Sections: General Index Present Section: Index Present Work: Index Next: Book II
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BOOK I
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CHAPTER I
DESCENDING slowly, surely, helplessly,
towards earth; the stars growing dimmer, until their light is utterly
extinguished by the mists which, clammy, dense, and oh! so cold, are wrapping us
round as in a death-shroud. The silence absolute; and nothing to indicate the
nature of the place that is to receive us on quitting our aërial course. Is it
land? Is it sea? Mountain or plain? A wilderness of snow, or a field of ice?
“Imagine a group of conscious souls in the interval between two existences, on
the point of being ushered into a state of Being absolutely new and untried, and
devoid of the confidence which comes only of experience, – and you may imagine
the depth of those sentiments of awe and mystery which possessed myself and my
comrades on that night, some five and forty years ago – night so dread in
itself, yet but for which, and its relation to us, this our latter age would
never have been illumined by the bright, true, pure spirit of him concerning
whom I have undertaken to tell.”
The speaker was old Bertie Greathead. The place was the common hall of the Triangle. The audience consisted of the
members, young and old, of that famous Club, besides some other persons. The
occasion was the first anniversary of the death of one of the members, towards
whose memoirs, written by myself, Lawrence Wilmer, Bertie’s narrative was a
contribution.
Having uttered the above sentences with tearful eyes and
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faltering voice, Bertie paused and gazed upon
his hearers. The evident sympathy he found in their looks reassured him, and,
with stronger accents, he began his formal relation.
“Members of the
Triangle,
and other friends here assembled; – The narrative which I have undertaken to
contribute towards a connected history of the loved friend we have lost, claims
to be but a simple statement of facts. As most of you know, the literary
function is not mine. Although for many years a leader and teacher of youth, my
business has been aerographical and locomotive, not mental or scholastic. In
short, I am simply a professor of aërial navigation. It was on one occasion,
when returning from an excursion taken partly for the sake of visiting foreign
regions, partly for the purpose of inculcating my art, that the series of
uncommon incidents occurred without which there would have been no occasion for
me to appear now before you.
“The time is forty-five years ago last Christmas. Of the youths entrusted to my
charge for an aërial trip, to two only shall I have occasion to refer, namely,
Mr. Wilmer, the father – long since dead – of our dear Lawrence here, and our
distinguished friend, Charles Avenil, who, being unavoidably absent this
evening, is represented by his nephew and other relatives. It is of a third, who
joined our party on its route, and of the way in which he joined it, that I have
more particularly to tell you.
“We were bound homewards from a sojourn in the volcanic isles of the North Pole,
a district which had then recently been made available for settlement, through
the perfection to which the science of aërial navigation and universal
telegraphy had been brought. Surrounded at a distance by a rarely passable
barrier of ice, these islands, nevertheless, enjoy a fair climate for a
considerable portion of the year, owing in part to the presence of oceanic
currents from the Equator, and in part to the prevalence of volcanic fires at a
short distance beneath the soil.
“These facts are, doubtless, familiar to most persons present. But, as I desire
to be fully comprehended by all, even the
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youngest, of my hearers, I must request
indulgence if, for the sake of some, I go more fully into detail than is
requisite for others. The garrulity and tediousness naturally appertaining to
seventy-five years of age, I shall endeavour to suppress.
“Desiring to avoid the crowd of summer tourists, and to study without
distraction the meteorological and magnetic phenomena presented by the country
under the total deprivation of sunlight; as well as to examine at leisure the
manners and traditions of the tribes whose discovery by the first aërial polar
expedition made the great sensation of a comparatively recent generation, owing
to the enormous and undoubted antiquity of their records, which showed that,
though isolated from the rest of mankind for tens of thousands of years, they
yet possessed the same characteristics of form, manners, and religious symbolism
to which we had been wont to ascribe a far later origin – for these reasons, I
say, we had extended our sojourn nearly to mid-winter, intending to return to
England in time to spend the Festival of the Year with our friends at home.
“The winter solstice was just commencing when we embarked on our return journey
at the North Polar Aërial Transit Station, in the vehicle in which we had made
the outward voyage, my own favourite aëromotive, a machine whose staunchness had
been proved in many a long and stormy flight over all parts of the earth. How it
came to fail me on this occasion is still a matter of doubt. It was probably
through the action of a sudden “blast of intensely cold air upon the cylinder of
the decomposer (for it was a magnetic-atmospheric propeller). However, in
mid-air, and mid-way upon our voyage, we were so crippled as to have no choice
but to descend, and proceed either by land or sea, according to the nature of
the element upon which we might alight, for the car was adapted to either
purpose.
“By aid of our parachute apparatus, which, in spite of the intense cold, worked
admirably, we were, in a very few minutes after the accident, slowly and
steadily descending towards the earth. The only question of any importance was
as to where precisely we should find ourselves on alighting. In the event
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of further progress being impracticable, and
the country being devoid of supplies, we still had sufficient to keep us until
we could telegraph for, and receive aid.
“It is true that in those days the network of wires which now cover both sea and
land, like the lines of latitude and longitude in the maps devised by our
ingenious ancestors, was but scantily diffused over the Arctic regions. But even
then there were points for communication, though comparatively few and far
between; and we did not doubt but that, alight where we might, we should be
able, by travelling no very great distance, either by land or sea, to summons
from the Central Home Depot an aëromotive to our relief.
“And here I must be pardoned a digression if, for the sake of these little ones,
I stop a moment to call their attention to the blessings which civilization has
conferred upon the world in our days. Once upon a time, and for myriads of ages,
it was a chief business of one generation of men to destroy the improvements
made by another. Amid the universal wreck and havoc of those Ages of War, such a
scheme as our universal network of telegraph-wires would have been impossible,
if only for its costliness. It is true that a war involving equal, or even
greater, outlay, would have been undertaken with readiness and lightness of
heart, so that it was not the cost alone that interfered, but the fact that
humanity was still in its destructive stage, and therefore disinclined to make
the same effort on behalf of construction. It is because we have got rid of the
waste of war, and vast armaments for national offence and defence, and no longer
absorb labour in useless works, or withdraw it from working altogether, that we
have been able to construct and maintain works of such vast magnitude and
utility as the Floating Oceanic Telegraph System, and the corresponding
Terrestrial Service.
“Our precise position was unknown to us. Under ordinary circumstances this would
have been of little consequence. Such was the speed of my aëromotive – scarcely
surpassed even by later inventions – that she must have been very far out of her
course to be unable to recover it in a few hours. The voyage to
(p. 5)
the Pole is simple enough. Travellers have
but to steer north-ward until the needle points vertically downwards, and then
to look about for a spot on which to alight. Twenty-four hours due north, at an
average speed of a hundred miles an hour, is bound to bring them in sight of the
volcanic fires which, rising from the summits of the Polar Mountains, make such
convenient beacons for aëronauts. The time, however, varies somewhat, owing to
the action of the polar atmospheric currents, which frequently divert the
traveller from his direct course, and compel him to approach the Pole in a
spiral direction.
“Similarly, in returning from the Pole, the spiral direction is taken at the
start, as it happened in our case; and it was the impossibility of ascertaining”
the velocity of these currents that preventing us from calculating our position.
In any other region we should have remained aloft until daylight, and then
leisurely selected a spot whereon to descend. But as the accident to our
machinery occurred in the middle of an arctic winter, when the night is several
months in duration, it was impossible to remain floating about waiting for
daylight.
“Well, when it was indicated by the barometer that we must be in the lower
stratum of air, and therefore very close to the earth’s surface, we adjusted our
electric-reflector lamp so as ‘to project its brilliant column of light directly
downwards. All that we discovered, however, was the fact that on all sides, as
far as we could see, the earth was covered by a mist so dense as to conceal
entirely from our view the spot we were approaching. We were therefore unable to
determine whether it was for contact with a solid or a fluid element that we
ought to be prepared.
“Descending very slowly and cautiously; checking our downward movement by
working the spiral wings of our machine with our hands, and watching intently
for any sight or sound that might indicate our whereabouts, we were disposed to
be somewhat appalled by the intense stillness that prevailed. Of course, high
up, the stillness is equally intense, save only when broken by the noise of the
propelling machinery, and the rushing by of the air. But there, close to the
earth, its characteristics
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seemed different. I have no doubt my young
friend, Lawrence, or at least Mr. Avenil, junior, has heard his relation speak
of the impression it made upon us ––”
“I remember,” said Avenil, “my uncle saying that Wilmer’s father, who was then
about fifteen years old, asked if it were possible that they had missed the
earth and got foul of the dark side of the moon, or some asteroid in which light
and life are extinct; and that as he was speaking you were all knocked off your
feet as if by some invisible vindicator of the honour of the heavenly body in
question.”
“True, he was of a poetical temperament, like his son after him. But the suggestion turned out to be more appropriate than at first appeared likely. It was neither earth nor ocean that was about to receive us. Our first intimation that we were nearing anything, came in the form of a blow from some unseen body. Recoiling a little, we continued our slow descent, until presently we received another concussion; a slighter one, for we rebounded but a very little way from the substance which had given it. The next sensation was that of sliding down a nearly perpendicular slope. It was clear that we were alighting upon the side’ of a steep mountain; and supposing that we were in about the eightieth degree of latitude, I hoped to find ourselves either on the north coast of Greenland, or in Spitzbergen, or on some other land that borders ort the Arctic circle, and therefore within reach of a telegraph point, and consequently of succour: for points had recently been placed upon all the principal summits for the convenience of aërial voyagers. That is, upon the principal permanent summits; for of course icebergs were not taken into account; and it was upon a gigantic iceberg that, on finally settling down, we found ourselves safely deposited.”
(p. 7)
CHAPTER II
THE first thing to be investigated
was the practicability of repairing our crippled machinery, with a view to
continuing our voyage. A little examination showed that this was out of the
question. The next point was whether we could reach the edge of the floe, and
launch the car upon the open sea. Before this could be done, it was necessary
that the mist should clear off, for that was so dense as utterly to defy the
rays of our reflector. A third point to be determined was that of the berg’s
mobility, that is, whether it was upon a motionless continent, or a drifting
island that we had alighted.
“In the meantime, it was necessary to take precautions against the cold. By the
aid of our reflector, we ascertained that we had slidden into a sort of
wedge-shaped hollow, or crater, with sides vertical or overhanging, rising some
fifteen or twenty feet above us all round, except on the side nearly facing the
declivity of the berg, where there was an opening some yards in width. The
bottom of our crater was tolerably smooth and level, and so, taking all things
into consideration, we decided that we could do no better than remain there for
the present. And in a little while after touching ground, or rather ice, we were
snugly ensconced in the angle of the hollow, between solid encircling walls of
green ice, which, inclining over head, made an admirable shelter, especially
when supplemented by the floaters of the aëromotive, which we detached for the
purpose. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say we were comfortably settled, both
as regards our mental and our physical condition, for those with me had too much
confidence in me, and I had too much confidence in the resources still left to
us by science, to think of despairing of our ultimate safety.
“Let me enumerate those resources. It was still mid-winter, so that the berg
would not melt or turn over. We had provisions that might last us a couple of
weeks or more, and we might add to our store by catching some seals or bears.
Our ice-house
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was so warm that we could save all our
combustibles for the purpose of illumination. It is true there was not much
chance at that season of a traveller passing over our heads, or of his
perceiving our signals of distress, if there were one. But there was a chance,
and it was my main hope, though its success depended upon the thickness of the
ice, and upon our finding an aperture through which we could get at the water.
This, again, however, would he of little use, unless our resting-place were in
motion, for the chance consisted in our being able to drop a grappling line
through into the sea, and hooking up a wire by which we could at once
communicate with home, and summon relief. The floating telegraphs have all been
constructed with this view; so that persons at sea are always within a few miles
of some link in the magnetic network. We knew that it was not impossible that
even at that moment, while upon the top of the ice-floe, its under side might be
in contact with one of these wires, and that it was only necessary to reach it
in order to obtain aid in a few hours.
“But to this desirable end two things were almost certainly necessary. We must
get at the water in order to sink our line; and we must be in motion in order to
catch the wire. This once caught, any one of the lads of my party could
communicate with home by means of his magnetic pocket-speaker, as readily as
tell the time by his watch.
“It is a strangely uncomfortable sensation, that of being in the dark, and
without the slightest notion of the kind of place one is in. Beside the
discomfort we experienced on this account, there was the necessity of learning
something about our immediate surroundings, if we were to escape by leaving
them. So we spent much time in endeavouring to grope around our cave. Whoever
undertook the office of explorer, was always made fast by a cord to keep him
from slipping away or otherwise being lost. We made several of these attempts
without any satisfactory result, for the ice sloped away so steeply on all sides
when we had got just outside the cave, that it was with difficulty we could draw
the explorer back to us. It seemed precisely as if we were in the crater of a
volcano, with a break in the wall on
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one side. The thickness of the fog continued
to neutralize all attempts to gauge the darkness with the reflector.
