined vineyard flourishing once more, girt about by shining, everlasting walls! then we should hear the old songs again, and they would dance the old dances, the happy, ransomed people, commensals and compotators of the everlasting tavern.”
the whole treatise, of which this extract is a fragment in a rudimentary and imperfect stage, is, of course, an impassioned appeal for the restoration of the quickening, exuberant imagination, not merely in art, but in all the inmost places of life. there is more than this, too. here and there one can hear, as it were, the whisper and the hint of deeper mysteries, visions of a great experiment and a great achievement to which some men may be called. in his own words: “within the tavern there is an inner tavern, but the door of it is visible to few indeed.”
in ambrose’s mind in the after years the stout notebook was dear, perhaps as a substitute for that aroma of the past in a phial which he has declared so desirable an invention. it stood, not so much for what was written in it as for the place and the circumstances in which it was written. it recalled little russell row and nelly, and the evenings at the chateau de chinon, where, night by night, they served still stranger, more delicious meats, and the red wine revealed more clearly its high celestial origin. one evening was diversified by an odd encounter.
a middle-aged man, sitting at an adjoining table, was evidently in want of matches, and ambrose handed his box with the sympathetic smile which one smoker gives to another in such cases. the man — he had a black moustache and a small, pointed beard — thanked him in fluent english with a french accent, and they began to talk of casual things, veering, by degrees, in the direction of the arts. the frenchman smiled at meyrick’s enthusiasm.
“what a life you have before you!” he said. “don’t you know that the populace always hates the artist — and kills him if it can? you are an artist and mystic, too. what a fate!
“yes; but it is that applause, that réclame that comes after the artist is dead,” he went on, replying to some objection of ambrose’s; “it is that which is the worst cruelty of all. it is fine for burns, is it not, that his stupid compatriots have not ceased to utter follies about him for the last eighty years? scotchmen? but they should be ashamed to speak his name! and keats, and how many others in my country and in yours and in all countries? the imbeciles are not content to calumniate, to persecute, to make wretched the artist in his lifetime. they follow him with their praise to the grave — the grave that they have digged! praise of the populace! praise of a race of pigs! for, you see, while they are insulting the dead with their compliments they are at the same time insulting the living with their abuse.”
he dropped into silence; from his expression he seemed to be cursing “the populace” with oaths too frightful to be uttered. he rose suddenly and turned to ambrose.
“artist — and mystic. yes. you will probably be crucified. good evening . . . and a fine martyrdom to you!”
he was gone with a charming smile and a delightful bow to “madame.” ambrose looked after him with a puzzled face; his last words had called up some memory that he could not capture; and then suddenly he recollected the old, ragged irish fiddler, the player of strange fantasies under the tree in the outskirts of lupton. he thought of his phrase about “red martyrdom”; it was an odd coincidence.
