Chapter IV: A Hot Argument

‘YOU will never do it,’ gasped Fan, rising to her feet also.

‘Yes, I will,’ said Oliver, now perching himself precariously on the ancient carved railing. ‘I mean what I say and I will do what I mean.’

‘What! waste all your talents and education?’

‘I should not call them wasted; “the better man the better deed.” If I have any talent out of the common—’

‘You know you have; what is the good of mock humility?’ poor Fan assailed him.

‘Well, granted I am not a blockhead, even granted I were a genius, which would be a gross delusion—stop, I’ll light my pipe, as we’ve got the length of talking the matter calmly over.’

He had recovered his composure and cheerfulness the moment he had broken the truth to his sister, but that did not make the truth less exasperating to Fan.

‘Hans Sachs,’ Oliver recommenced with easy discursiveness, ‘remained at once a minnesinger and a cobbler, and I do not know that he either sang or cobbled the worse for it. You will go and listen with satisfaction to an opera of Wagner’s, but not take the moral of the text into account, you most illogical of Fans. Hans Sachs lived in the blooming time of Nüremberg, in the middle ages to be sure. You may think the world has grown too old for simplicity and a higher ambition than rising above the class one was born in.’

‘What is a higher ambition?’ interrupted Fan, abruptly and incredulously.

‘To raise one’s class and rise with it—much the truer and surer, if it be the slower process,’ answered Oliver, without hesitation or circumlocution, as announcing a thought out and incontrovertible proposition. ‘But if you think Hans Sachs forms too remote a precedent, there is Jasmin, the French barber and poet, quite in our day. And I have heard of a very worthy fellow who is also more than a poetaster, and has yet worked out his “shifts” like a man, going down day by day with his pick and his lamp into the blackness of darkness of a Scotch coal mine. I tell you, child, it is the notion that ability and education will not grace any honest calling and station which is the essence of snobbishness and vulgarity. It has tainted every class in this country. It plays the very devil with many a man who might otherwise have been respected and respectable, a useful citizen and worthy member of society. It causes a certain order of talents and refined tastes to prove a curse instead of a blessing to a working man, even to a clerk, or a shop-lad. I look upon it,’ said Oliver with restrained passion, ‘as being at the bottom of much of the unprincipled extravagance, fraudulent speculation, and criminality and misery which are eating out—not to say the prosperity—the integrity of the nation.’

‘Then you would introduce Hindoo castes or Russian serfdom into England?’ Fan was a little confused and incoherent in her examples, which was not like her, for she was clear-headed as far so she saw, but she was driven nearly beside herself. ‘You would forbid any man to exercise the gifts which God has given him, and rise to their level in the social scale.’

‘I would do nothing of the kind. I would have every man be a law to himself, and act up to his own standard—doing his best to raise that standard. I don’t quarrel with any fellow for abandoning tailoring—say, and adopting painting—always provided he has a clear justification for the change by finding it absolutely necessary for the expression of the gift that is in him. I only say that it is done a thousand times every day, when it is neither justifiable nor necessary. It is high time somebody made a stand against the disloyalty and folly.’

‘And you are the somebody who knows better than every one else!’ said Fan, sarcastically.

There had always been great freedom of opinion and speech between the brother and sister in the middle of their warm mutual regard. Oliver was not the man to behave like a Turk to his womankind. Fan had not been accustomed to be treated as an inane dove, neither was she the woman to consent readily to the treatment, whether from father, brother, husband or son.

‘Oh, Oliver, how can you be so conceited and self-willed?’ she protested, indignantly. ‘I thought you were too clever—really, not to be modest; I begin to think learning has made you mad!’

Oliver shrugged his shoulders.

‘An unlucky, unintentional quotation, my dear, which, after all, I dare not presume to take to myself. But I am not the only man who holds views which, thank God, are gaining ground in our day. Look here, Fan, I hope this is not altogether a case of want of ambition, sloth, a taste for low life—if you care to apply that term to the trading class to which our father belonged. It is a point of conscience which is beginning to be mooted among men, whether or not they may be able to act upon it as they ought. You think a great deal of Oxford. If you were down there, you would find some reading men, far before me in scholarship, regretting that they had not learned a trade and maintaining the dignity of labour in its most primitive form.’

‘Young men will take up any crochet for the sake of contradiction,’ said Fan, with a girl’s narrow dogmatism and ready scorn.