“My last attempt in this direction was prompted by a surmise of so uncomfortable
a nature, that I was anxious to keep it to myself. I had, for reasons obvious to
the scientific mind, erected the aëromotive’s pendulum in the centre of our
nook, so as to be always readily observable, and I had given the lads strict
injunctions to communicate to me its slightest movement. For the first day or
two it was motionless. Then occasional tremors were observed to be passing
through it. This made me watch anxiously for the next development. The fog was
our chief enemy in the present. A steady oscillation of the pendulum would
indicate a rolling motion in the ice, that could only proceed from a storm,
which though at first distant, would in all probability soon arrive and disperse
the fog. The larger and more compact the ice-field, the smaller would be the arc
described by the pendulum. This was obvious. It ought to have been equally
obvious that the higher we were above the sea-level, the larger that are would
be. But I confess that this had not occurred to me at the time of which I am now
speaking. The situation was far from being a familiar one. Mountains don’t rock
or roll.
“Well, it was the period we treated as night, and for which we turned in to
sleep, when I was watching the movements of the pendulum with a perplexity that
increased as they increased and varied. I thought every one except myself was
asleep. Suddenly, to my astonishment and alarm, the pendulum, instead of going
backwards and forwards over the diameter of the circle inscribed below it,
changed its direction, and described a circular movement, passing completely
round over the circumference of the indicating circle.
“ ‘It’s no use, Master Bertie,’ said a voice which at first startled me by its
unexpectedness, but which I recognized as that of the young Avenil, who, instead
of sleeping, had been quietly exercising his precociously scientific faculties
in watching the pendulum, and drawing his own inferences. ‘It’s no use your
trying to keep things to yourself, for fear of frightening us. Look at this
rod.’
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“Resting one end of a short bar upon the floor, he made the other end slowly
describe a circle in the air.
“ ‘This is where we are,’ he said, pointing to the upper end of the bar. ‘It’s
just as well we didn’t lower any of the boys further down when we were
prospecting the outside of our hollow tree. I shall go to sleep now.
Good-night.’
“He had made the discovery first, a discovery which caused me to gasp with
apprehension. At that moment a rushing sound as of wind attracted my attention.
I went to the aperture of the cave and looked out. The sight confirmed my worst
fears. The fog was entirely gone. Overhead shone the stars out of a sky
intensely crystalline and black, where the streamers of an
“However, as the danger of such a catastrophe did not appear to be imminent, the
discovery I had made still afforded room for hope. We were in motion. That was a
valuable fact. The area of ice was limited, so that the water could not be very
far from the base of our eminence. This too was important. The rolling proved us
to be detached from any field. Even though it should be impossible to descend
from the peak, we might be able to reach the sea with a grappling line, and
telegraph home for relief. If we succeeded in doing this, the only thing that
then remained for us to do, would be to keep our position so brightly
illuminated, that the Relief would be able to
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see us and take us off; for not knowing where
we were, we could not tell them where to look for us.
“These things passed through my mind as I stood by the entrance to the cave.
Returning within, I was accosted by Avenil, who said,
“ ‘I have been making some calculations in my head, and am very much inclined to
think we must be on the top of a pretty high old berg. What have you seen? Is
the fog gone yet?’
“Telling him to wrap his furs closely around him (we all had dresses of fur,
double ones with fur on both sides), I took him outside and showed him our
position.
“ ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that these things take-to rocking and rolling a long
time before they can tumble over, so that we need not trouble ourselves about
that.’
“ ‘Could we not,’ he then asked, ‘find out whether it is ice or water down
below, by firing some shots down?’
“ ‘Certainly,’ I said, ‘If we had been provided with a gun.’
“ ‘I have my piece with me,’ he replied, ‘and some percussion bullets left from
the stock I brought out with me.’
“I begged him to get them out at once, as if the fog came on again they would be
of no use.
“The gun was soon ready, and the whole party came and stood on the ledge to
watch the experiment.
The first shot was directed against the face of the berg opposite to us, in
order that we might learn the effect of the concussion on what we knew to be
solid ice, before discharging one into the unknown void below. The bullet struck
and exploded, tearing away large splinters and hurling them into the air, whence
they fell into the abyss. We then fired several shots downwards at various
angles, some to a distance of probably two or three hundred yards (for it was
but a pocket-piece, and scarcely able to carry further). They all exploded, as
if against a hard substance, making a noise that amid those icy silences seemed
terrific. We then bethought us of lighting up the most distant points the gun
would reach, by discharging some small fireballs; and I returned into the cave
to prepare
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them from a combination of Avenil’s
explosives, and some of the reflector’s magnesium. They answered their purpose
admirably, but proved still more conclusively that no open water was accessible
to us, and therefore no room for drifting, except with a vast mass, and probably
therefore no telegraph wire accessible, or means of communicating with home, and
no prospect of relief.
“The experiments which forced this melancholy conclusion upon me being over, it
was with a heavy heart that I led the way back into the cave, and seated myself
in silence beside the pendulum.
“Avenil, who was the oldest of the lads, placed himself beside me, and after a
short silence, remarked –
“ ‘It is lucky that I am one of the lightest, as well as in other ways the
fittest, of the party for the job. Don’t you think, Bertie, we had better set to
work at once?’
“ ‘It seems the only hope,’ I answered; ‘but I cannot bear the thought either of
letting one go alone or of leaving any behind, and in such a place as this.’
“I said this because I thought that he meant that with but one or two persons in
it, the aëromotive could be worked by hand power, and that he would venture
forth in it to seek aid.
“ ‘No, no, I don’t mean that,’ he exclaimed, when I had explained my thought.
‘Why, Bertie, old man, the idea of missing your Christmas dinner is affecting
your brain! Did you not notice that the wind has set in strongly from the south,
so that there would be no chance of working against it by hand? I meant that I
would be the first to descend the berg by a rope and explore the lower part of
the floe more closely: and if I could find a likely spot, commence boring or
blasting a hole to let our grappling hook through. I suppose we have line enough
to scale any possible berg?’
“I reminded him that the plan would only answer upon a thin ice-field, whereas
we had two-thirds of our mass below the surface of the water; but he said that
there might be thin ice pr even crevices close by, and that at any rate it must
have an
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end or an edge somewhere, and that whatever
the risk it was necessary for some one to run it, and who better than he?
“I declared that if anyone made the attempt it should be myself, and that I
would set about it tomorrow; but he exclaimed –
“To-morrow! why, dear Bertie, how forgetful you have become – you who are famous
for always thinking of everything, and everybody, except yourself. It is all one
long day, or rather night, here.’
“ ‘The thought of you all, and of your parents,’ I said, ‘will come over me at
times, and is almost more than I can bear. But call it what you will, day or
night, the next twelve hours will see the turn of the sun. Would that we might
be safe here until his light travels so far north. But we have not food for so
long a time, or fuel to maintain the heat for converting the ice into water for
drinking, even if the berg were safe from overturning. But what are the lads
firing again for?’ I asked, for I thought I heard a fresh discharge.
“As I spoke, young Wilmer rushed into the cave, crying out that our shots had
been taken for signals, and were being answered from a balloon or something that
seemed to be coming towards us.
“Scarcely crediting my senses, I hastened out, and was just in time to hear
another discharge, apparently to the south, and but a short distance off. Gazing
intently in that direction, we-presently discovered a light attached to what
appeared to be a large old-fashioned balloon coming along with the wind.
“ ‘More victims;’ I muttered to myself, for I knew that a machine of that build
could never control its course in anything stronger than a light wind. Our own
machine was on the spiral fan system, and, with sufficient motive power, could
screw its way right into any wind. This was of the old gaseous type; and though
it was not unusual for travellers to take a short cut over the Pole from one
hemisphere to the other, this was not the vehicle to do it in.
“Observing that the stranger was keeping a direct course for us, I told the boys
to get out the gun again, and a fresh supply
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of magnesium, adding that we would let the
strangers see as well as hear us, and that it would be curious indeed if we were
to have company there.
“ ‘A Christmas party! a Christmas party on an iceberg!’ they shouted.
“ ‘And perhaps,’ added Avenil, ‘they will be able to take us off.’
“When they were quiet, I said to them –
“ ‘My boys; that balloon is in distress. She is either steered by a novice, or
by one too weak to keep her steady. I wish the wind would lull; she will sweep
past us to a certainty. Cease firing, and keep the reflector turned on her. We
shall be able to speak her presently.’
“It was a moment of intense anxiety as she neared us. It was clear that she was
desirous of coming to anchor. for her grapples were all out hanging far below
her, so far that I wondered they did not catch in the water, and either retard
her progress or drag her down. As it was, she had a strange jerky motion, which
at first I was at a loss to account for. Studying her carefully through my
glass, I discovered the cause. She was skimming the ice; and the jerks were
caused by the grapples catching the edges of the hummocks and then slipping off
and catching again. She was on a lower level than ourselves.
“I had scarcely made this observation when we all cried –
“ ‘Ah!’
“For at that moment she made a sudden leap upward as if lightened of a
considerable load, and indeed, I thought I saw a large package or something drop
from her. A few moments more and she rushed upon our berg, her lines striking
against the walls of our cavern, and she herself striking against the side of
the peak far above us, exactly as we had done, only with much greater violence,
and from another direction.
“Without pausing a moment to see what she would do next, but shouting at the top
of my voice to encourage the inmates, – if living inmate she still had, for I
had begun to doubt it, so strange had been all her ways since the last signal
had been
(p. 15)
discharged, – I and the lads seized hold of
the grappling lines and carried them into the cave, where we made them fast by
wedging them into a great crevice in the ice. Fortunately the arrest of the
balloon against the berg had left them slack, or they would have been torn away
from our grasp. Hastening out again, we perceived her clinging to the precipice
above us, as if rubbing herself uneasily against its sloping front. I then
hailed her in several different languages successively, the last time being in
Arabic, for the make of the grapples made me take her for an Oriental of some
kind. This time I was rewarded by hearing a faint voice speaking in the same
tongue, and querulously complaining of something or other.
“So we set to work to haul her in to us. She came more easily than we expected, for she had lost much of her buoyancy with the blow of the contact – a contact partly caused, as on reflection seemed probable, both in her case and in our own, by the attraction of the gigantic iceberg.”
CHAPTER III
“WHILE gently drawing the stranger
towards us, I did my best to encourage the inmates by addressing to them kindly
phrases in the same tongue; and, as I must confess, I felt a little ruffled at
not getting a single word in response. At length the car, which was elaborately
constructed of the finest basket-work and silk, was safely lodged within our
crater, its huge floaters, still partially distended with gas, occupying a great
portion of the cavity. Fortunately the wind had entirely lulled; but to prevent
it from embarrassing us should it rise again, by its action on the mass, I
directed the lads to gather up the folds as the gas escaped, and packed them
away in the recesses of the cave. I then clambered up into the car.
“It was an immense and unwieldy affair, evidently designed by and for people who
were greater adepts in luxury than in science. What perplexed me most was the
absolute quietude
(p. 16)
of all within. Opening a trapdoor, and
descending a flight of steps, I found myself in a small chamber, where by the
light of a dim lamp, I perceived an old man of most venerable aspect, with long
white hair and beard, evidently an oriental, reclining on a divan, and
apparently more dead than alive.
“Hearing me enter, he said, in a tone of mingled reproach and entreaty, but
without glancing toward me –
“ ‘Zöe, why so long absent? Surely the car needed not guidance so much as I
needed thee?’
“He had scarcely finished his utterance when a sharp little cry broke from an
adjoining chamber, which caused the old man to start and turn towards me.
Whether the astonished look of his glistening eyes was caused most by the
appearance of a stranger, or by the cry he had just heard, I could not tell, but
he was evidently disturbed at both.
“ ‘Can I help you?’ I enquired, for I found him easily intelligible. We
aërialists, you must know, are obliged to be conversant with the tongues of all
civilised people.
“ ‘Zöe ought to have announced you,’ he said, with a gesture of courtesy. ‘I
presume that you have come on board us from some balloon that we have met. I
fear I am too ill to converse with you. Zöe will speak for me. Me thought I
heard an infant’s voice. You are a foreigner. Do foreigners carry young children
on such voyages?’
“ ‘I think you are in some error,’ I returned, ‘as to the precise position of
your balloon. It is because I saw you were in some difficulty that I have come
on board. Could I find her you named, or any other of the passengers, I would
not intrude upon you.’
