CHAPTER XIV.
VANITAS VANITATUM.
There is a certain poet whose free-and-easy philosophy expressed inverse, rippling and silvery, but slightly too luscious for Sundayreading in a boarding-school conducted on correct principles, holds thatwhen far from the lips we love, we have but to make love to the lips weare near. Our friend O'Hara, we fear, was much addicted to reading thaterotic bard, and had been so long removed by time and so far by distancefrom his mistress, to whom belonged the tress of hair he wore over hisheart and under his watch-fob--fob without a watch--that he had not manyobstacles to conquer in persuading himself that Captain Chauvin'sunmarried _prot?g?e_ was strikingly handsome. There was that high-bredair about her, too, which plays such havoc with the feelings of a raceaccustomed to set more store by blood than pelf. Her manners werestamped by a refined self-respecting reserve not chilled to the point of_hauteur_. She had a commanding figure, with brilliant eyes, and thatfeature which is the greatest charm in woman--an even and undamaged setof almond-white teeth, when her lips parted. Her hair, besides, was thecolour of his tress--as ebon and full, as thick and glossy.
'Frenchwomen make good housewives,' reflected Manus to himself, as hesmoked the pipe of meditation the morning after the marriage. 'They'renot very expansive at home, it is true, but they do adore theirchildren. Caroline is not insipid, anyhow. In case anything happened toBidelia, she would be just the woman to fall back upon. Besides, I haveneither leisure nor liking for billing and cooing. How is Bidelia, bythe way? What is she doing? Egad! I'll write to London, to my cousinHyacinth, to ask him.'
And he did write.
And this was the answer he got eight-and-forty hours afterwards:
'Doughty Street, London, W.C. 'April 27th, 1866.
'DEAR MANUS,
'Confound you, why don't you write oftener? As we used to say on the old sod (by-the-way, is Ireland really older than any other place?)--as we used to say, I repeat, only twisting the phrase--it's good for sore eyes to see your crabbed fist. How am I getting on? _More Hibernico_, I shall answer, your question by asking one of my own. How are _you_ getting on? You haven't taken your degree yet, with or without honours, that I can plainly discern, _ma bouchal_. Taking lessons in anatomy from the living subject at Bullier, I'm afraid, eh? you born divil of the O'Hara breed and the pedigree without a blemish. Now, if you were a suckling barrister you might have a chance of getting at the head of your profession by phrenologically investigating the Chief Justice's noddle; but studying the symmetry of the human form divine from the contortions of Rigolboche and her friends is hardly the way to rival Butcher or Brunton.
'Chaffing apart, old man, I do hope you stick to your profession, and are not carried away by your ill-starred passion for Literature. Like Art, she is but a sorry, wanton jade to pay court to, and leaves you in the lurch when most you stand in need of a helping hand. Better be a mediocre sawbones than a mediocre paper-stainer. The mediocre sawbones can always take a shop, go to India, marry a sickly widow, or invent a patent medicine. As for poor paper-stainer, every day that he lives he is eating his way into his capital. My boy, they won't lend money to a pressman in this town, even on solvent security. The other day I went myself _in propria person?_ to ask for a small advance from an advertising firm of usurers close to London Bridge, and after I had filled and signed a pile of scored fools-cap, what did they tell me?--"If you had informed us that your were a journalist at first you might have saved yourself all that trouble. We make it a rule to have no business transactions with journalists!" There was a pewter inkstand at my elbow, and I imagine it would have had a business transaction with a greasy little Hebrew's countenance if I didn't happen to catch a glimpse of a couple of others, who were hiding behind the tall desks, cut-and-dry witnesses in the event of assault and battery, I presume. Here I must stop to drink a glass to the memory of Titus. Wasn't he the fellow that brought about the destruction of Jerusalem? Glory be his bed and birthright this blessed day!
* * * * *
'Well, 'tis time to tell you how I am getting on. _Imprimis_, I have _not_ set the Thames ablaze, and, honestly, I must admit that it was not for the lack of inflammable properties in the liquid. One may be a Triton in his own parish pond, and a very minute minnow in this huge ocean of London. The streets are not paved with gold, nor the houses roofed with rubies. The streets are more usually paved like those of another spot, but with big ambitions instead of good intentions, and as to the houses, he's a lucky dog who has one he can call his own. I have tried my hand at anything and everything not requiring a strict preliminary training--bar stone-breaking. I had aspirations towards the stage, but I never got beyond the front door--that is to say, I was hired as a check-taker at the Vaudeville once. I thought I would write a melodrama--an Irish one, of course--and I took it to one Mrs. Selby, a dear old lady, who had a house devoted to comedietta and extravaganza, legs and upholstery--how innocent of all these things I was, you may guess from this--and she kindly recommended me to cart it to the Surrey. I did. It was accepted on conditions, after sundry hums and haws. The theatre was burnt down two nights afterwards. The theatre was insured, but, alas! the manuscript of "The Terryalts" was not, and I hadn't a copy of it.
