Baring-Gould Sabine
Arminell, Vol. 1
“Of course you are,” said he, “but, Tamsin, I cannot talk to you as you are behind me.”
“I do not care to see your face,” said the girl, “the back of your collar and coat are enough for me. Is that your Sunday wide-awake?”
“Yes – what have you against it?”
“Only that there is a hole in it, there” – she thrust her finger through the gap in the crown, and touched his scalp.
“I know there is, Tamsin; a coal bounced on to it from the fire.”
“Without bringing light to your brain.”
“I shall change my place,” said Archelaus; he stood up, stepped past the girl, and seated himself above her.
“Now,” said he, “I can look down on, and seek for blemishes in your head.”
“You will find none there – eh! Arkie? Shall I make my fortune with my hair? Coin it into gold and wear purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day? That is what I want and will have, and I don’t care how I get it; so long as I get it. My head and hair are not for you.”
Then she stood up, strode past Archelaus, and planted herself on the step higher than that he occupied.
“This is a queer keeping company, tandem fashion, and changing the leader,” laughed Archelaus.
“We are not keeping company,” answered Thomasine. “Tandem is best as we are, single best of all.”
“I don’t see why we should not keep company,” said the lad.
“I do,” answered Thomasine sharply, “have I not made it plain to you that I didn’t want a life of drudgery, and that I choose to have a life in which I may amuse myself?”
“Let us try to sit on the same step,” said Archelaus, “and then we can discuss the matter together, better than as we are, with one turning the back on the other.”
“There is not room, Arkie.”
“I’ll try it at all events,” said he, as he got up and seated himself beside her. “Now we are together, and can keep steady if one puts an arm round the other.”
“I will not be held by you,” said she, and mounted to the step above; then she burst out laughing, and pointed. “Do y’ look there,” she said, “there is a keeping of company would suit you.”
She indicated a pair that approached the farm. The man was lame, with a bad hip, and his right hand was furnished with two fingers only – it was Samuel Ceely. His maimed hand was thrust between the buttons of his waistcoat, and on his right arm rested the coarse red hand of Joan Melhuish.
“Do y’ look there!” exclaimed Thomasine, “are they not laughable? They have been courting these twenty years, and no nigher marriage now than when they began; it might be the same with us, were I fool enough to listen and wait for what you offer.”
“It is no laughing matter,” said the lad, “it is sad.”
“It is sad that she should be such a fool! Will his fingers grow again, and his hip right itself? She should have looked about for another lover twenty years ago, now it is too late, and I take warning from her. You, Arkie, are like Samuel Ceely, not in body but in wits, crippled and limping there.”
“Tamsin!” exclaimed Arkie, “you shall not speak like that to me.” He stood up and stepped to where she was, and seated himself again beside her. That was on the highest step, and they were now both with their backs to the granary door. He tried to take her hand.
“No, Arkie,” she said, “I speak seriously, I will not be your sweetheart. I like you well enough. You are a good tempered, nice fellow, very good natured, and always cheerful, but I won’t have you. I can’t live on fourteen shillings a week, and I won’t live in the country where there is nothing going on, but cows calving and turnips growing. There is no wickedness in either, and wickedness makes life various and enjoyable. I can read and write and cypher, and am tired of work accordingly. I want to enjoy myself. There is mistress!” she exclaimed, stood up, stepped aside, missed her footing, and fell to the bottom of the steps.
“Oh, Tamsin, if only you had let me hold you!” cried Archelaus, and ran down to raise her. “Then you would not have fallen.” She had sprained her foot and could only limp.
CHAPTER X
“SABINA GREEN.”
In the four-hundred-and-thirty-first number of the Spectator is a letter from Sabina Green, on the disordered appetite she had acquired by eating improper and innutritious food at school. “I had not been there above a Month, when being in the Kitchen, I saw some Oatmeal on the Dresser; I put two or three Corns in my Mouth, liked it, stole a Handful, went into my Chamber, chewed it, and for two Months after never failed taking Toll of every Pennyworth of Oatmeal that came into the House. But one Day playing with a Tobacco-pipe between my Teeth, it happened to break in my Mouth, and the spitting out the Pieces left such a delicious Roughness on my Tongue, that I could not be satisfied till I had champed up the remaining Part of the Pipe. I forsook the Oatmeal, and stuck to the Pipes three Months, in which time I had disposed of thirty-seven foul Pipes, all to the Boles. I left off eating of Pipes and fell to licking of Chalk. Two Months after this, I lived upon Thunderbolts, a certain long, round, bluish Stone, which I found among the Gravel in our Garden.”