“ ‘Not find Zöe!’ he exclaimed. ‘She was here just now, and only left me to look
after the machinery and lights. That ‘is always her part in our air-trips. Since
we left
“His utter ignorance of what had happened to his balloon led me to surmise that
his companion had met with some accident – probably fallen out immediately after
discharging the signals which had attracted our attention.
(p. 17)
“At that moment the cry was renewed. Unhooking the lamp from its chain, I went
into the adjoining compartment, where I found an infant in a hastily-improvised
cot.
“At the sight of the light, the cry ceased, and I took the child, cot and all,
and set them down beside the old man.
“ ‘I suppose this is her child of whom you were speaking,’ I said. ‘It is,
indeed, young to ‘
“ ‘Man!’ he cried, almost raising himself from his couch. ‘Her child! what mean you?’
“I refrained from speaking, and he gazed on it awhile with a wondering and
troubled mien, muttering to himself words which I could not catch. Presently he
said again, –
“ ‘Where can Zöe be?’
“It was clear that there was no alternative but to tell him all, so far as I
knew it, respecting his situation. When I had concluded, and made him comprehend
that his companion must have been precipitated to the earth and lost, and that
the sole inmates of the balloon were himself and a new-born infant, and that he
had come down on an ice-field in the Arctic seas, and also that though we would
do all in our power to aid him, we almost despaired of our own extrication, and,
indeed, had hailed his approach as that of a possible deliverer to ourselves, –
he said, in a tone of devout resignation, –
“ ‘I understand it all now. It was willed. Save her child, if it be possible.
You will find that here which will repay you. For me, I die.’
“And covering his face, he murmured, –
“ ‘How she must have suffered through my blindness. Suffered in silence and
alone. Would that her mother had lived. Zöe, my two Zöes, I come. Receive and
forgive!’
“Thinking it best to leave him awhile to his grief, I quitted the car and
returned to my party, who were in no little curiosity about our visitant. They
had completed their work of expelling the gas, and were folding up the bulky
fabric as I had directed them. I now stopped this, and said we would spread it
partly overhead as a ceiling, and partly under foot as a carpet, in order to
shelter the new comers who were unable to help themselves.
(p. 18)
“ ‘Why, who and what are they?’ they inquired, all speaking at once.
“ ‘In the first place,’ I told them, ‘there is an old man, a very venerable old
man, with snowy hair and dark piercing eyes, who has lately left Damascus, and
says he is going to die. In the second place, there was a young woman, his
daughter, who took care of him, but has now disappeared.’
“ ‘Quite lately?’ asked Avenil.
“ ‘So lately that he did not know of it, and was expecting to see her when I
entered.’
“ ‘Depend upon it, it was her falling out that made the bal-loon rise so
suddenly, while we were watching it,’ he said.
“I agreed that this seemed probable, and added, £In the third place, there is a
baby; which, seeing that. The old man knew nothing about it until I discovered
it, must have been introduced by the young woman very shortly before her
disappearance.’
“ ‘The poor little thing won’t survive her long in these regions,’ said one.
“ ‘And who else is there? and why don’t they show themselves?’ asked another.
“I told them there was no one else; and that of these two the old man had made
up his mind to die, and committed the infant to my charge, for his mind was as
broken with grief as his body with age.
“ ‘And the balloon is of no use to carry us away from this place,’ said one, in
a tone of disappointment.
“I said probably not, but that at any rate we might find some supplies which we
could turn to account. And then selecting young Wilmer, – your father, Lawrence,
– as the gentlest and most tender of the lads, I re-entered the chamber. The old
man was still alive, but moaning feebly; and the child was so fast asleep, that
I thought its mother must have given it a cordial before leaving it, a surmise
which was afterwards confirmed by my finding a vial beneath the head of the
couch.
“I knew little of medicine, and nothing of the management of children, but
having a vague idea that the principal agencies
(p. 19)
in sustaining their vitality are air, food,
sleep, and warmth, I directed young Wilmer to open some cases which were in the
chamber, and see if they contained any nutriment likely to be suitable for the
child, while I endeavoured to rouse the old man to action of some kind. The
chamber which had evidently been constructed with a view to a warmer climate
than that of the Arctic regions, was rapidly losing the heat I had found
oppressive on my first visit, a heat supplied by the machinery of the balloon,
and therefore no longer sustained now that the machinery was at rest. Its
atmosphere, however, was far from pure and wholesome. So I begged the old man to
let me remove him and the child to our own more roomy abode. But all my efforts
were unheeded. He refused to move or to be consoled, and by turns murmured the
names of Zöe and Solomon, and something about a talisman, whose aid he seemed to
be invoking for the child.
“In the meantime, young Wilmer had been to work to good purpose. He had found a
case containing a preparation of milk, solidified into small bars. After tasting
these, I determined to administer them to the infant. Not to make this part of
my story too long, I will state at once that the old man died a few hours after
his descent, having uttered nothing that could give us a clue to his name; and,
indeed, only once speaking coherently, on which occasion he asked the month and
day of the year, and said something which I took for an adjuration addressed to
the sun.
“The child became our first care, and we seemed tacitly to regard it as a point
of honour to save ourselves in order to save it, and rear it to manhood. I say
manhood, for it proved to be a boy. This important discovery was made on the
occasion of the question being started as to what we should call it. We were
sitting, soon after its arrival, around our camp illuminator and warmer, which
was no other than our electro-magnesian reflector already mentioned, and which
was so constructed as to be readily convertible into a small and luminous stove;
young Wilmer, in his function of nurse, held the infant on his knees, and it was
gazing, with eyes wide open, at the light. It never
(p. 20)
cried, which was a great comfort to us male
creatures, for we should have been terribly puzzled what to do if it had; and it
had taken very kindly to the food we had given it. “Well, we were sitting thus
when some one suggested that we ought to call it Zöe.
“ ‘Zöe, indeed!’ exclaimed nurse Wilmer, indignantly; ‘why, it’s a boy!’
“The observation showed how judicious had been my choice of him for nurse. The
possibility of such a thing had not occurred to anyone else. We could not resist
having a good laugh over our dullness, and, to our surprise, the child, as if
because it then heard human voices for the first time, actually joined in the
laugh by making a sort of crowing noise.
“ ‘Is there a name on the balloon, that will do?’ asked one of the lads. But the
balloon bore no name. Another suggested something implying ice or air; and it
was even proposed to call it Ariel, and give it one of my names for surname.
Ariel Bertie, we thought, sounded well, and I was strongly inclined to adopt
this suggestion; the more as I had fully made up my mind to adopt the child as
my own, should I ever succeed in escaping from that place, and reaching home
with it in safety. The similarity of the name, I considered, would make it
appear to strangers as if it were really a blood relation. The child itself,
too, seemed by its crowing to approve, at least, of having some distinctive
name.
“However, young Wilmer, looking up from it, said that he had read in an old
story-book, of a wild Indian, who, being on a desolate island, was rescued from
death by a white man, and in gratitude devoted himself to the white man’s
service, and was called after the day of the week on which he had been saved, –
Friday.
“ ‘And as this is the last day of the winter solstice, and we may regard him as
a little ray from heaven to lighten our gloom, let one of his names be
Christmas!’
“So with vehement rapidity exclaimed young Avenil; and, as if in approbation of
the proposal, the infant chirped and crowed with redoubled energy.
(p. 21)
“ ‘Listen! it is singing a carol,’ cried nurse
Wilmer. ‘A Christmas Carol – hear its caroling?’
“ ‘Then call it one,’ said Avenil.
“ ‘One what?’ I asked.
“ ‘Christmas Carol. It’s a charming name.’
“ ‘And we will call it Chrissy, for short,’ said the boy-nurse, bending down and
kissing the child, and then handing it round for each one of us to kiss as we
repeated the name, Christmas Carol.
“We all agreed it was a charming name, and wonderfully appropriate, from whatever point of view we regarded it. For it had come at the very birth of the year, when the days first begin to wax after the winter solstice. and in the moment of our deepest despair; and we spoke of the old man just dead, its grandfather, as the old year, and of its mother Zöe, as the life that went out in giving it life. And as we looked on the infant that had so wondrously descended among us, and repeated the name whereby it was to be known among men, we forgot the peril we were still in, and warmed towards the most ancient of sciences, Astronomy, and the poetry of its kindred Mythology, and were, I believe, at that moment, about the happiest party on earth.
CHAPTER IV
“A
DEEP, broad crevice ran across one
corner of the floor of our cavern. In this we deposited the body of the old man,
filling it up above him with broken bits of ice, which when driven in with blows
became welded together, forming a sarcophagus of clear crystal, warranted not
only not to consume the body, but to preserve it from decay, until the berg
itself should finally bow its head and sink and melt in the sea.
“The next task was to investigate the nature and contents of the balloon. Young
Avenil set himself to make an examination of the machinery. The other lads
rifled the stores,
(p. 22)
and I sought for some document by which we
might learn the history of the late occupants.
“It was little substantial help that I expected to get from any discoveries we
might make. It was unlikely that the stock of provisions would go far towards
keeping us alive for the five or six weeks still remaining of utter darkness,
during which it would be hopeless to attempt to leave the berg. Fitted, as the
machine probably was, to be a mere pleasure conveyance of a wealthy and
luxurious Damascene family, it was not likely to contain more than was
sufficient for a short trip. But what we found led us to a different conclusion.
Not only was it over-laden with provisions and luxuries sufficient to sustain in
comfort a number of persons for several weeks, but it contained jewels and money
to a great value. So that, altogether, we were led to conclude that the old man
and his daughter” were, probably in consequence of some unpleasantness connected
with the latter’s situation, in the act of emigrating with all their property in
search of a new home, when by reason of illness, or storms, they were driven out
of their course, and carried by the currents of the atmosphere to the Arctic
Seas.
“The discoveries I had made intensified the interest I already felt in the
child. It was evidently the heir to people of consideration and wealth, that
would enable it to take up any position in the world for which it might by
character and abilities be fitted.
“So occupied was I with these reflections, that I had not given my mind to what
was really of far more importance to us just then, than anything else in the
world; namely, the possibility of turning the balloon to account in contriving
our escape. There was clearly no other way, for the berg had evidently reunited
with the masses of ice around it, as was shown by its perfect immobility; and a
journey over the ice-field would be attended by hardships that must be fatal to
at least one member of the party. Since the stars had become visible, there had
been no difficulty in ascertaining our latitude. It was a degree or two above
that of Spitzbergen: that is, the polar distance of our berg was about eight
degrees. About
(p. 23)
our longitude we were necessarily still in
the dark; and our only hope of finding it lay in our hooking the telegraph.
This, however, was practically of no consequence, as the very size of our berg
showed that we must be too far from any coast for us to attempt to reach it over
the ice. By knowing the latitude we were enabled to determine the period
remaining of total darkness. And this, as I have mentioned, had still five or
six weeks to run.
“I was talking over these matters with the lads, as we sat round our little
stove, the child as usual lying on young Wilmer’s lap, and flourishing
marvellously, when Avenil abruptly asked me who was the maker of the broken
cylinder of our aëromotive, and whether the size and number were stamped upon
it.
“Thinking he was indulging in visions of a claim for dam-ages against the
manufacturer on our return home, I twitted him on the score of his reflections
taking a more sordid and less practical turn than usual.
“He had then the same imperturbable good temper that distinguishes him in his
present exalted position, and he made no reply to my taunt. But after the rest
of the party had turned in and were asleep, he beckoned to me to take the lamp
and come outside our place of shelter. When I got there, he said –
“ ‘What I want to know is this: – can the fans be worked with a less powerful
decomposer’ than the one we have broken?’
“I said, certainly; the only difference would be in our speed; but that I did
not care about that, for, provided we had power enough to carry us aloft, and
sustain us there, the winds would be sure sooner or later to carry us to some
eligible place for descending. At any rate we could hardly be in a worse one.
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘now will you answer my question about the broken cylinder?’
“I mentioned the maker’s name, and the number of the piece.
(p. 24)
“ ‘Now look at this,’ he said, ‘and tell me what you think of it.’ and he led me
to the machinery of the strange balloon, which he had been taking to pieces, and
uncovering the cylinder, which he had concealed, bade me look at it.
“I did look at it, and then at the machinery of which it formed a part, and then
at the boy. And then I said –
“ ‘Do any of the others know of this?’
“ ‘Of course not,’ he answered. ‘I was not going to raise hopes only to have
them disappointed. But what do you think of it?’
“ ‘Think of it? Why that this cylinder, though less powerful than our own, is by
the same maker, and of precisely the same kind, and that it will take us up off
the ice, and if we have moderate weather, enable us to steer homewards.’ And I
grasped his hand in joyous revulsion of feeling at the immediate prospect of
escape for my lads.