I next became a cab-driver; that is, as soon as I got to have the map of the town sunk in _bas-relief_ on my cranium. A hard life, precarious, harassing, and not very profitable. The novelty of the thing kept me up for a while, but I had to give in after a course of three months. The deuce of an adventure I had but once, and that was with a distinguished member of the craft I at present honour with my patronage. It was outside Stone's, in Panton Street. A portly man, with a nose the hue of a danger-signal, hailed me. "Barnes, cabby," he said, "and look alive about it." "All right, sir," and away I rattled till I got to Barnes, a village on the south bank of the river, between Putney and Mortlake. I opened the spy-hole at the top of the hansom to ask at what house I was to stop, and, lo and behold you! there was my fare snoring the snore of the just. I got down and roused him. "Where are we?" he asked. I told him. "Drat you!" he cried, "I meant Barnes' Tavern, in the Haymarket--I wanted to borrow some tin there." I apologized. "All right, watchman," he cried, "drive on!" and dropped back again into the corner as sound asleep as a curled hedgehog. I drove to the middle of Barnes Common, tenderly lifted my customer out of the cab, and gently bedded him on his back in the shadow of a furze-bush.
'My next essay at fortune took a military turn. I went down to Charles Street, Westminster, met a recruiting sergeant, declared my enthusiastic yearning to join the sappers and miners, and soiled my palm with the Saxon shilling. My martial career was not remarkably lengthened. I failed to "pass the doctor" next morning--he told me I had varicose veins! Bad manners to his impudence, the pursy little humbug! I only wished you and I had him alongside us up Keeper Hill, on one of our boyhood's rambles, and we'd soon take the wind and the conceit out of him.
'What was I to do now? I was fairly at my wits' end. To rob I was not able--it requires genius here; to beg I was ashamed. I had serious thoughts of trying my hand at the fine arts. I heard that those fellows who chalk mackerel on the pavement make a tidy living out of it, and it struck me that a new departure in that direction might bring me fame and fortune. My notion--it may turn up a trump yet for somebody--was to paint caricatures in distemper on the backs of tortoises. But I had no spare cash to lay out on stock, either in pigments or specimens of the genus _testudo_.
'At last I met Providence in the form of Dan McCarthy, of Doonas. "Hyacinth," said he, "do you know anything of boxing?" I was puzzled, for
I wasn't sure but he meant boxing the compass, but I found I had got into the wrong box there. The long and short of it was, a friend of his had asked him to look up a smart man with a ready pen and a vigorous imagination, who would undertake to write racy accounts of some of the renowned fisticuff fights of old, for a publican's newspaper. That's what I am doing now, God forgive me! The pay is good, but the work does not like me, I am wise in the "upper-cut," and am known to every "scrapper" in the "drums" of the East and West End, and all the rest; in short, I am comparatively comfortable, but completely demoralized. When you come over next, I can take you, perhaps, to a "merry little mill," for I am always in the "know."
'Don't come, though, an you're sensible, in such weather as we have now. Fog! fog!! fog!!! How I envy you the clear skies of the one city in the world outside Ireland worth living in--wicked, delightful Paris. D----n the London fog! It caught me by the larynx and laid me by the heels three days last November. It steals on you like a garrotter, throttles you, chokes your lungs, clogs your fancy, clouds your good-humour, and sets your drunken landlady stealing your coal by the scuttle and your gin by the quartern.
'Your affectionate coz,
'HYACINTH BLAKE.
'P.S.--And so it is after Bidelia Blake you'd be asking, Mr. Slyboots? Faith! she has changed her name. Bidelia, or "Biddy," as we knew her, transmogrified herself into Beatrice when she came over here. Not satisfied with that, she has altered her surname to Clarke. A fine, handsome, wealthy, warm-hearted husband he is, and no fool. He's a deal better than Biddy deserved. They have a mansion in Mayfair, and I have the run of the house, but I seldom go there, as I do not wish to make myself too cheap. I met them in the Park yesterday. Dash my buttons! as Li-Chung, the Chinaman, says, if you'd recognise Biddy. She was rosy with health and spirits (Nature's, not Kinahan's), and burning with jewels. I don't know if her husband chains her up at night, but she had a something like a brass dog-collar round her neck. And her wool--I believe you got a tress of it once--is not black now, but yellow--the effect, I am seriously afraid, not so much of London sunshine or London fog, as of golden hairwash. You had better ask her for another tress.
'H. B.'
O'Hara's face, as he perused this letter, would have served as a modelfor an actor charged with the duty of reading a similar epistle on thestage. He liked his cousin, but he did not seek to conceal hisimpatience--nobody else was present--at Blake's recital of hismeanderings in quest of a social position. The letter was humorous hereand there, but he did not appreciate the humour. He wanted to hear ofBidelia; and when he did hear of her, in the abrupt way Hyacinth put itin his postscript,--well, his face was a study. He coloured, he re-readthe passage, he clutched the paper tightly in his palm, he laughed, hesat down in his arm-chair, he read the postscript for the third time,and then he lit his pipe.
It is an excellent plan to light one's pipe in moments of vexation.