Arminell’s mental appetite was as much disordered as the physical appetite of Sabina Green. Whether Gaboriau’s novels bore any analogy to the foul tobacco-pipes, we do not pretend to say, their record of vice certainly left an agreeable roughness on her mental palate, but now without any intermediate licking of chalk, she has clenched her teeth upon a thunderbolt – a question hard, insoluble, beyond her powers of mastication. Besides, she was wholly unaware that the thunderbolt had been laid in her path expressly that she might exercise her teeth upon it.
A hundred and fifty years ago, Sabina Green picked corns, licked chalk and munched tobacco pipes, and the same thing goes on nowadays. There are tens of thousands of Sabina Greens with their mouths full, and with no appetite but for tobacco-pipes or thunderbolts. We have advanced – our pipes are now meerschaum – foam of the sea.
We have known young ladies who would touch nothing but meringues, and thereby seriously impair their constitutions and complexions. We have known others who could touch nothing but literary meringues, novels, and whose digestion revolted at solid food, but who crunched flummery romance at all times of day and night, till the flummery invaded their brains, filled their mouths, frothed in their hearts; and then tired of sweets they look out for what is pungent or foul – like the old tobacco-pipes.
An unwholesome trick into which German women fall is that of “naschen,” of nibbling comfits and cakes all day long. They carry cornets of bonbons in their pockets, and have recourse to them every minute. They suffer much from disordered digestion, and fall into the green sickness, because they lack iron in the blood. How can they have iron in the blood when they eat only sugar? Our English girls have a similar infirmity, they nibble at novels, pick at the unsubstantial, innutritious stuff that constitutes fiction all day long. Do they lack iron in their moral fibre? Are their souls bloodless and faint with the green sickness? How can it be other on a diet of flummery?
The stomach of the nibbler never hungers, only craves; the appetite is supplanted by nausea. The symptoms of disorder are permanent; languor of interest, debility of principle, loss of energy in purpose, a disordered vision, and creeping moral paralysis.
If Arminell had reached the condition of one of these novel-nibblers, what she had heard would have produced no effect upon her heart or brain because neither heart nor brain would have been left in her. But she had not been a habitual novel-reader, she had read whatever came to hand, indiscriminately; and the flummery of mere fiction would never have satisfied her, because she possessed, what the novel-nibblers do not possess, intelligence. No control had been exercised over her reading, consequently she had read things that were unsuitable. She had a strong character, without having found outlets for her energy. A wise governess would have tested her, and then led her to pursuits which would have exerted her ambition and occupied her interest; but her teachers had been either wedded to routine or intellectually her inferiors. Consequently she had no special interests, but that inner eagerness and fire which would impel her to take up and follow with enthusiasm any object which excited her interest. Her friends said of Arminell with unanimity that she was a disagreeable girl, but none said she was an empty-headed one.
On reaching the house, Arminell found that lunch was over, and that her father had gone out. He had sauntered forth, as the day was fine, to look at his cedars and pines in the plantations, and with his pocket-knife remove the lateral shoots. Lady Lamerton was taking a nap previous to the resumption of her self-imposed duties at Sunday-school.
Arminell was indisposed to go to school and afternoon service in the church. After a solitary lunch she went upstairs to the part of the house where was Giles’ school-room. She had not seen her brother that day, and as the little fellow was unwell, she thought it incumbent on her to visit him.
She found the tutor, Giles Inglett (vulgo, Jingles) Saltren, in the room with the boy. Little Giles had a Noah’s Ark on the table, and was trying to make the animals stand on their infirm legs, in procession, headed by the dove which was as large as the dog, and half the size of the elephant.
Mr. Saltren sat by the window looking forth disconsolately. The child had a heavy cold, accompanied by some fever.
“If you wish to leave the school-room, Mr. Saltren,” said Arminell, “I am prepared to occupy your place with the captive.”
“I thank you, Miss Inglett,” answered the tutor. “But I have strict orders to go through the devotional exercises with Giles this afternoon, the same as this morning.”