“It is true that I ought sooner to have seen this possibility, as all the
machinery used in the East is of British manufacture. But the events connected
with the arrival of the balloon had occupied nearly all my thoughts. Besides,
the acquisition of such an addition to our stock of provisions had removed from
my mind all apprehension for the present.
“I will not detail the experiments which occupied the next two or three days.
Suffice it to say, that after several trials we succeeded in fitting the new
combination of machinery so as to give sufficient power for our purpose. The
moment of our quitting the iceberg was one of intense emotion; the thought of
our various homes and the feelings we knew would be working there, had our
position been known, dominating all others.
“Next to this, the strongest feeling I verily believe was that of eagerness to
save the child whose advent had so strangely ministered to our salvation, and of
curiosity to see whether its subsequent career would correspond with its
commencement.
“The important question, in which direction we should steer, was soon decided in
favour of home, though it was by much the longest journey. It is true we might
easily have regained the Pole, which was but some eight degrees distant, and
(p. 25)
there we should have found a fresh vessel to
take us home. But the lads all shrank from a return to its gloomy though
hospitable shores, and cried out for the sun, and the light, and home; and the
little Criss carolled so cheerily at the sound of their acclamations, that I
determined to undertake the longer voyage without more ado.
“So we departed, rising slowly and steadily from off the cratered pinnacle of
ice which had been our home for so many days; leaving on it a burning beacon,
which remained in sight long after we had started. The air was perfectly calm;
and so, slowly and without mishap, and glad not to rise very high, for fear of
the effect of a rare atmosphere upon the child’s tender lungs, we steered for
the invisible sun, remaining ignorant of our longitude until we had got well
within the daylight.
When next we came near enough the earth to discern the character of the things
upon it, we were pleased to find that we were coming among friends. For I espied
the familiar outlines of one of those stereotyped stations for aërial and
railway locomotion, with which our Government has provided the whole of its
Asiatic protectorate. And by the signal hoisted on it for the information of
aërial travellers, we learnt that it was one of the north-eastern-most stations
of British China.
“It soon appeared that we bore a more dilapidated aspect than we were aware of;
for a large number of spectators assembled to witness our descent in the
enclosure appointed for the purpose. At first they were disposed to make merry
at our appearance; but when they beheld the gravity which we all steadfastly
maintained as we stepped one by one out of the car, now properly secured by the
station officials; and when finally young “Wilmer came forth bearing the infant,
laughing and crowing in his arms, and we proceeded to the Station Hotel, the
curiosity, especially of the Chinese portion of the crowd, knew no bounds. They
would have it that one of us was a woman in disguise; and then, that we must
have abducted the child. Hearing murmurs to this effect, and not desiring to
excite the hostility of the natives, I asked one of the officials in their
hearing, if there was a place of worship at hand, where a
(p. 26)
thanksgiving-service for escape from great
peril could be performed; and learning that a Buddhist temple was near, I sent a
liberal fee, to secure the services of the priest. I took care to say all this
aloud, in the language of the country, for former experiences had taught me that
the nearest way to the hearts of a barbarian people is by paying respect to
their religion. And I knew from history that nothing had contributed more to
induce the Chinese to entrust the political management of their empire to us on
our retiring from India, when we had taught its people to govern themselves, and
hold their own against the Russians; or to dispose them favourably towards our
beliefs, than the conviction that we should pay the same respect to their
religion and customs that we showed to those of each other in our own country,
as well as to those of the Hindoos.
“I also sent for a native newspaper reporter.”
CHAPTER V
“WE were fortunate in finding a nurse
for the infant in a young English widow of gentle nurture, who had just lost her
own child, and was desirous of returning to
[Here the old man’s voice faltered, and became broken. The cause of his emotion
was known to few beside myself; but he succeeded in mastering it, and presently
went on.]
“We did not escape the usual penalty of novelty while we remained in the Mongol
town. It was on the western borders of the sea of Japan that we alighted. We
were duly interviewed by the caterers for the public press, especially those of
the native religious papers which my act of piety had conciliated. Some of these
were illustrated, and marvellous were the sketches they produced of our
encampment on the ice-peak; for they had depicted faces of buried dead peering
with open eyes through the lid of their crystal coffin, from the walls and
(p. 27)
floor of our crater; while watching over us
was seen the shadowy form of their principal divinity, – the one to whom the
temple I had patronized was especially dedicated. All these and other paintings
were done in the same style of Chinese art that prevailed thousands of years
ago; for they are the most conservative people in the world. I am inclined to
believe that, like the horse, the bee, and many other highly-organized animals,
the Chinese have long ago reached the utmost perfection of which their
particular species is capable; so that they do not, like us, keep developing
into new varieties. The period during which a race* retains the faculty of
changing for the better, which with us constitutes the secret of civilization,
has long since been passed by them, and their sole care is to continue to exist
without palpable deterioration, They are the bees of humanity, very ingenious
and industrious, but they do not get on any further. They live only to repeat
what has been done before over and over again. Their organization has quenched
individuality.
“It is possible, however, that such stereotyping of character is but a resultant
from the stereotyping of conditions. Now the Japanese, who were long ago called
the Englishmen of the East, form a wonderful contrast to their neighbours across
the strait. But for us,
“But I see one of my young friends opposite yawning. I am obliged to him for
doing so. It was a needed reminder that mere reflections are apt to be tedious,
especially when they have nothing to do with the subject in hand. And I
under-took to relate facts, not reflections. In my excuse, let me tell you that
the life I have led so much up in the air, and so much alone, without a sight or
a sound to attract the attention, and guided only by the needle, without
reference to aught without, – like a soul by its internal ideal, – is very apt
to make a man reflective. He comes to regard himself as a bystander to the
world, and to think and talk about it as if he were not a part of it.
“We brought ourselves and the infant all safe to
(p. 28)
And Bertie’s voice trembled again as he closed his manuscript.
CHAPTER VI
THE work of which the foregoing
narrative is to serve as commencement, will in reality be a joint production, to
the greater portion of which I shall enact the part of editor rather than of
author; for it is derived from the reminiscences of the loving hearts of those
who knew him best, and who, during its
progress have been continuously associated with me in our common home.
This home is no other than the well-known “Club” (as our ancestors taught us to
name such institutions), already referred to under the name of The Triangle. As I hope our story will be read
in regions whither the fame of The Triangle has not yet travelled, I will here mention
that it is the oldest, and as its members fondly believe, the most highly
considered, of the institutions which have, more than any others, served to
ameliorate the social life of modern times. It has been the model for the
numberless similar clubs which have now long existed among all kinds and classes
of civilized people, and in their perfection of economy and organization,
brought facilities for comfort, fellowship, and culture otherwise unattainable,
within easy reach of every rank and grade of life; without detriment to
domesticity or individuality. And here I may remark that
(p. 29)
in no respect does our idea of perfection in
organization differ from that of antiquity more than in this, – that while
formerly its highest triumph was to repress, so now its sole, or at least main,
aim, is to develop individuality. Other clubs have such names as The Right-angled
Triangle, The Obtuse-angled Triangle, or The Acute-angled Triangle, and are called for short, The Right, The
Obtuse, or The Acute. There is also the Isosceles, and the Equilateral. Ours alone is known as The Triangle.
The determining idea of all these institutions is derived from the fundamental
plan of human life. They consist, therefore, of three departments, each distinct
and complete in itself, yet all inseparably united to form an harmonious whole.
One angle of the building is devoted to men, another to women, and the third to
both in common, with their families.
Formerly it was only in this last section of the building that the inhabitants
of the various divisions could meet together, except by calling upon each other
privately by an external entrance. Now, each division has its own hall private
to itself, the common one for all having recently been constructed. In the
opinion of the members of The Triangle, the propinquity of the family folks is
as desirable as that of others. We are, therefore, emphatically an Equilateral
Triangle, and dispense altogether with diagonals or bi-sections; for these
involve an expedient which we hold to be subversive of the essential
significance of the club principle. The example of the Square, Rectangular, or
Parallelogrammatical Clubs, which have been started as an improvement upon the
Triangular ones, and which provide a fourth and separate division for the
exclusive use of couples ungifted with offspring, has never obtained favour at The Triangle.
It is by the frank adoption of the Triangular principle that modern society has
reconciled the long conflicting ideas of the Home and the Commune. Coexisting
harmoniously beneath the same roof, the former is free from invasion or
dictation from without, while the latter involves no deprivation of domesticity
or individuality. Convenience, not interference, is their motto. We thus vindicate
our claim to be the most perfect
(p. 30)
exponents of the most perfect civilization
yet attained, – the civilization which, while affording complete security,
ministers also to the promotion of individuality and the development of the
affections.
It was this that endeared the Triangle to the great and loving heart of him
whose loss we are now so sorely lamenting. A multiplication of distinctions
beyond those broadly indicated by life itself, he regarded as a departure from
the basis of Nature, and a return to the system which proved so disastrous to
our ancestors.
These, as the lessons of our childhood inform us, used to imagine that they had
detected imperfections in the structure of the universe, and particularly of the
moral world; and in the plenitude of their presumption set themselves to improve
upon natural order by artificial expedients contrived without reference to the
principles of that order. Their sentiment of humanity was undermined by their
sentiment of patriotism; and their sentiment of patriotism was undermined by the
yet more sub-divisional character of their religion. It was only through “The
rise of a spirit superior to both patriotism and religion (as then understood),
that our country was rescued from falling into utter disintegration and
insignificance.
The struggle by which this happy era was inaugurated was a tremendous one: and
inasmuch as it was a struggle of principles, apart from all material vested
interests or other forms of selfishness, it is regarded by us as constituting
the grandest period in our history.
As some of its details will necessarily be alluded to in the course of our
narrative, I will not here say more respecting it than that its result was to
extinguish for ever, so far as the vast bulk of our population is concerned,
that antagonism between the Church and the World, which had for centuries been
the fount of woes innumerable to mankind; and to obtain recognition of the
essential identity of the two opposing forces.” It is the return to the basis of
nature, through the abrogation of the ancient divorce between the various
departments of the human understanding, that is symbolized in the triune form of
our
(p. 31)
modern life. Hence she love borne to it by
one who more vividly than any other of modern times realized the essential
Oneness of Humanity, in its capabilities and significance, with its sub-standing
and informing principle.
It must not be supposed that the idea of such an institution as The Triangle attained its full development all
at once. It required the Emancipation to restore the taste for the almost
forgotten art of marriage. The demand for dwellings suitable for couples and
families of moderate means, had led to the institution of Flats or Suites, and
even of
Radials, as a ring of houses was called,
having a central kitchen and service in common. These were a great step in the
promotion of comfort and economy; but they failed to minister to that fullness
of social intercourse which all cultivated natures crave. For, however well
adapted to each other a man and a woman may be, their intellectual capacities
require to draw at least a part of their sustenance from without. Otherwise,
domesticity itself becomes a bar to the maintenance of individuality.
To this end they must have a varied society within their reach. It was reserved
for the Triangle to show how this want was to be met. People who watched with
curiosity the growth of the great three-cornered building which overlooks the
Concerning the
Triangle, I will here only add further,
that it is situated in the heart of the intellectual quarter of London; so called
because here dwell chiefly those who are devoted to literature, science; and
art. To the east of this quarter lies the
(p. 32)
mercantile and industrial; to the west, the
fashionable; and to the south, the governmental and legal quarter, the whole
covering an area which to our ancestors of the earlier part of the Victorian era
would have appeared monstrous and impossible. Yet it is not so much in a lateral
direction that
CHAPTER VII
I
SHALL now continue the narrative which
Bertie has so well begun for me, and endeavour to weave into a harmonious whole
the various items supplied me from the sources at my command. Next to Bertie
Greathead, it is mainly from the Avenil family that I have drawn my information.
The whole of the Wilmer’s, to whom I belong, early left the scene, and only
reappeared on it towards the end.
It was by general acclamation of the whole party of the iceberg, and of their
relatives, that Bertie undertook the charge of the little Christmas Carol. As
his calling caused him frequently to be absent, and as the child’s property
promised to be considerable, Bertie begged that the fathers of Avenil and of my
father might be associated with him in the trust. This was done, and when my
father and Avenil came of age they also were made trustees.
The only difficulty was about the place of residence for the child and Alma
Nutrix, for so the new nurse was called. Bertie insisted on their living with
him, so attached had he become to the child. But his bachelor’s quarters were
altogether too straitened to admit such a party. His fellow guardians wished him
to come into the Triangle. But he was not a member; and on making application,
and being asked which division of the club he desired to join, he found himself
ineligible for any. He could not have the child and its nurse
(p. 33)
with him in the single men’s quarters; and he
could not go with them to the single women’s quarters. As for the married folks’
division, he would not hear of it. He was not qualified, he said, and did not
mean to be qualified, to occupy that department.