‘Still, if it is any comfort to you,’ continued Oliver, with a laugh not so genial as his laugh was wont to be, ‘there are far more cads and fools in Oxford and the world than such would be reformers—idiotic as you may reckon them in their own line. There are fellows who, like Tito, would not only cut as neatly as possible their greatest benefactors if they happened to be grocers and linen-drapers, but would go far beyond Tito in boasting of the creditable performance. There are numbers of young Englishmen prepared to turn their backs, on the first opportunity, on the iron or the cotton by which their fathers have played their parts, according to their lights, like men, with success (while the iron and the cotton trades were never in greater need of fresh light and guidance), all in order that young England in this direction may vegetate, run to seed, starve or steal, as officers whom the piping times of peace suit best, briefless barristers, or incompetent clergymen.’

‘But you would not be a briefless barrister or an incompetent clergyman,’ said Fan.

Oliver shook his head. ‘I cannot speak in public, I can only hold forth to my own cronies.’

This was true; Oliver was not calculated to shine as an orator; his highly wrought nervous awkwardness was entirely against him; a certain turgidness in the rush of his thoughts proved even a more serious obstacle.

Occasionally, when he was ‘dead in earnest,’ as he said, he could surmount both defects. He would then speak tersely and clearly while he towered the head and shoulders above his brethren, and flung out an arm with something like might and majesty. But, as a rule, a singular shyness and self-consciousness came over the young man in any general assemblage, from a debating club upwards, and left him a fettered and dumb giant.

‘I should make a bad advocate and a worse judge,’ said Oliver; ‘I have not the making of a good lawyer in me—none of the sifting impartiality, critical acumen, and hard-headed common sense which ought to dispense justice. My own ideas, instead of authorities and precedents, would possess me. You have only to put on a wig and gown in order to be a sounder, safer judge yourself, though I can’t flatter you, little woman, by pretending you would prove another Portia.’

‘But a clergyman is different,’ said Fan, faintly.

He shook the whole man, not his head alone, in his impatience. ‘Do you suppose I should think myself warranted in becoming a clergyman if I had not the highest motive and the clearest bent?’ he demanded, with more indignant sharpness than he had yet spoken. ‘I would rather break stones on the road. I might preserve my self-respect as an honest man while I hammered at flints; I should certainly despise myself as a profane cheat and liar if I offered spiritual stones for bread—all because the Church was a gentleman’s calling, and by great good fortune, policy, energy, and carefully cultivated interest I might die a right reverend bishop. I wonder though if a miller and baker’s son ever did die a bishop—out of the colonies,’ speculated Oliver with returning good humour.

‘Oliver,’ said Fan, solemnly, ‘I cannot think you are in earnest. I seem not able to believe my ears. After father resigned your services, after you have kept all your terms, taken more than one scholarship and gained this first class, which everybody who knows anything about it said you could do, and added that it would be a great honour to you and the making of you in any profession, to throw it all up in the end, to act as if you had been keeping another man out of his place, and wasting money the whole time! For you would have made as good—I should say a far better miller,’ (Fan could not bring herself to say the word baker,) ‘if you had never gone to Oxford, if you had left the Grammar School when you were fourteen or fifteen at the latest, and served your apprenticeship like other lads who meant to be tradesmen, and then father might have had your help in his old age.’

‘There is something in that,’ answered Oliver in a low tone, with the pain which the reminder roused in him perceptible in his voice. ‘I shall never cease to regret that I did not see things as I do now from the first. I would give a great deal even to have made up my mind sooner—in time to tell father. But nothing will convince me that he would have opposed my decision.’

‘He might have said that you were spoilt either for a miller or for anything else,’ retorted Fan.

‘If he had done so, it would have been the result of an old-fashioned prejudice; and if I had been able to show him that he was in the wrong, he would have been the first to admit it gladly,’ said Oliver, keeping his temper. ‘Why, on earth, should a man not make as good a miller—or coal-heaver for that matter—because he knows a little Latin and Greek, and can read Horace and Virgil, Sophocles and Plato, in the original, if he chose, when his work is done?’

Fan was getting desperate. No one save herself could tell how grievous had been the downfall of all the castles in the air which she had been building since her earliest girlhood, while she sat or stood, during the last half-hour, in the familiar mill gallery, looking down, as she had looked many a time before, on the lovely home landscape, in the midsummer twilight, and only betraying her emotion by her changing colour and tightly clasped hands. It was all so utterly wrong-headed and delirious in Oliver; what one might have expected in a French Communist, but what one could never have imagined would find a fitting soil at Oxford.

Fan had prepared herself for so different a conclusion. She would have done anything, taken any pains and faced any ordeal for Oliver—the Oliver of her dreams. Had he been called to fill a throne, she would have toiled to qualify herself to stand on its lowest step. She was one of those women who have high enterprise in their composition. But if Oliver’s regalia were to consist, after all, of the mill-wheel and the baker’s oven, which had been thorns in Fan’s flesh when they were connected with her father and grandfather, she had not the enterprise to follow her brother in that adventure.