“I will take them for you.”
“You are most kind in offering, but having been set my tale of bricks to make without straw, I am not justified in sending another into the clayfield, in my room.”
“I see – this is a house of bondage to you, Mr. Saltren. You hinted this morning that you meditated an in exitu Israel de Egypto.”
The young man coloured.
“You tread too sharply on the heels of the pied de la lettre, Miss Inglett.”
“But you feel this, though you shrink from the expression of your thoughts. You told me yourself this forenoon that you were not happy. If you leave us, whither do you propose going?”
“A journey in the wilderness for forty years.”
“With what Land of Promise in view?”
“I have set none before me.”
“None? I cannot credit that. Every man has his Land of Promise towards which he turns his face. Why leave the leeks and onions of Goshen, if you have but a stony desert in view as your pasture? I suppose the heart is a binnacle with its needle pointing to the pole – though each man may have a different pole. South of the equator, the needle points reversedly to what it pointed north of it. An anchor, an iron link, a nail even may divert the needle, but to something it must turn.”
“Miss Inglett – had Moses any personal hope to reach and establish himself in the land flowing with milk and honey, when he led Israel from the brick-kilns? He was to die within sight of the land, and not to set foot thereon.”
“But, Mr. Saltren; who are your Israel? Where are the brick-kilns? Who are the oppressors?”
“Can you ask?” The tutor paused and looked at the girl. “But I suppose you fail to see that the whole of the civilised world is an Egypt, in which some are task-masters and others slaves; some enjoy and others suffer. Miss Inglett – you have somehow invited my confidence, and I cannot withhold it. It is quite impossible that the world can go on as it has been, with one class drawing to itself all that life has to offer of happiness, and another class doomed to toil and hunger and sweat, and have nothing of the light and laughter of life.”
Arminell seated herself.
“Well,” she said, “as Giles is playing with his wooden animals, trotting out the contents of his ark; let us turn out some of the strange creatures that are stuffed in our skulls, and marshal them. I have been opening the window of my ark to-day, and sending forth enquiries, but not a blade of olive has been brought to me.”
“As for the ark of my head,” said the tutor with a bitter smile, “it is the reverse of that of Noah. He sent forth raven and dove, and the dove returned, but the raven remained abroad. With me, the dark thoughts fly over the flood and come home to roost; the dove-like ones – never.”
“I am rather disposed,” said Arminell, laughing, “to liken my head to a rookery in May. The matured thoughts are a-wing and wheeling, and the just fledged ones stand cawing at the edge of their nests, with fluttering wings, afraid to fly, and afraid to stay and be shot.”
“To be shot? – by whom?”
“Perhaps, by your wit. Perhaps by my lord’s blunderbuss.”
“I will not level any of my poor wit at them. Let your thoughts hop forth boldly that I may have a sight of them.”
An exclamation of distress from Giles.
“What is the matter?” asked Arminell, turning to her brother.
“The giraffe has broken his leg, and I want him to stand because he has such a long neck.”
“If you were manly, Giles, you would not say, the giraffe has broken his leg, but – I have broken the giraffe’s leg.”
“But I did not, Armie. He had been packed too tightly with the other beasts, and his leg was so bent that it broke.”
“Mend it with glue,” she advised.
“I can’t – it is wrong to melt glue on Sunday. Mamma would not like it.”
The conversation had been broken along with the giraffe’s leg, and neither Arminell nor young Saltren resumed it for some time. Presently the girl said, “Mr Saltren, do you know what sort of men Addison called Fribblers? They are among men what flirts are among women, drawing girls on and then disappointing them. There are plenty of flirts and fribblers in other matters. There are flirts and fribblers with great social and religious questions, who play with them, trifle with them, hover about them, simulate a lively interest in them, and then – when you expect of them a decision and action on that decision, away they fly in another direction, and shake all interest and inquiry out of their thoughts. I have no patience with such flirts or fribblers.” She spoke with a little bitterness. She was thinking of her step-mother. The tutor knew it, but did not allow her to see that he did.
“Do you not think,” he said, “that they fribble from a sense of incompetence to grapple with these questions? The problems interest them up to a certain point. Then they see that they are too large for them, or they entail consequences they shrink from accepting, consequences that will cost them too dear, and they withdraw.”
