‘I didn’t quite care for all of them—the Nihilists and Communards took my breath away at first; but as to Max Schurz himself I think there can be only one opinion possible about him.’
‘And that is——?’
‘That he’s a magnificent old man, with a genuine apostolic inspiration. I don’t care twopence whether he is right or wrong, but he’s a perfectly splendid old fellow, as honest and transparent as the day’s long. He believes in it all, and would give his life for it freely, if he thought he could forward the cause a single inch by doing it.’
‘You’re quite right,’ said Herbert calmly. ‘He’s an Elijah thrown blankly upon these prosaic latter days; and what’s more, his gospel’s all true; but it doesn’t matter a sou to you or me, for it will never come about in our time, no nor for a century after. “Post nos millennium.” So what on earth’s the good of our troubling our poor overworked heads about it?’
‘He’s the only really great man I ever knew,’ said Ernest enthusiastically, ‘and I consider that his friendship’s the one thing in my life that has been really and truly worth living for. If a pessimist were to ask me what was the use of human existence, I should give him a card of introduction to go to Max Schurz’s.’
‘Excuse my interrupting your rhapsody, Ernest,’ Herbert put in blandly, ‘but will you have your own trousers tonight, Oswald, or will you wear mine back to your lodgings now, and I’ll send one of the servants round with yours for them in the morning?’
‘Thanks,’ said Harry Oswald, slapping the sides of the unopened dust-coat; ‘I think I’ll go home as I am at present, and I’ll recover the marks of the Beast again to-morrow. You see, I didn’t betray my evening waistcoat after all, now did I?’
And they parted at the corner, each of them going his own way in his own mood and manner.
CHAPTER II. — THE COASTS OF THE GENTILES.
The decayed and disfranchised borough of Calcombe Pomeroy, or Calcombe-on-the-Sea, is one of the prettiest and quietest little out-of-the-way watering-places in the whole smiling southern slope of the county of Devon. Thank heaven, the Great Western Railway, when planning its organised devastations along the beautiful rural region of the South Hams, left poor little Calcombe out in the cold; and the consequence is that those few people who still love to linger in the uncontaminated rustic England of our wiser forefathers can here find a beach unspoiled by goat-carriages or black-faced minstrels, a tiny parade uninvaded by stucco terraces or German brass bands, and an ancient stone pier off which swimmers may take a header direct, in the early morning, before the sumptuary edicts of his worship the Mayor compel them to resort to the use of bathing-machines and the decent covering of an approved costume, between the hours of eight and eight. A board beside the mouth of the harbour, signed by a Secretary of State to his late Majesty King William the Fourth, still announces to a heedless world the tolls to be paid for entry by the ships that never arrive; and a superannuated official in a wooden leg and a gold cap-band retains the honourable sinecure of a harbour-mastership, with a hypothetical salary nominally payable from the non-existent fees and port dues. The little river Cale, at the bottom of whose combe the wee town nestles snugly, has cut itself a deep valley in the soft sandstone hills; and the gap in the cliffs formed by its mouth gives room for the few hundred yards of level on which the antiquated little parade is warmly ensconced. On either hand tall bluffs of brilliant red marl raise their honeycombed faces fronting the sea; and in the distance the sheeny grey rocks of the harder Devonian promontories gleam like watered satin in the slant rays of the afternoon sun. Altogether a very sleepy little old-world place is Calcombe Pomeroy, specially reserved by the overruling chance of the universe to be a summer retreat for quiet, peace-loving, old-world people.
The Londoner who escapes for a while from the great teeming human ant-hill, with its dark foggy lanes and solid firmament of hanging smoke, to draw in a little unadulterated atmosphere at Calcombe Pomeroy, finds himself landed by the Plymouth slow train at Calcombe Road Station, twelve miles by cross-country highway from his final destination. The little grey box, described in the time-tables as a commodious omnibus, which takes him on for the rest of his journey, crawls slowly up the first six miles to the summit of the intervening range at the Cross Foxes Inn, and jolts swiftly down the other six miles, with red hot drag creaking and groaning lugubriously, till it seems to topple over sheer into the sea at the clambering High Street of the old borough. As you turn to descend the seaward slope at the Cross Foxes, you appear to leave modern industrial England and the nineteenth century well behind you on the north, and you go down into a little isolated primaeval dale, cut off from all the outer world by the high ridge that girds it round on every side, and turned only on the southern front towards the open Channel and the backing sun. Half-way down the steep cobble-paved High Street, just after you pass the big dull russet church, a small shop on the left-hand side bears a signboard with the painted legend, ‘Oswald, Family Grocer and Provision Dealer.’ In the front bay window of that red-brick house, built out just over the shop, Harry Oswald, Fellow and Lecturer of Oriel College, Oxford, kept his big oak writing-desk; and at that desk he might be seen reading or writing on most mornings during the long vacation, after the end of his three weeks’ stay at a London West-end lodging-house, from which he had paid his first visit to Max Schurz’s Sunday evening receptions.
‘Two pounds of best black tea, good quality—yours is generally atrocious, Mrs. Oswald—that’s the next thing on the list,’ said poor trembling, shaky Miss Luttrell, the Squire’s sister, a palsied old lady with a quavering, querulous, rasping voice. ‘Two pounds of best black tea, and mind you don’t send it all dust, as you usually do. No good tea to be got nowadays, since they took the duties off and ruined the country. And I see a tall young man lounging about the place sometimes, and never touching his hat to me as he ought to do. Young people have no manners in these times, Mrs. Oswald, as they used to have when you and I were young. Your son, I suppose, come home from sea or something? He’s in the fish-curing line, isn’t he, I think I’ve heard you say?’
‘I don’t rightly know who ‘ee may mean, Miss Luttrell,’ replied the mother proudly, ‘by a young man lounging about the place; but my son’s at home from Oxford at present for his vacations, and he isn’t in the fish-curing line at all, ma’am, but he’s a Fellow of his college, as I’ve told ‘ee more than once already; but you’re getting old, I see, Miss Luttrell, and your memory isn’t just what it had used to be, dost know.’
‘Oh, at Oxford, is he?’ Miss Luttrell chimed on vacantly, wagging her wrinkled old head in solemn deprecation of the evil omen. She knew it as well as Mrs. Oswald herself did, having heard the fact at least a thousand times before; but she made it a matter of principle never to encourage these upstart pretensions on the part of the lower orders, and just to keep them rigorously at their proper level she always made a feint of forgetting any steps in advance which they might have been bold enough to take, without humbly obtaining her previous permission, out of their original and natural obscurity. ‘Fellow of his college is he, really? Fellow of a college! Dear me, how completely Oxford is going to the dogs. Admitting all kinds of odd people into the University, I understand. Why, my second brother—the Archdeacon, you know—was a Fellow of Magdalen for some time in his younger days. You surprise me, quite. Fellow of a college! You’re perfectly sure he isn’t a National schoolmaster at Oxford instead, and that you and his father haven’t got the two things mixed up together in your heads, Mrs. Oswald?’
‘No, ma’am, we’in perfectly sure of it, and we haven’t got the things mixed up in our heads at all, no more nor you have, Miss Luttrell. He was a scholar of Trinity first, and now he’s got a Fellowship at Oriel. You must mind hearing all about it at the time, only you’re getting so forgetful like now, with years and such like.’ Mrs. Oswald knew there was nothing that annoyed the old lady so much as any allusion to her increasing age or infirmities, and she took her revenge out of her in that simple retributive fashion.
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