‘Oh! Oliver, if you would only think it all over again!’ besought Fan, with tears, which she had too much pride and endurance to shed, dimming her bright dark eyes, as the evening star came out above the Copley Grange woods, and glimmered over the two. ‘You have been away from home, for the most part, for years and years, ever since you were little more than a boy. You have forgotten what the conditions of a tradesman’s life really are, how hopelessly commonplace and vulgar—worse in some respects than the life of a day labourer. There may be some dignity in hard toil and grinding poverty bravely borne—though I should not like to be the one to bear them,’ said Fan, in parenthesis; yet even as she spoke Oliver recognised that this worldly-minded little sister of his was a woman who, in the circumstances she referred to, would have been found capable of working herself to death and making no sign, dying with the elements of true tragedy and pathos in the self-respecting silence and resignation of her humble end. ‘But I cannot see how there can be dignity in ordinary buying and selling, in low chaffering and huxtering, and often cheating.’

‘You are talking utter nonsense, Fan,’ said Oliver, half amused, half angry. ‘There is nothing dishonouring in trade, any more than in a handicraft; you might have known that. There is dignity in any honest work which a man does in the sweat of his brow. It is idleness, however refined, which is clear degradation and a blot on the social economy. We have surely got a long way ahead of the early nations that committed every useful art to their slaves. When we go out now, with the laudable aim of civilising savages, don’t we first qualify ourselves—those of us who have spent our youth in the colleges—by graduating in carpenters’ and masons’ work, cooking and tailoring?’

‘That may be the way among savages,’ said Fan, with a nice distinction, ‘but at home we have not, in practice at least, gone so far beyond the old theory.’

‘My dear Fan, have you never heard that we are a nation of shopkeepers? How have you managed to shut your ears! In what corner have you been hiding?’

‘Don’t laugh,’ said Fan, passionately; ‘I am not able to bear it. And you must know that when English people of the upper classes own to be shopkeepers, it is on a grand scale like the merchant princes of Venice.’

‘Or Tyre and Sidon,’ suggested Oliver ‘and we know what they came to; but don’t starve your simile.’

‘Trade, or anything on a grand scale,’ floundered Fan, ‘where the interests involved extend far and wide and where the petty details hardly reach the head trader, is very different from a small business, with its meanness and sordidness.’

‘Call nothing common and unclean which human beings require,’ muttered Oliver; and then he could not resist resuming his banter.

‘I have you now, Fan; you go in for the gulf between wholesale and retail, in the comparative offences of selling a bar of iron and a tin-tack. What a humbug you are!’

She disdained to defend herself from an accusation which was particularly untrue and objectionable to her.

‘I am sensible that there is a tremendous amount of humbug in society in the present day. Doubtless it has existed in every generation, but in ours, I think, the crop is an unusually fine one,’ commented Oliver, with provoking coolness. He was swinging one leg with a laziness that had an irritation in the very slowness of the movement—monotonous as that of a pendulum. Then he stopped the pendulum, but caused it to quiver quickly, in a still more trying manner, until Fan, under the torture, was fain to cry out as if she had been a vixen.

‘If you don’t keep your leg still, this moment, Oliver, I—I believe I shall leap down into the water. You ought to have been whipped when you were a child till you learned to stand and sit still.’

‘But you see I wasn’t; and I believe it would have been next to an impossibility to teach me,’ said Oliver, stopping on the instant, contritely. He would not willingly have hurt a fly if he could have avoided it, though he was compelled to wound Fan to the quick. Happily for him, he could not sound the depths of her prejudices, or altogether realise the pain he was inflicting. But he struggled not to chaff her any more, since she was so thin-skinned and so much vexed by his determination. He reverted to general illustrations of humbugs. ‘I will say nothing of the curious favour which is shown to brewers in these days; but though I don’t go in for total abstinence, and can sing out for a glass of beer with an easy conscience, it seems to me, in the name of morality, the baker ought to be esteemed the better tradesman of the two. Let me refer further to the odd fact that a squireen, or duke, or a prince, with an agricultural hobby may farm his own land, grow corn, and fatten beeves, without coming under the ban of a spurious gentility—odious word, Fan! But society holds that when the same corn comes to be ground into flour and kneaded into bread, and the same cattle to be slaughtered and cut into beef—very essential processes for the welfare of the million, the men who take the processes in hand and pledge themselves to bring them to a fair issue, are justly to lose all social status, and sink in the scale to depths of vulgarity lower than the brutality of the most stupid, ignorant, ragged, dirty lout! (Of course you understand I am pointing my moral by an extreme instance of the working man.) Now, I maintain that if we had—in addition to the great farming landowner, and to that extraordinary exception in position to other tradesmen, the great brewer—the great baker, butcher——’

‘Fishmonger and greengrocer,’ chimed in Fan, mockingly.