“Like the young man in the Gospel who went away sorrowful for he had great possessions. He was a fribbler.”
“Exactly. He was a fribbler. He was insincere and unheroic.”
“I could not fribble,” said Arminell vehemently. “If I see that a cause is right, I must pursue it at whatsoever consequence to myself. It is of the essence of humdrum to fribble. Do you know, Mr. Saltren, I have had a puzzling problem set before me to-day, and I shall have no rest till I have worked it out? Why is there so much wretchedness, so much inequality in the world?”
“Why was Giles’ giraffe’s leg broken?”
Arminell looked at him with surprise, suspecting that instead of answering her, he was about to turn off the subject with a joke.
“The world,” said Saltren, “is like Giles’ Noah’s Ark, packed full – over full – of creatures of all kinds, and packed so badly that they impinge on, bruise, and break each other. Not only is the giraffe’s leg broken, but so are the rim of Noah’s hat and the ear of the sheep, and the tusk of the elephant. It is a congeries of cripples. We may change their order, and we only make fresh abrasions. The proboscis of the elephant runs into the side of the lamb, and Noah’s hat has been knocked of by the tail of the raven. However you may assort the beasts, however carefully you may pack them, you cannot prevent their doing each other damage.”
Mr. Saltren turned to little Giles and said: —
“Bring us your box of bricks, my boy.”
“It is Sunday,” answered the child. “Mamma would not wish me to play with them.”
“I do not wish to make a Sabbath-breaker of you,” answered the tutor, “nor are your sister and I going to do other than build Babel with them – which is permissible of a Sunday.”
The little boy slid off his seat, went to his cupboard, and speedily produced the required box, which he gave to Mr. Saltren.
The tutor drew forth the lid. The bricks were all in place compacted in perfect order.
Then he said, with half-sneer, half-laugh, “There are no gaps between them. The whole assemblage firm as it were one block. Not a breakage anywhere, not room for a breakage.”
“No,” said Arminell, “of course not. They all fit exactly because they are all cubes. The bricks,” she laughed, “have no long necks like the giraffe, or legs or horns, or proboscis, or broad-brimmed hats, liable to be broken. Of course they fit together.”
“If you shake the ark – the least concussion produces a breakage, one or two beasts suffer. You may toss the box of bricks about; and nothing is hurt. Why?”
Arminell was impatient. “Of course the reason is plain.”
“The reason is plain. The bricks are all equal. If it were so in the world of men, there would be no jars, no fractures, no abrasions, but concord, compactness, peace.”
Arminell said nothing. She closed her eyes and sat looking at the bricks, then at the animals Giles had arranged.
The tutor said no more, but his eyes, bright and eager, were on the girl’s face.
Presently Arminell had gathered her thoughts together sufficiently to speak.
“That, then, is the solution you offer to my problem. But to me it does not seem solved. There the animals are. They are animals – and not bricks.”
“They are animals, true, but they must be shaken and shaken together, till all their excrescences are rubbed away, and then they will fit together and find sufficiency of room. That is how marbles are made. Shapeless masses of stone are put in a bag and rattled till all their edges and angles are rattled off.”
“What an ark would remain! You complain of some animals crippling others, this scheme of yours would involve a universal mutilation – the animals resolved into undistinguishable, shapeless, uninteresting trunks. The only creature that would come out scatheless would be the slug. All the rest would be levelled down to the condition of that creature – which is a digesting tube, and nothing more.” Then Arminell stood up. “It is time for me to be off,” she said; “her ladyship will be back from church, and oh! Mr. Saltren, I have interfered with the Psalms and Lessons.”
CHAPTER XI
IN THE AVENUE
According to the classic story, the Sphinx demanded of all who visited her the solution of an enigma – and that enigma was Man.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, on a quiet ordinary Sunday morning, Arminell, a young girl without experience, had been confronted with the Sphinx, and set the same enigma, an enigma involving others, like the perforated Chinese puzzle-balls, an enigma that has been essayed and answered repeatedly, yet always remains insoluble, that, as it has assumed fresh aspects, has developed new perplexities. Arminell had been wearied with the routine and restraint of social life, its commonplace duties and conventionalities, and had been fired with that generous though mistaken dislike to the insincerities and formalities of civilisation, so often found among the young – generous, because bred of truth; mistaken, because it ignores the fact that the insincerities impose on no one, and the formalities are made of mutual compromises, such as render life, social life, possible.