In the meantime, the child and nurse were accommodated by the Avenils, in their
own quarters in the club, and Bertie used to visit them there. The Avenils had
thus an excellent opportunity of becoming well acquainted with
Bertie then, for his own solace, took the child with him on an aërial journey.
It had begun to pine a little, as if for its
(p. 34)
foster mother. The journey did it so much
good that Bertie concluded that, having been born in the air, the air was its
natural element. After this it was his constant companion, until old enough to
go to school. It was doubtless in a measure owing to the action of the life
aloft upon a peculiar temperament, that little Criss grew up to be the man he
was. It served to develop a temperament which was itself the result of an union
between two races of opposite characteristics. A careful examination of the
contents of the balloon, made after Bertie’s arrival in England, revealed
letters and other documents which proved that the old man, though himself of
Jewish extraction, had married an European woman; and that Criss’s mother Zöe
was their daughter, being named after her mother. She, again, had a husband or
lover, who was a Greek, whose child Criss was. Her father hated this Greek, and
believed him to be the emissary of enemies who were plotting against him. It was
to escape from their malevolence that he had embarked in his balloon with his
daughter and his wealth, intending to settle in some country where he would be
more secure than in
Thank heaven we have got so far past that stage of woman’s
(p. 35)
long martyrdom, that her mistakes in the
bestowal of her affections are now met by a smile of encouragement to be wiser
in the future, and not by a fierce frown of unrelenting condemnation for all
time to come.
Bertie found some confirmation of these conclusions after-wards, on visiting
Of Criss’s father, the Greek Lover of Zöe, Bertie found no trace whatever. And
he and his fellow-guardians decided that it was not necessary to advertise the
finding of the child and the property, inasmuch as there could be no doubt that
any lawful claimant would not hesitate to advertise for them himself. No such
advertisement appeared, and Bertie owned to himself that it was only with vast
reluctance that he could have brought himself to yield his charge even to its
own father. The non-appearance of a claimant was therefore a great relief to
him.
To one portion of the contents of the balloon I must recur; it is a portion
which plays an important part in my story.
The examination made by Bertie on the iceberg had necessarily been hasty and
superficial. It was shortly after reaching home that he requested the elder
Avenil and Wilmer to be present at the opening of the boxes, as he considered
whatever of value they might contain to be the property of the child, and
therefore vested in them jointly as its trustees.
Mr. Avenil’s knowledge of mineralogy was sufficient to enable him to perceive
that some of the gems were of great value. A jeweller with whom he was
acquainted being called in, the report he gave was so startling, that they
determined,
(p. 36)
with the jeweller’s advice, to consult a
first-class diamond merchant. There was one in
Bertie contented himself with saying that they were heirlooms in the family of
the ward of whom he and his two friends were trustees. Finding that nothing more
was forthcoming, the merchant said:
“Diamonds like these are always catalogued. No two famous stones have precisely
the same weight or form, and few have precisely the same hue. Here is a printed
list of all the principal diamonds in the world, including those which have
disappeared; for such things are never destroyed. They are always kept out of
the way of fire, but they disappear through being stolen and hidden away, and
the thieves dying and leaving no note. I propose, with your permission, to weigh
some of these larger ones, and compare them with my list.”
He then produced a balance of a marvellously delicate construction, and having
ascertained the exact weight and counted the sides of a wonderfully magnificent
diamond, he referred to his book. What he found there made him start again. He
said nothing, however, but proceeded with tremulous hand to make a like
comparison with some of the others. After referring to another part of his book,
he addressed the trustees and said:
“Gentlemen, when you have heard what I am about to say, you will not wonder at
my surprise, and, I trust, not be averse to giving me the information I have
already requested of you. The last time that these gems were seen in public, it
was in the capacity of crown jewels of the brilliant but short-lived empire of
the North Pacific. You are doubtless all
(p. 37)
familiar with the extraordinary career of the
Californian sailor-warrior, who maintained the independence of the states of
North America which border on the Pacific, against those on the east of the
Rocky Mountains, and erected them into an empire unrivalled in grandeur and
extent, bringing all the islands of that great ocean, with their enormous wealth
of produce, beneath his sway; and who was finally baffled in his scheme of
universal dominion in that hemisphere, by the determined and heroic resistance
of the allied powers of Australia and New Zealand. Ah, gentlemen, those were
exciting times in that hemisphere. Then, for the first time since the days sung
by Moses, Homer, and Milton, earth, sea, and air bore an equal share in the
contests of men. The lofty ranges of the Rocky Mountains and the
“Forgive my repeating what every school-boy knows, and the oldest of us can
almost remember; but professional enthusiasm has invested that period with an
overpowering interest for me; for never before or since have gems attained such
a value as under that brilliant and reckless ruler. It was on the downfall of
the adventurer, for so I suppose I must call him, seeing that he did not succeed
in establishing his kingdom, that these gems were lost. His end was as strange
as his origin and career.
“Born in a Californian placer, and carrying in his veins the blood of that long
famous heroic family of France, the Bonapartes, and of the renowned high priest
of the once powerful sect of the Mormons, King George Francis, on the collapse
of his empire, quitted his capital, San Francisco, in an aëromotive.
(p. 38)
His hope was to reach the
“His pursuers reckoned on their superior speed to reach the islands first
unperceived, and capture him on his arrival before he could land. Fixing their
rendezvous for the summit of Mouna Roa, they got there in time to conceal
themselves in the hollows of an extinct crater, and take up their posts of
observation. Heavily laden though they knew the car of the fugitive to be, its
machinery was so powerful that they had no reason to suppose he would depart
from his usual custom of flying high until directly over his intended
destination, and then dropping straight down upon it. Their plan was to
intercept him at the moment of his descent, and its success depended mainly upon
his being unaided by his partizans in the islands. Had he telegraphed to them of
his coming, a detachment of guards and officials would have risen to meet him,
in too strong force to be withstood. The absence of any such demonstration led
the party on the lookout to surmise that either through confidence, haste, or
treachery, he had not announced his coming.
“They had not long to wait. In a very few hours a spot appeared in the
north-eastern horizon, which soon developed into the well-known outlines of the
imperial car. Rising at once into the air, the enemy disposed themselves so as
to be able to make sure of intercepting their prize. The comparative
diminutiveness of their vessels would have rendered them
(p. 39)
unseen by him, while his was plainly visible
to them; moreover, the smoke which arose from the volcano beneath, the terrible
Kilauea, then in a state of violent activity, would serve to make the whole
scene on their side indistinct to one at a distance. Even when on his near
approach the emperor perceived the hostile squadron, he had no reason to suppose
it to be other than some of his own islanders, or other excursionists, on a
visit to the renowned volcano.
“Too late he discovered that he was surrounded by enemies. The imperial car had
been brought to a stand-still preparatory to its descent. They had considerable
way on them, while he was motionless. This was the moment for which they had
watched. They darted on him like a flock of swift eagles on an unwieldy swan
seeing the capture of his vessel imminent, the Emperor, who was a man of
unbounded intrepidity committed himself to a parachute, in the use of which he
was a tolerable adept; and presently his enemies, to their immense chagrin, saw
him slipping through their hands, as he descended, at first rapidly, and then,
as the resistance of the air began to tell, slowly and steadily towards the
earth.
“Now came the catastrophe which led to my telling this long story. During the
struggle aloft, the contending parties had drifted immediately over the vast
crater of
“Ascending the mountain, and traversing the table-land, you come suddenly to the
brink of a gulf at least a mile in diameter, and with vertical sides from one to
two thousand feet deep. The whole interior of this abyss is a furnace of molten
lava, agitated like the ocean in a tempest, and tossing aloft billows of fire,
which do not, as in the ocean, flow in one direction, impelled by a steady wind,
but meet from opposite quarters with such violence as to dash their fiery spray
high in the air. And all this fierce contention goes on amid such appalling
Bounds of rage and sighs, and groans and murmurs, that it is impossible to avoid
fancying one is gazing upon the fabled hell
(p. 40)
of the poets, and watching the throes of
giant fiends in their agony.
“How the Emperor came to meet his fate none could tell. Probably the mephitic
vapours stifled his senses, and made him unable to direct his course. But he was
seen to descend into the very midst of this furnace, and with him went the
finest collection of diamonds in the world. There can be no doubt of it. They
had disappeared from the Palace at
“And now, pardon me if once more I ask how these jewels which, a couple of
generations ago, were thus lost in the crater of
All looked to Bertie Greathead. He had resolved to keep the matter secret, at
least for the present. He felt the temptation strong upon him to reply –
“Lost in a crater of fire, they were found in a crater of ice!”
But he resisted it, and observed merely that it was probably a case of mistaken
identity.
The merchant shook his head, and looked disappointed. But he only said, –
“In that case the previous history of the lost jewels can have no interest for
you. Now what do you want done with these? I may be able to find you a
purchaser, but I can undertake no responsibility about title.”
“Of course not,” said Mr. Avenil, somewhat sharply; “That is our business. All
you have to do is to describe them as heir-looms in a family that wishes to
realize their value. And it
(p. 41)
occurs to me, that as we are disposing of the
property of a minor, it will be well to make a condition providing for their
repurchase at his option on the occasion of his attaining his majority.”
The merchant declared that such a condition was without a precedent, but that he
would do his best. He had at that very time a commission to provide a set of
diamonds to be worn at the coronation of the Emperor of Central Africa, a
ceremonial which had been long deferred, owing to the loss of the crown jewels
of that country, and the failure to procure any worthy to replace them.
Not to multiply details, I will only add that a sale of the jewels was effected
in the manner proposed, the eagerness of the African monarch to obtain them at
any price the moment he received his agent’s report, leading him to consent to
the unusual proviso for their future redemption, rather than forego their
present possession.
It was highly improbable that any private individual would care to keep such an
amount as that of the purchase-money lying idle in the shape of jewels, but the
trustees were agreed as to the propriety of retaining the option, and the method
they adopted of investing the fortune accruing from the sale would enable its
possessor easily to repurchase them on coming of age. For it was carefully
placed in good governmental and co-operative securities, to average the moderate
rate of ten per cent., the income being reinvested as it came in, so as to allow
the capital to accumulate by compound interest.
Bertie was unwilling to accept any portion of the child’s income towards its
maintenance and education. But he was overruled by Mr. Avenil, who said that the
immensity of the fortune would give his scruples about such a trine the
appearance of affectation, and also that it would be unfair to the boy himself
to restrict his advantages to suit the far narrower means of any of themselves.
(p. 42)
CHAPTER VIII
UNDER the loving guardianship of Bertie
Greathead, little Criss Carol throve wondrously. Mr. Avenil and Mr. Wilmer knew
well that they were doing the best for the child’s highest welfare in committing
it to such superintendence. They knew that the hardness and irresponsibility of
character likely to be engendered by the possession, of ample wealth would find
its best corrective in the companionship of one so simple, tender, and true as
Bertie the aëronaut. Whatever intellectual supervision was needed, Avenil would
himself supply, but he agreed fully with Mr. Wilmer in ranking character as
above attainments, especially for one exempted by fortune from the struggle for
existence, and endowed with an almost unlimited power of influencing others.
The struggle for existence! I shall not, I trust, be neglecting my story for my
reflections, if I make here some observations respecting the origin and
development of the period which produced the character I have undertaken to
present. We are, each one of us, the product, not of the present only, but of
the past. Nature, though it repudiates the vicarious principle, links all things
together in an inevitable sequence. It is to the ever-memorable nineteenth
century – a period to which we trace the first dawning of our glorious
Emancipation – that we are indebted for the clue whereby we have escaped
entanglement in those labyrinths of transcendental speculation, in which our
forefathers lost themselves.
How would they have rejoiced could they have seen in their clay the revelation
of the divine method of the universe which has been made to us! – could they
have known that in the original substance which filled infinity was such
capacity for evolution as would account for all subsequent phenomena whatever;
that the various steps of physical motion, heat, life, light, sensation,
thought, conscience, follow each other necessarily, evolved, as the spark from
the contact of steel with flint, from
(p. 43)
the contact of part with part, – given only
time, or rather eternity, for the process! and this not over the infinite whole
merely, but throughout each separate portion.