O'Hara _was_ vexed, more vexed than sorry. He puffed and thought, andthought and puffed, and knit his brows, and occasionally took the ambermouthpiece from between his lips and grinned in a scornful fashion, likethe baffled villain of tragedy in a show-booth. He stood up at length,took the paper in which the tress of hair was confined, did not kiss itas his wont was, but flung it into the stove, where it lit up, as if itwere well preserved in pomatum, crackled crisply, flared, and left asharp ugly smell of singed goose behind it. O'Hara thought there was apeculiar repulsiveness in the odour. It was the result of his frame ofmind. The perfumed locks of Cleopatra would have smelled as foul. Thelaws of nature are not affected by our prejudices. The body of the heroputrefies by the same process as the body of Hodge.
O'Hara then sat down and set himself a-thinking anew. This was the sumof his thoughts; being literary, they wandered into quotation:
'"Frailty, thy name is woman!"' (Shakespeare; this is good to beginwith!) 'Bidelia never had an ounce of sentiment in her. D----nsentiment! I don't regret her. Pshaw! not I; in fact, I'mpleased--pleased, no, rejoiced, that she's well married. What's thisNoll says? "She who makes her husband happy leaves nowhere in therunning the novel-reading hussy, whose sole aim is to murder mankindwith shafts from her quiver."' (This is better: substantially, it isGoldsmith, but it has been very, very queerly committed to memory. Poorfellow! his nerves must have been unstrung.) 'To Connaught with BideliaI'll marry the Frenchwoman through spite. I'll throw myself at her feetnext week, or next year--I'll swear I love, I do love her--that is tosay, I do not dislike her--and I'll send Missus Beatrice Clarke--oh,the short-sightedness of some girls!--an invitation to the ceremony andthe wedding-breakfast to follow, with a promise of a bit of bride-caketo cheer her if she is debarred by previous engagements from thepleasure of accepting my very kind invitation. Good! "Remove far from mevanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with foodconvenient for me."' (Holy Writ; this is getting serious, friendO'Hara.) 'Caroline was evidently designed for me by nature. My mind ismade up.'
O'Hara rose, and nearly tripped over Pat, his faithful dog, the lasthenchman of the clan. He stroked him fondly on the back; and Pat,jumping up, licked his master's hand with his moist red tongue, and thenwent through a favourite gymnastic exercise--that of pursuing his owntail. When he was tired of this canine form of search for a chimera, hestood still, panting, and yelped and agitated his tail like a fan.
'Biscuits as usual,' said O'Hara to the quadruped. 'By my troth, itwould be a great saving to me if _you_ were in love, but you're not.You've the appetite of an ogre.
* * * * *
O'Hara and the O'Hoolohan might have been discovered outside the Caf? deSu?de one evening a month afterwards. They were deep in conversation.
'I do not believe in the constancy of woman--you know my reasons; but Ido in the necessity of marriage. You know Caroline intimately now. Doyou admire her?'
It was O'Hara who spoke.
'Much,' answered O'Hoolohan; 'but some people are prejudiced in favourof brunettes.'
'Ah! you mistake me. I referred to disposition, to mind--which, afterall, counts more in a union than complexion, or figure, or hair. Can Iconfide in you?'
'You are not obliged to give your confidence if you mistrust.'
'Then I shall give it. I have spoken to her of marriage. She franklytold me that she felt she could not love, and I as frankly told her thatneither could I.'
'Then the affair is finished?'
'Yes, but not as you think. We have agreed to marry, and trust to loveto come afterwards.'
'Mother of Moses! I hope it may,' and O'Hoolohan leant back surprised.'Ah! friend, have you forgotten what Moore sang?'
'That poodle of literature,' said O'Hara, 'he sang any amount ofnonsense, like the rest of them. Which of his verses are you thinking ofnow?'
'Have it, if you must:
'"In France, when the heart of a woman sets sail On the ocean of wedlock its fortune to try, Love seldom goes far in a vessel so frail, But just pilots her off, and then bids her good-bye!"'
'Is that _your_ experience?' queried O'Hara.
'Respect your seniors, _blanc-bec_,'[12] growled O'Hoolohan.
'At your excellency's orders,' returned O'Hara, with mockobsequiousness. 'But I can cap your quotation with another from MasterTommy Little, which will give us an excuse for fresh bocks at allevents:
'"----fill the cup--where'er, boy, Our choice may fall, our choice may fall; We're sure to find Love there, boy, So drink them all, so drink them all!"'
'I don't mind pledging that,' assented O'Hoolohan, 'but I wish all thesame the lass and you had got spooney on each other. This sort ofnuptial knot has a kink in it. As for Berthe and myself, we're happy asMidsummer Day, but conscientiously I can offer _you_ nocongratulations.'
'Your good wishes are all I want. There are marriages of affection
, ofinterest, of spite, and of necessity; but this is the first time, Iventure to say, you have heard of a marriage of esteem,' and O'Harafolded his arms and looked philosophic.
'By my hand,' remarked O'Hoolohan, 'you're an original. I can't make youout. I give you up.'