Arminell was in this rebellious mood, when she was brought face to face with a problem beyond her powers to unravel. She might as well, with a rudimentary knowledge of algebraic symbols, have been set to work out Euler’s proof of the Binomial Theorem. She was like Fatima when she opened Blue-Beard’s secret chamber, and saw in it an array of victims. Of these victims disclosed to her, one was Jingles, another Patience Kite; then came Captain Saltren and his wife; and next hung in the dismal cabinet of horrors, Samuel Ceely and Joan Melhuish. The world was indeed a Blue-Beard’s room. If you but turned the key you saw an array of misery and tearful faces, and hearts with blood distilling from them. It was more than that – it was a box with a Jack in it. She had touched the spring, and a monster had flown up in her face, not to be compressed and buttoned down again.
How could the facts of existence be reconciled with the idea of Divine Justice? On one side were men and women born to wealth and position and happiness; on the other, men and women denied the least of the blessings of life. Why were some of God’s creatures petted and pampered, and others kicked about and maltreated? Was the world of men so made from the beginning, or had things so come about through man’s mismanagement, and if so, where was the over-ruling Providence which governed the world? When the Noah’s Ark arrived new from the great toy-shop whence issue the planets and spheres, were all the figures round and fitted together, only afterwards in the rearrangement to impinge on and mutilate each other? Or had they been all alike in the beginning and had developed their horns and proboscises, their tusks and broad-brimmed hats? Life is a sort of pantomime, that begins with a fairy tale, leads to a transformation scene, and ends, perhaps, with low comedy. In a moment when we least expect it, ensues a blaze of light, a spectacular arrangement of performers, and then, away fall the trappings of splendour, and forth, from under them, leap out harlequin, clown, and pantaloon. The knights cast off their silver armour, the fairies shed their gauzy wings, kings and queens depose their crowns and sceptres, and there are revealed to us ordinary men and women, with streaks of paint on their faces, and patches of powder in their hair, perpetrating dismal jokes, the point of which we fancy is levelled at ourselves.
To some men and women the transformation scene arrives late in life, but to all inevitably at some time; and then when the scene on the stage before us is changed, a greater transformation ensues within.
When we were children we believed that everything glittering was gold, that men were disinterested and women sincere. The transformation scene came on us, perhaps with coruscations of light and grouping of colours and actors, perhaps without, and went by, leaving us mistrustful of every person, doubtful of everything, sceptical, cynical, disenchanted. Is not – to take a crucial case – marriage itself a grand transformation scene that closes the idyl of youth, and opens the drama of middle age? We live for a while in a fairy world, the flowers blaze with the most brilliant colours, the air is spiced as the breezes of Ceylon, angels converse with men, and sing æthereal music, manna floats down from heaven, containing in itself all sweetness; sun and moon stand still o’er us, over against each other, not to witness a conflict, as of old in Ajalon, but to brighten and prolong the day of glamour. Then the bride appears before us, as Eve appeared to Adam, unutterably beautiful and perfect and innocent, and we kneel in a rapture, and dare not breathe, dare not speak, nor stir; and swoon in an ecstasy of wonder and adoration.
Then tingle the marriage bells. The transformation scene is well set with bridesmaids and orange-blossoms, and a wedding breakfast, postboys with favours, and a shower of rice, and then – ?
The fairy tale is over. The first part of the pantomime is over. The colours have lost their brilliancy, the flowers shrivel, the scents are resolved into smells of everyday life, broiled bacon, cabbage water, and the light is eclipsed as by a November fog. The men for the way-rate, the water-rate, and the gas-rate are urgent to have a word with us. There descend on our table at every quarter most bitter bills – those of the butcher and the green-grocer, the milliner’s little account, and the heavy itemless bill from the doctor. What shall we say about our Eve, the beautiful, the all-but divine, the ideal woman? The all-but divine turns out to have a touchy temper and a twanging tongue, falls out with her cook, dismisses her, and consequently serves you cold mutton and underboiled potatoes.