It was the struggle for existence, – a struggle often, doubtless, in those who
are too weak to endure to the end, fatal to that Conscience, which alone we
recognize as worthy to be the final cause of all things – that at length
produced the conscience which now governs the world, – at least, in its maturer
parts, – and constitutes the salt of its preservation. Head by this light,
history exhibits nation after nation, race after race, Aryan, Turanian, Semitic,
all faltering and failing, tried and found wanting, through lack of capacity for
development up to this the crowning point of the structure of humanity. No
single race was equal to the achievement; and so it comes that now the first
place on the earth is held by the peoples into whose composition enters
something of each of these, but most of the Aryan, and that under its
Anglo-Teutonic form, this being pre-eminently the race which acknowledges the
supremacy of man’s brain and heart, and ranks the intellect, the moral sense,
and the affections of living humanity; as above all traditions, and conventions
whatsoever.
Such was the significance of “the glorious Emancipation.”
Young Christmas Carol was fortunate alike in the period of his existence, and in
the persons among whom he fell. Had he, with his beauty, his wealth, and ‘his
mystery, lighted upon our isles in the days when Money was king and
Conventionality was god, the story of his life could scarcely have been other
than a tale of the degradation and ruin of a character, of his essential
innermost sacrificed to his accidental outermost, to the utter effacement of the
divine capacities of his being as an individual. But he came in a time when the
dominant characteristics and achievements of modern society were such as found
fair representatives in men like those who became his friends and guardians.
Greathead, Wilmer, and Avenil, each was an exponent of a different yet
coordinate factor in the sum of triune perfection. With Goodness, Beauty, and
Use thus
(p. 44)
impersonated, to preside over his youth,
Christmas Carol had all the external advantages that the world even of these our
days could bestow.
I assign the function of representing Beauty in the abovementioned category, to
my grandfather and father, each of whom in turn were the lad’s trustees and
guardians; for the same exquisite spirit of poesy animated them both, and their
influence had much to do with the nurture of the lad’s nature on its softer,
side. Would that death had not so early removed my father. Yet even Criss’s
ample repayment to me would not have exceeded his indebtedness to him. I believe
my father’s chief regret in dying arose from his desire to carry on to
completion the education of which he had helped to lay the foundation.
Physically and mentally little Criss Carol exhibited the characteristics of his
ancestry. The Greek came out in his keen appreciation of knowledge and beauty;
the Semitic showed it-self in his sensitiveness to the imaginative and
emotional. Never was prophet-poet of the ancient Hebrews possessed by a more
vivid sense of a divine personality. Soar far aloft with him as Bertie would on
his voyages while yet a child, or after-wards when as a lad he had become an
adept unsurpassed in the management of his beloved “Ariel,” and mounted by
himself to regions of air inaccessible to others, even the most daring, his
foster-father owned himself startled at the boy’s absolute inability to
comprehend the feeling of loneliness. Sometimes he seemed as if he held commune
with beings palpable only to himself. But Bertie, while he watched and wondered,
respected the individuality of the child’s manifest genius, and therefore
abstained from any remark that might chill his spirit, and throw him back upon
himself.
When permitted to make ascents by himself it was Criss’s delight to shoot
rapidly up to a great height, and there remain almost stationary, like an eagle
poised on outspread wings, without help from his propelling apparatus. Here he
could remain
(p. 45)
floating about on his parachute. The
perfection which he soon attained in the use of this appliance was so great as
to relieve Bertie of any misapprehension on the score of accident. His parachute
was one of the flat kind, so difficult to master, but so admirable in its action
when mastered. It would almost float on the air by itself when expanded; and
Criss, who was slenderly built, of moderate stature, and a wonderfully active
and wiry frame, was able by its aid alone to raise himself from the ground and
remain in the air for a considerable time. Indeed to fly, seemed to be almost as
instinctive with him as with the birds; and it was one of the prettiest sights
to see him, quietly and without apparent effort, soaring aloft in the clear
blue, sustained by the white expanded wings of his parachute, with a crowd of
birds’ flocking round him, and seeming to recognize him as of their own order.
As he grew up he was allowed to have for his own a rocket-spiral machine of the
most perfect make that the skill of Ave-nil could devise and his own fortune
purchase. This was worked by the power long ago discovered, but for the secret
of whose practical application our ancestors for generations sighed and toiled.
Their mistake consisted, not in their conception of the potentialities of the
magnetic coil, but in sup-posing that the power produced was only in proportion
to the amount of the chemical and metallic elements consumed. It was the
discovery that these agents are but a necessary initiative, and that the power
is capable of almost indefinite enlargement without a corresponding increase in
their consumption, but merely by bringing other and more subtle elements into
cooperation, that has made possible all our modern mechanical developments.
So naturally did Criss take to flying, that it needed no laborious instilment of
the formulæ respecting the relations of atmospheric pressure to falling bodies,
to produce the confidence indispensable to the exercise of the art. The ancient
hymn, “Heaven is my home,” had for him from the first a peculiar and literal
significance.
*
*
*
*
*
(p. 46)
Bertie was long profoundly affected by the loss of the wife he had so curiously
acquired; and partly under the influence’ of this feeling, partly for the sake
of a more bracing air for Criss, he removed his headquarters from the Triangle
to a cottage on the Surrey hills, situated near the new town which was then
rapidly springing up. It was here, where, except on one side, there was scarce a
tree or impediment for miles, that Criss made his first essays, and acquired his
chief skill in aerostation and aëronautics. Had
His skill once acquired in the country, its exercise was not interfered with by
a return to town. Every house-top afforded him a resting-place, and it was one
of his chief amusements to pass, sustained by his parachute alone, from one
street to another, without ever’ descending lower than the roofs, but merely
touching them lightly in order to spring from them onwards.
We in our days are so accustomed to things as we have them, that we are apt to
forget they were not always so. There was a time when the roofs of their houses
were as strange and mysterious to the inmates, as the interior of the earth on
which they stood. But, the practice of aëronautics, and the substitution of
magnetism for coal in the production of heat, combined to bring about a great
revolution in our architecture and habits, and affected even our system of
jurisprudence. For it was found necessary, in the interests of that privacy
which is essential to the development of the character and affections, to secure
our interiors from the observation of impertinent aërialists, by making certain
changes in our window system, and
(p. 47)
also to add certain stringent provisions to
the laws relating to libel and slander. The most effective of these provisions
was one that was in direct opposition to the enactment of our ancestors. There
was a period when they suffered the libeller to go free on pleading
justification and sustaining his plea by proof of its truth. We, on the
contrary, treat such a plea as an aggravation of the original offence, and
punish it accordingly.
But what would our ancestors have said, could they have seen the
Whether dwelling in town or country, the scholastic part of
(p. 48)
Criss’s education was carried on with the
utmost care, under the admirable
The steps whereby the country arrived at a solution of that once famous Religious
Difficulty,
by which our unhappy ancestors suffered themselves to be rent and divided into
hostile factions, to the utter destruction of all patriotic impulses; and the
part played by that Difficulty in ultimately promoting the establishment of
an uniform Canon of Reference, for the solution of all questions requiring to be
solved, I may have occasion, later on, to give some account. They form part of
the larger history of the great movement which we know as “The Emancipation,” a
movement which constituted the crown and completion of the still more ancient
“Reformation.” A great result often springs from a mean-looking germ. It was the
cost of the original “School-board” system, that led the over-burdened
rate-payers to look about for means of relief. These were ultimately found in
the enormous and ill-applied resources of the National Church Establishment.
Under the perfect organization of the
(p. 49)
We have got rid also of the system which recognized and fixed a broad
distinction between classes. All now are taught in the same institutions; the
only differences being such as are rendered needful by the different vocations
they are intended to follow.
Avenil, Bertie, and my grandfather, as well as their relations male and female,
were educated in these schools. My father’s premature death led to my being
deprived of the same advantage, to my irreparable loss. The adoption of this
system of united instruction for all classes was accompanied by an access of
patriotic enthusiasm, such as has rarely occurred in the history of our country.
The class antagonisms and differences out of which had grown so many of our
social difficulties, at once fell to a vanishing point.
The mechanism of the system was contrived not merely to allow, but to encourage,
the development of individual character and opinion on the part of the scholars.
While inculcating methods rather than results, it trained each individual to
refer all questions, neither to authority nor to tradition, but to the criterion
of his own carefully cultivated intelligence and moral sense. To develop, not
repress, the faculty of thinking, was now the object of education; and this with
girls as well as boys! The inculcation of opinions based upon mere authority,
and bearing no relation to evidence or utility, was reckoned immoral.
The “Religious Difficulty” had been solved by the substitution of careful
definitions for the old harassing dogmas. Church and School, representing
severally the development of the religious and the intellectual faculties, were
able to unite upon the basis of the axiom, that –
As in the region of Morals the Divine Will can never conflict with the Moral
law; so, in the region of Physics, the Divine Will can never conflict with the
Natural law.
(p. 50)
Whatever may have been the mental capacity of primitive man, it has been found
that under its modern development the human mind is unable to conceive of
universal law as proceeding from any source short of the Divine, that is, the
supreme all-pervading creative energy of the Universe. And we find it to be
equally impossible for us to regard as Divine a will or law that is variable and
self-contradictory. So that, did we find a conflict occurring between Law and
Will, we should necessarily and involuntarily determine that, one or the other
was not entitled to be regarded as Divine.
This axiom or definition is not a “dogma,” inasmuch as it does not claim to be
true independently of reason and evidence. It is a necessary basis of
consciousness. We cannot conceive of the opposite of it being true, any more
than we can conceive of Space as limited, or Time as terminable.
The close and affectionate relations maintained between his fellow-guardians,
secured for Criss all the advantages of a home and society whenever Bertie’s
avocation took him to a distance. Whether in the private dwelling and working
rooms of the Avenils and Wilmer’s, or in the common salon of the Triangle, Criss
was always warmly received as a favourite member of the coterie. Ofttimes when
left by himself in the cottage on the downs, to follow his studies in Bertie’s
absence, he would telegraph to his friends at the Triangle (for all the members
have a private wire between the club and their country houses,) telling them
that he was coming to spend the evening with them, and asking them to have tea
on the roof, when he would alight among them in his car.
The extent of the boy’s wealth was kept a secret among his trustees, but his
character and history made him a constant subject of interest, and his friends
delighted to draw him out on matters which excited his attention. As affording a
glimpse of his life at this time, as also of those with whom he was connected,
the following letter of the elder Mrs. Avenil to my grandmother will be read
with interest –
*
*
*
*
*
(p. 51)
“Criss was to join us a few evenings back on the roof of the Triangle, and as he
was late, we looked out for him. Some of us thought we had caught sight of the
Ariel’s light over one of the poorest parts of the city, but it remained there
so long that we concluded we were mistaken. When at length he dropped among us,
he said in reply to our questionings, that he had lingered in that neighbourhood
as one that always had a special attraction for him. My son Charles exclaimed at
this, and asked what he could want in the very worst part of
“The boy looked surprised and puzzled, and then said –
“ ‘Why
worst? what do you mean by worst?’
“ ‘I mean,’ said Charles, ‘that it is inhabited by the poorest and most vicious
classes.’ “
“ ‘Poor, yes; but what is vicious?’ asked the child.
“ ‘Now, Mr. Wilmer,’ said Charles, ‘here’s a chance for you.’
“ ‘Nay,’ replied Mr. Wilmer, ‘surely your twenty-seven years are competent to
instruct his ten. Let us hear your definition.’
“ ‘I have not kept up my Morals since I left school,’ said Charles, ‘as I have
been so much occupied with Mathematics; but if I remember aright, we used to
define vice as a course of conduct produced by a defect in the faculty of
sympathy, so that vice means selfishness, or the practice of self-indulgence to
the detriment of others.’
“ ‘If that be it, you have used the wrong word, Master Charles, dear,’ cried
little Criss with vivacity: ‘for it is just because I find so much sympathy, and
therefore so little selfishness or vice, among those poor people, that I delight
to drop down among them.’
“ ‘But you bate squalor and ugliness, I know,’ returned Charles, ‘and admire
every beautiful thing you see, in building and landscape.’
“ ‘Yes, yes, that is quite true,’ pleaded the child, ‘and I do not know quite
how it is; but – ‘and here his voice sank and faltered a little, ‘it always
seems to me that directly something living and human appears, all my interest
and sense of beauty
(p. 52)
centres in that. I never see ugliness in
those districts; for I see poor people helping each other in their struggles for
a living. I see poor mothers tending their own children, instead of leaving them
to servants, as some of the very rich do: and poor husbands and wives nursing
each other in sickness, instead of sending for a hospital nurse.’
“ ‘And pray, how do you see these things?’ asked Charles. ‘I hope you don’t go
and look in the windows?’
“ ‘I don’t know how I see them,’ the child answered, thoughtfully. ‘I seem to
myself sometimes, when I am passing over a dwelling, to he as well aware of all
that is going on inside as if I saw it with my bodily eyes. Perhaps it is by
means of that same sympathy, the absence of which, you say, is the cause of
vice.’