‘Why not?’ Oliver accepted the addition undauntedly. ‘Men who should endow the world with excellent bread, wholesome meat, fresh fish—at reasonable prices, do you see? for the credit of their trades and the good of humanity—not merely that the baker and his fellow-tradesmen might make haste to grow rich and cut the shop, rear their sons for professions, and marry their daughters to professional men as the first step to a higher social grade—they would deserve to be ranked as public benefactors. I should not wonder,’ declared Oliver, breaking out into fun again, ‘though I had a statue erected to me one day for leading the van in the beneficent movement. Most likely I shan’t be there to see. It won’t be, I dare say, till I’m “Old Constable” to a third or fourth generation. But if the world is only a little quicker in its appreciation and gratitude than it is wont to be, as you are my junior by a few years, it is just on the cards, if you live to be ninety-nine, Fannikin, you may behold the tribute. Won’t it be glorious! Won’t you be proud of me then?’

‘Oh don’t,’ groaned Fan. And Oliver repented of an inveterate propensity to relieve with a kind of light humour his gravest moods. Then Fan rallied sufficiently to say, ‘If the statue be true to life, it will be like that of Horatius Cocles, “halting on one knee,” or doing something equally uncouth and grotesque.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Oliver, who had little personal vanity, and who was glad, in the innocence of his heart, to suppose Fan was not so much hurt that she could not take him off in her turn. But Fan was simply galled into irony. She was sharpening her weapons in the little silence which succeeded for a new assault on her brother’s position.

‘Any ordinary man may be such a tradesman as you describe.’

‘The ordinary man is long of coming, then,’ he interrupted her briskly.

She paid no heed to the interruption. ‘An extraordinary man only rises to his natural level when he forsakes some common occupation for another more in keeping with his powers. You may as well pretend that God made all men equal in every respect, and it is a sin and wrong that there should be different classes in society, as hold that your talents and education can be fitly applied to a trade.’

‘No. I say every new social movement demands extraordinary men to be its pioneers. I confess I am rather ashamed to give myself out as the extraordinary man in this case, but I may serve till a better appear.’

‘It is not trade as it ought to be, it is trade as it is, which you are bound to take into account before you throw away all your hard-won advantages. High-flown notions may be all very well in theory, but they are not for real life,’ said Fan, hardly sensible that she was airing a terribly unchristian doctrine, only aware that Oliver was shaking himself in vehement protest. ‘The tricks of trade are proverbial.’

‘Disgracefully proverbial,’ assented Oliver, briefly. ‘But if I thought they were universal I should be fit to hang myself. Do you infer that our father was not an honest man?’

‘I have never said a word against father’s honesty,’ protested Fan, hotly. ‘I believe he was as honest as man could be. But he went into trade for a livelihood, not to regenerate society, as you are bold enough to propose. You will ruin yourself in the first place, I know.’

‘Then I don’t know it, and what is more, I don’t mean to do it. That is the common cant; no thinker outside the details of his trade can steer clear of the bankruptcy court. And we have the disastrous fate of Burns and of other thinkers—poets, politicians and what not, in their respective businesses—lugged in as a timely warning. I tell you no man’s thought and culture, unless they were attended by some radical mental defect or fatal self-indulgence, ever disqualified him from managing his worldly affairs. The reverse has been proved over and over again; but it does not suit the commonplace world, and you as its present exponent, to believe it. However, I am no poet or astronomer or geologist. Unlike the Laird of Cockpen, my head is not taken up with the affairs of the State. Even my scholarship is of modest dimensions. Moreover, I shall make it my careful endeavour not to ruin myself, were it only to give the lie to my self-complacent friends who go in for business on what they call business principles, forsooth!—every man for himself and the most money soonest made—as if there were not sounder as well as higher laws of political economy than some of the political economists themselves ever touched. But if I do ruin myself in an attempt to regenerate society, as you, Fan, term—rather grandiloquently—my simple resolution to stick to the old shop and do the best I can with it, can I ruin myself in a worthier cause?’

Then, in contradiction to his disclaimer of anything remarkable in his purpose, he began to repeat with repressed enthusiasm:—

‘Can a man die better
Than facing fearful odds?’

She would not let him finish the verse. She broke in with the old fruitless adjuration, ‘Oh, Oliver, think again.’