The transformation is complete, and how does it leave us? In a rage at our folly? Cursing our idealism? Rasped and irritable? Withdrawing more and more from the society of our Eve, and our Eden turned to an espalier garden, to our club? So it is in many cases. The transformation scene is a trial, and certain ones there are that never recover the shock of disenchantment; but there are others, on the other hand, who endure, and to them comes in the end a reward. These continue to sit in their box, listless, paring their nails, turning the programme face downwards. Half contemptuously, wholly void of interest, they lend a dull ear to what follows, and look on with a wondering eye, convinced that the rest is farce and buffoonery and a vexation of spirit, which must however be sat through; then, little by little fresh interests arise, tiny new actors invade the stage, with sweet but feeble voices, saying nothing of point, yet full of poetry. The magic begins to work once more, the little fingers weave a spell that lays hold of heart and brain, and conjures up a new world of fantasy. The flowers re-open and flush with colour, the balmy air fans our jaded faces, again the songs of angels reach our ears, the clouds dispel, the manna falls, Eve resumes her beauty, not the old beauty of childlike innocence and freshness, but that of ripened womanhood, of sweet maternity, of self-command and self-devotion.
We sit hushed with our head in our hands, and look with intense eye, and listen with sharpened ear, and the tears rise and run down our cheeks. We have forgotten the old Eden with its fantastic imaginations, in the more matured, the richer, the fuller, and above all the more real paradise that is now revealed.
In the case of Arminell Inglett there was no enchantment of colour, no setting of tableau, for the transformation scene; it came on her suddenly but also quietly. In one day, on a quiet country Sunday, when she walked out of the dull and stuffy school, she passed, as it were, through a veil, out of childland into the realm of Sphinx.
In the evening, after a dull dinner, instead of remaining in the drawing-room with my lady, who had taken up a magazine, Arminell put a shawl over her head and shoulders, went forth into the garden, and thence to the avenue.
The evening was pleasantly warm, the weather beautiful; beneath the trees the dew did not fall heavily. A new moon was shining. The girl thought over what she had heard and seen that day – over the troubles and wrongs of Captain Saltren, driven from his occupation, and yet chained to the house that was his own, and with which he would not part; over the defiant scepticism of Patience Kite, at war in heart with God and man; over the suffering lives of Samuel and Joan, united in heart, yet severed by fate, looking to a common grave as the marriage bed, and Arminell felt almost contempt for these latter, because they accepted their lot without resentment. She thought over what young Mr. Saltren had said about his own position, and she was able to understand that it was one of difficulty and discomfort.
Then she turned her mind to the Sunday-school, where, whilst outside of it, within the narrow confines of Orleigh parish, there was so much of trouble and perplexity, my lady was placidly teaching the children to recite as parrots the names of the books of the Apocrypha, which they were not to read for the establishment of doctrine, and Captain Tubb was enunciating arrant nonsense about the names of the Sundays preceding Lent.
The avenue was composed of ancient oaks. It was reached from the garden, which intervened between the house and it. The avenue was not perfectly in line, because the lay of the land did not admit of its being carried at great length without a curve, following the slope of the hill that rose above it, and fell away below in park-land to the river.
The walk was gravelled with white spar. It commanded an exquisite view down the valley of the Ore, over rich meadow-land and pasture, dotted with clumps of trees, beech, chestnut, and Scotch pine. A line of alders marked the course of the river, to where, by means of a dam, it had been widened into a lake. On the further side of the river, the ground gently rose in grassy sweeps to the wooded hills. To the south-west the river wound away about shoulders of richly-clothed hills, closing in on each other, fold on fold. The avenue was most delightful in the evening when the setting sun gilded the valley with its slant beams, turned the trunks of the pines scarlet, and cast the shadows of the park trees a purple blue on the illuminated grass.
Oaks do not readily accommodate themselves to form avenues, they are contorted, gnarled, consequently oak avenues are rarely met with. That at Orleigh had the charm of being uncommon.
The evening was still, the sky was full of light, so much so that the stars hardly showed. The light spread as a veil from the north, from behind the Orleigh woods, and reflected itself in the dew that bathed the grass. Arminell was attached to this walk, in great measure because she could at almost all times saunter in it undisturbed.
She had not, however, on this occasion, been in it half an hour, before she saw her father coming to her. He had left his wine; there were, as it happened, no guests in the house, and he and the tutor had not many topics in common.
“Well, Armie!” he said, “I have come out to have a cigar, and lean on you. My lady told me I should find you here.”