“Here I made a sign to Charles that he should not lead the child on to talk in
this direction: for we have often observed in him symptoms of a belief that he
possesses some occult faculty, which makes him different in kind from other
folk. A notion of this kind is often but a germ of insanity, and requires
careful management to eradicate it, the most essential point being to supply
plenty of occupation in another direction, and allow it to die of inanition by
never encouraging or even heeding it. The sympathetic faculty exists in him to
an extent altogether extraordinary, and unless its growth be judiciously
repressed, and kept proportionate to other sides of his nature, we shall have
reason to be anxious about the excesses to which it will carry him when he comes
into the very considerable fortune which I understand will be his. Bertie
Great-head insists on his being kept in ignorance of his prospects while his
education is going on. No doubt it would injure the character of any ordinary
youth to be brought up to regard himself as independent of parents or guardians,
for such sense of dependence plays an important part in the development of our
best feelings. But Crissy is not as other children. The affections are already
too predominant in him. He is capable of sacrificing himself to any extent.
Their development needs precisely such a check as would be given by the
knowledge of
(p. 53)
his own independence. It would give him a
more practical turn. Admirably as he has learnt the theory and practice of
aëronautics, there is in him far too great a predominance of the contemplative
and subjective element. It is true that, when excited and eager in his talk, his
wonderful eyes shine out upon his audience with startling brilliancy and
suggestiveness; but when in repose, his gaze is manifestly turned inwards, as if there lay the real absorbing topic of his soul;
and he has a singular passion for being alone, a passion which grows upon him.
Already his favourite reading is, not in the literature of our own day, but in
such ancient writings as the Hebrew Psalms, and the Gospels, and the curious old
English poem called ‘In Memoriam.’ We who have learnt to discern the real
significance of the Beautiful Life, cannot but feel uneasy at the proclivity
thus shown towards sentimental contemplation by one so endowed and so young. All
are not eagles to gaze with impunity upon the sun. I know there are some points
upon which you and I do not coincide, but I shall be glad to know how your
motherly heart judges this dear child and his bringing up.”
The district to which reference was made in the conversation of which the
foregoing letter records the commencement, is mainly inhabited by that large
class of operatives, who are disqualified for being co-operatives. As all my
home readers must be aware, the great mechanical trades and industries of the
country are in the hands of large bodies of artisans, male or female, who are
associated together for their own exclusive mutual benefit, except in the cases
in which they are allied with outside capitalists. Much of the land is similarly
held; and the workers divide among themselves all the profit of their work,
employing as managers and secretaries, men or women, of high education and
social position, whom they pay liberally. The members of these associations and
their families are all well to do, and run little risk of poverty from lack of
work, while they have reduced the risk from natural causes to a minimum. For not
merely have the members of the various trades, by
(p. 54)
breeding in and in among themselves, acquired
an hereditary aptitude for their work, but they are careful to obtain the finest
specimens of women to be the mothers of their children, so that incapacity,
mental or physical, is scarcely known among them. There is thus no longer a
perpetual drafting off from these classes of the best looking girls to recruit
the ranks of wealthy vice and dissipation, and no leaving to the working man
only the poorest types of womanhood from which to choose his wife. It is
therefore outside of the ranks of the co-operative, that the pinch of pauperism
is found. To be qualified for membership, a man or woman must be up to a certain
working power. Those who are above this standard are at liberty to remain aloof
and work independently, making if they can, larger wages than are to be got in
the association, but at their own risk in case of illness or failure through
other causes. Owing to the advantages in the shape of capital and machinery at
the command of the associations, few do this except in those higher branches of
art-labour, where individual genius finds scope for its exercise. The great bulk
of the outsiders are excluded by reason of their inability to come up to the
mark required, as regards either the quality or the quantity of their work.
I mention this as I do not wish to appear to claim for our civilization that it
has already attained a condition so perfect as to be incompatible with the evil
of pauperism. The principle followed by our artisan classes is still the
principle inaugurated and insisted on by the church in bygone ages. As the
church utterly disregarded human individuality in respect of the nature and
operations of the mind, so the co-operative labour associations disregard it in
respect of man’s powers of physical work. The church doomed its heretics to dire
condemnation here or hereafter. The co-operatives doom all artisans who are
unable to comply with their arbitrary standard, to the dire pangs of poverty.
The progress of enlightenment; by removing the shackles placed by the church
upon thought, has emancipated mind from its slavery. A further progress will
similarly enlarge the conditions of co-operative labour until all classes of
(p. 55)
workers can be included without the sacrifice of individual differences.
The old restricted church maintained its authority by force. The old
trades-unions, adopting the ecclesiastical method, also used force. Like the
church, too, they rejected the principle of nationality, and set up their caste
against the state. These things are not so now. Individualism, or the rights of
the man, had to struggle long and hard against the fanaticism of organization,
ecclesiastical or communistic. The helpless Celt had succumbed to the tyranny
for ever, but for the indomitable energy of the self-reliant Anglo-Saxon, who
taught him what freedom meant. Such advance have we made. But the end is not
yet. The fold is not yet capacious enough to contain all the sheep. But time
will accomplish even this. The curious part of it is that the artisans, even
while following the old ecclesiastical principle in this respect, profess the
greatest hatred of the old ecclesiastical regime. Such is the vitality of the
system which dates from old
CHAPTER IX
IN their anxiety to do the very best
for their charge, the scientific Avenils and the aesthetic Wilmer’s held many a
consultation with Bertie Greathead. Under the term æsthetic I include the whole
range of subjects which appeal to the emotions. It was to my grandmother’s
strong religious feeling that Mrs. Avenil alluded in the closing sentence of her
letter. The family temperament, which in her and in my mother took the form of
devotion, took in my father the poetic – and in my-self the art – direction. My
father had married his cousin, and after his death, which occurred in my
childhood, my mother, under the influence of my grandmother, abandoned herself
utterly to the sway of their dominant sentiments. They withdrew
(p. 56)
altogether from their old associations, and
buried them-selves and me in the dwindling but tenacious sect of religionists,
who, as representing the church prior to the Emancipation, assume to themselves
the title of The
Remnant.
This, however, came after the time with which we are now concerned.
One day the conversation about Criss was commenced by Bertie referring to the
boy’s talk with his schoolfellows about the things he was in the habit of seeing
and hearing when aloft in his car. Bertie confessed himself unable to determine
whether his utterances respecting another world of intelligent beings proceeded
from any fixed or definite conviction, but many of his schoolfellows thought
that he believed in something akin to the doctrine of the transmigration of
souls, and held the upper air to be inhabited by angels, who met and conversed with him.
“Does he think that he finds albumen and life-plasm up there?” asked the younger
Avenil, with a laugh.
“I understand that he calls them angels, but does not profess to know what they are
made of,” said Bertie, drily. “He has sufficient scientific comprehension to
avoid assuming a distinction in kind between the entities of matter and spirit.
It was to a conversation he had with some of his schoolfellows on this point
that I was about to refer in disproof of Mr. Avenil’s notion of his unpractical
character.”
“Surely the other boys ridicule him when he speaks to them of such things?”
“Far from it,” replied Bertie. “They have too much reverence for the earnestness
and simplicity of his character to let any irony appear. The only time he ever
manifested impatience was at first, when they assumed as a matter of course,
that he took for realities the products of his own imagination. On this occasion
he told them that the beings of whom he spoke were as real to him as his own
schoolfellows. They had been tending some pet animals, which Criss allowed some
of his schoolfellows to keep in the cottage garden. One of the boys had said
that it would be a very dull and stupid world if all the living creatures had
developed into human beings. And another
(p. 57)
said it would be duller still if all the
human beings were grown-up men and women, without any boys or girls. And a third
said that people used, to fancy one yet more dull than that, for they imagined
heaven as peopled with beings who were all alike, and had no difference even of
sex. Then the first speaker turned suddenly to Criss, and exclaimed, –
“ ‘Carol can tell us all about it. Carol, are there any animals in heaven?’
“ ‘You know our bargain,’ was his reply. ‘If you want me to tell you about the
Above, you must first sing my favourite song for me.’
“ ‘Yes! yes! the balloon song! the balloon song!’ cried a number of little ones,
hastening to range themselves before him, as he seated himself on a
grass-covered mound. And then the little voices burst with tremendous energy
into the old nursery rhyme, which dates from the days when men could mount into
the air only by tying themselves to a huge bag of gas. (1)
Balloon! Balloon! Balloon!
Go up and hunt the sky,
Then come and tell us soon
What you have found on high.
So many things we want to know,
We cannot see down here:
Where hides the sun when day is done,
Where goes the dried-up tear.
And when our laughter dies away,
Who stores it up for future day.
Balloon! Balloon! Balloon!
Tell us of what the stars are made,
What are their children like?
We’re always told they’re good as gold,
And never sulk or strike.
But aren’t they often giddy found,
With always rolling round and round?
(p. 58)
“ ‘Now what is it you want to know?’ he asked, when they had finished.
“ ‘If there are any animals in heaven.’
“ ‘Certainly there are,’ he replied, with the utmost seriousness. ‘One of the
principal delights of the angels is in tenderly tending them. They regard them
as incipient intelligences of higher natures,’ and only a few steps below their
own children.’
“ ‘And are there any baby angels?’ inquired a little girl. She was sister of the
lad who had spoken first, and listened with awe to his account of the Above.
“ ‘Certainly,’ he said; ‘why not? Would not this be a very poor world were there
nothing but grown men and women in it, no tiresome children, no beautiful birds,
no noble horses, no sleek cats, no dear, affectionate dogs? Ah, they are not
worse off up there than we are down here, you may be sure.’
“One of the older boys here asked him whether the beings he spoke of possess any
specific gravity, or are altogether independent of gravitation.
Balloon! Balloon! Balloon!
What makes the thunder peal?
Where are the old gods gone?
We like to think ‘tis they who drink
The clouds when rain is done.
But don’t you often quake with fright
So far from earth to be at night?
Balloon! Balloon! Balloon!
We know what you have got to say,
You’ve told us oft before:
That if would we the old gods see,
We must our best adore:
And shines the sun, perpetual day,
’Tis only we who turn away.
Balloon! Balloon! Balloon
Go up and hunt the sky;
Then come and tell us soon
What you have found on high.
(p. 59)
“He replied that doubtless they vary from us in density and weight, as they live
at so different an elevation in the atmosphere; and that in some respects they
hold the same position towards us as fishes of the sea, inasmuch as they do not
require a solid element to rest upon, and can sustain themselves at different
elevations. They inhabit mainly, he said, the junction of the atmosphere with
space, and breathe the pure ether of the latter; but are endowed with an
apparatus whereby they can secrete the fluid necessary for breathing when they
wish to descend into the atmosphere. He delighted, he said, to note the
resemblances between things there and here.
“One of the lads said he supposed that every one was much more perfect up there
than in this world. To this Criss said:
“ ‘I do not understand. What do you mean by more perfect? All God’s worlds must
be perfect.’
“ ‘But not the people in them?’ suggested one.
“ ‘Hush, hush,’ exclaimed Criss, ‘we cannot call anything imperfect unless we
know the end it was designed to fulfil, and that it falls short of fulfilling
that end.’
“ ‘He talks as if they were all real for him,’ said another. ‘Come, Carol, tell
us, do you ever use the clouds as a bed, and go to sleep and dream when you are
lying on them?’
“ ‘Oh, yes, often and often,’ he returned; ‘but these things are as real for me
as you all are. Call them what you will, they are forces external to myself, and
which make me conscious of their existence by operating upon my senses just as
you yourselves do. Please do not call their existence into question. Fancy my
having to try hard to persuade them of the existence of you my schoolfellows! It
would seem just as absurd to me; and they have too much sense to require it.
Surely it is but a barren, superfluous sort of talk that consists in our
questioning each other’s existence. We, too, who have the microscope, telescope,
spectroscope, and such things, to make perpetual revelations to us of worlds
otherwise invisible! If it seems odd to you that I should nave experiences which
you have not, you should remember that you have experiences, which I have not.
The difference between us in this matter is
(p. 60)
only such as exists between a man who has an
ear for music and one who has none, or one who has a keen eye for colours and
one who is colour-blind. It is all a question of sensitiveness.’ “
Here old Mrs. Wilmer interrupted Bertie’s narration to remark that in saying
this the boy did not do himself justice. He should have adduced the case of his
own Israelitish ancestors as a proof that some races are endowed with a
vividness of spiritual perception which others are incapable of comprehending.
“I myself heard him,” said my father, joining in the conversation, “soon after
the trip he made with us to the sea-side, describing to a group of little
children some of the games and recreations with which, he said, the angels amuse
their leisure hours. You would have thought he was actually gazing upon the
scenery of the ideal world, as he described the particulars, so well did he make
his audience realize it too. Had I been a painter I could” have drawn a picture
from his description, so vivid and graphic was it. There were rows above rows of
angelic beings, attired in colours undreamt of by our rainbows, ranged along the
sides of tall cliffs which, in the form of a vast amphitheatre, overhung an
expanse of ether which lay at their feet, and stretched out and melted away in
the distance like an illimitable sea. I thought at first he was going to
describe something like the scene at Lord’s at one of the cricket-contests
between our ancient national schools of Harrow and
(p. 61)
contained ingeniously-devised machinery
concealed within them. Others were provided with wide-expanding wings to catch
the pulsations of the surrounding ether. And others were impelled by the young
angels themselves ranged in ranks upon them, and impelling them by their own
physical strength. And now and then during the race would be seen some little
craft without visible means of propulsion, making such rapid way as to outstrip
all competitors; and then a shout would arise, as the spectators surmised that
something unfair was being done; and then from beneath the keel which was hidden
in the element, the owner would emerge, shaking the ethereal particles from his
wings, and making the welkin ripple to his merry laughter, for such method of
propulsion was not within the conditions of the contest. I could have gazed long
upon the enchanting scene, as he raised it before me; but the bright and happy
crowds of the celestial population, and the fairy forms darting over the
luminous expanse, were in a moment all dispelled; for one of the youngsters
suddenly broke the rapt silence with which we had been listening, by clapping
his hands and exclaiming, ‘I know! Yachts!’ And after this Criss would not utter
a syllable further.”
It was with considerable impatience that the Avenils had listened to these
recitals of Bertie and Wilmer. When they were concluded, Mr. Avenil said to my
father –
“We must turn him over to you, Wilmer, to make a poet of him. He will grow up a
dreamy and unpractical man, and utterly unable to turn his fortune to good
account.”
“I think,” pleaded Bertie, “The skill he has acquired as an aërialist, indicates
a sufficiently practical turn for all useful purposes.”
“You aëronauts,” returned Mr. Avenil, “are too apt to judge the affairs of earth
by those of the air. You know little of anything more substantial than the
currents of wind and differences of atmospheric density and temperatures. Yours
is a pursuit that generates a disposition to drift rather than to act.”
Bertie laughed heartily at the idea of depreciating his vocation
(p. 62)
upon moral grounds; and remarked that those
who know what it is to drive an aëromotive at the rate of a hundred and fifty
miles or more an hour, through mist and darkness and tempest, cleaving the
ice-cloud, and dodging the lightning, would hardly recognize the criticism as
founded in justice. He added, that he, too, should he glad to see the boy in
training for some definite career.
“A rich man,” remarked Mr. Avenil, “ought to find his occupation in the
employment of his wealth. An income derived from investments, which require no
care on the part of the owner, tends to make a man a mere desultory vagabond,
unless he have some strong bias of his own to direct him. I should like to see
young Carol, as the proprietor of a large landed estate, devoting his money to
the improvement of agriculture, by the application of science in all its
available branches.”
“You read Poet in his every word and expression,” said Wilmer, “and would turn
the Poet into a Farmer!”
“He certainly is an enthusiast,” said the younger Avenil, “but his enthusiasm
takes anything but an analytic turn. His marvellous aptitude for languages,
coupled with his locomotive propensities, convinces me that he will find his
chief engrossments among men rather than among things.”
There was good ground for Charles’s remark. Criss had availed himself of the
advantages afforded in the National Schools, to attain a facility of expression
in many languages, which enabled him to converse freely with the nations of the
various countries he had visited with Bertie; particularly the Arabic, which,
for his origin’s sake, Bertie had urged upon him. Bertie said that the boy
seemed to acquire them almost by sheer force of sympathy. It was a heart – not a
head – faculty. The possession of it would be sure to encourage his love of
travel.
My father suggested that it was only part of the larger faculty of expression.
The boy possessed language and insight. Travel would give him information and
ideas. He ought then to turn his leisure to account as an author.
The elder Avenil demurred to this.
(p. 63)
“The world and science,” he said, “are the same everywhere; so that time spent
in travel is for the most part time wasted; Accustom him to regard a piece of
land as his own, – no matter whether he cultivates it or builds a town upon it,
– and he will soon learn to love it, and devote himself to its improvement.”
“The boy is a bird – a bird of passage; and you would chain him to a clod!”
exclaimed Bertie.
“The boy is an Israelite and a poet, and may be a prophet,” said my grandmother,
of hieropathic tendencies. “You are all thinking of the material, and forgetting
the spiritual. Put him, with all his endowments of soul and body, into the land
of his forefathers, and who knows but that he may successfully devote himself to
reviving the ancient glories. of his race, so long overshadowed by its lust for
gold. Though restored to the Holy Land,
They were all struck by this remark, coming as it did from one who dwelt apart
from the world of the present, in a region of exalted sentiment, absorbed in
theological studies, and making her chief companions the Sacred books of the
ancient religions. Unobservant, however, and indifferent, as she was in regard
to things around her, there was one portion of the earth that was ever present
to her mind, with an overwhelming interest. It was Judæa, the ever memorable
The prophecies of the ancient Jewish patriot poets respecting the future
resuscitation of their country’s greatness had taken deep hold of old Mrs.
Wilmer’s mind, and she had viewed with exultation the return of the Jews to
Palestine, and the vast influx of wealth and power with them into that country,
under the commercial influences of the Suez Canal,
(p. 64)
the Euphrates railroads, and the constitution
of the Empire of Soudan or
The whole of the circumstances attending the restoration were unusual. The
financial embarrassments of the decayed Moslem Empire had led to the sale of
The Ancient Court of the Sanhedrim was re-established, but on a purely secular
basis, as the nature of the times dictated. By this were the home affairs of the
country regulated; its foreign relations being controlled by a committee of the
Jerusalem Stock-Exchange, a puissant institution in these days of the almost
universal supremacy of wealth.
Powerful and prosperous as the Jewish community in Pales-tine had become, it
wanted yet one thing to complete its ambition. The adjoining countries of Arabia
and
(p. 65)
silent, studious German, backed by the moral
force of our own Anglo-Saxons at home and in North America, laid the first round
of the political edifice of that modern civilization, whose subsequent stages
have included the absorption by Germany of Austria proper; the reconstitution of
the Slavonic confederacy, and consequent reduction of Russia within moderate
dimensions by the withdrawal of her southern populations; the re-establishment
of the “Holy Roman Empire,” with Hungary as a royal appanage, in its own ancient
capital on the Bosphorus; and the waning of the Turkish dominion, through its
inability to retain its hold upon its border provinces.
My elder readers, who have all history, ancient and modern, at their
finger-ends, must forgive the recapitulation of these details as not irrelevant
to our story.
There was no king in
(p. 66)
individual with the general security for any
people, is approved of by us. As the genius of races and peoples varies, so will
these forms vary. The detail must be a matter of experience for all, not of
dogma for any.
We have, thus, learnt to recognize the sanctity of Individuality in Races, as
well as in persons. And there was no inconsistency in the statesmen of the great
and highly-civilized republics of Europe,
So they were all struck by Mrs. Wilmer’s remark. But it was not in the same way
that they were struck by it. To Bertie it was simply preposterous.
“My little Criss a king!” he exclaimed. “I am sure that it is no kingdom of this
world that he would care to have, any more than a farm. His heart is above the
clouds.”
“He cannot spend his money there,” said Mr. Avenil.
“By the way, have you ever, Mr. Greathead, taken him to the
(p. 67)
“Once only,” returned Bertie, and then I was so alarmed at the attention his
looks attracted, and also at meeting the diamond merchant, that I hurried away
without completing the enquiries I was making about his family. I hardly know
why, but I have a suspicion that that merchant knew more about the real history
of those jewels than he was willing to tell us, and I thought it best to leave
well alone. Did I ever tell you that I have seen them since we parted with
them?”
“Indeed!”
“It was on the occasion of my going to Bornou, the capital of
“Well, I found that this famous ‘and sacred Talisman of Solomon consisted of no
other than the jewels belonging to Criss, and which we had sold for him.”
“Curious,” observed Mr. Avenil; “I wonder whether it was a he of the Emperors,
or whether they were really the crown jewels which he had. If so, they must have
been stolen.”
(p. 68)
“At any rate,” said Bertie, “The Emperor’s readiness to give a large sum of
money for their recovery, without asking any questions, shows that he had strong
misgivings respecting the validity of his own title to them.”
“I don’t like one remark which you made, Mr. Greathead,” said my grandmother.
“Instead of saying these people are superstitious in spite of their having
Christianity and the Bible, say they are religious owing to their having them.”
“I was anticipating a somewhat different remark from you, my dear Mrs. Wilmer,”
said Mr. Avenil. “I thought you were about to claim the throne of
“He must know all when he comes of age,” said Mrs. Wilmer, with energy. “His
duty and mission in life may depend upon it.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Avenil, “whatever the future may contain for him, it is
clearly our business to make a man of him first, and not a visionary.”
NOTE
(57:1) It may not be worth preserving for
its own sake – what nursery rhyme is? But time is only too ready to drop things
into oblivion; so here it is.
CHAPTER X
IT was no small gratification to
Bertie to be able to relate to the Avenils anything concerning his beloved
foster-child that might tend to disabuse them of the notion that he was a mere
visionary. One possessing Criss’s acute sympathy with humanity could not, he
thought, be liable to the charge, no matter how he might love to cultivate
solitude and meditation in the intervals of his activity. During a holiday
absence of the boys, one of the Avenil girls was telling her sisters, how that
he had lamented to her the fullness of the world, and wished that he had lived
before the modem system of emigration had done so
(p. 69)
much towards spreading population everywhere.
And another said he acted as if he possessed an extra sense, and one that
required for its exercise a total withdrawal from human intercourse.
Bertie happened to call while they were talking, and they at once turned to him,
asking –
“Where is he now, Mr. Greathead?”
“Meaning Criss? I scarcely know. I had a message from him a few days ago from
the top of Teneriffe, which is one of his favourite perches. He has a friend in
the observatory there. There is a wire on the summit, as on most other summits,
for the convenience of aërialists, and he generally sends me a message when he
alights anywhere.”
“Oh, I know,” exclaimed one of the girls, “he delights to rest awhile on some
high peak, and thence take flight into the air, and return again to it, as a
lark to its nest, after being poised aloft. It was a happy inspiration of Mr.
Wilmer’s which gave him his name, for never did name and nature more closely
correspond. However dreamy he may be, he must see many things by moving about so
much, which other people miss. He ought to meet with adventures, too. Did he say
whither he was going next?”
“Yes, to
“Anything about Criss in it?”
“It is only as I have said.”
“Do tell us all about it.”
“Well, you must know that for a very long time Etna had been so quiet that a
large population had come gradually to settle upon its slopes, thinking the days
of its activity were over. Last week, however, a tremendous eruption rent the
mountain in various places, and there poured out torrents of lava, which,
meeting below one of the most thickly peopled
(p. 70)
slopes, completely cut off the escape of the
inhabitants. The Italian Government sent its best aërialists to try and
extricate them, but these, after many and disastrous attempts to pass the
barrier of intense heat, and alight exactly upon the very limited area
available, were compelled to desist; and then from within the flaming circle,
from the wretches doomed to be burnt or starved to death, and from their
sympathizing but helpless comrades without, went up a cry of agony, which, as
you know, has rung through all the wires of the world, appealing for aid. I and
others of my craft were on the point of starting to see what we could do, when a
telegram came to say that the rescue had been effected. I have now got the
details, and as I consider them a whole bunch of feathers in the cap of
aërialism, I have come to glorify my calling and its professors among my
friends.
“It appears that at the moment when despair was at its height, an aërialist
whose approach had been unperceived, alighted in the terror-stricken crowd, and
signified his readiness and ability to save them, one at a time. The peasants,
who are still as much a parcel of children as they were five or ten thousand
years ago, rushed upon him, determined to be saved all at once seeing that their
violence would be the destruction of himself and his machine, as well as of
themselves also, he dexterously disengaged himself, and leaping aloft out of
their reach, was lost to their view in the smoke of the burning mountain. On
hearing their renewed wail of despair, he presently returned towards them, and
hailing them, said he hoped now that they would do as they were told, and not
attempt to get into the car again. He then stopped a few yards over their heads,
and bade them depute one of their number to hold parley with him, the rest
keeping at a distance. Luckily their padre was with them, – it is he who has
given the account, – and it was under his influence that the stipulations of the
aërialist were observed. The important question who should go first, was settled
in favour of the children. The aërialist said he could carry two of these at
once; so the padre brought two children himself, and placed them in the car, for
(p. 71)
he could not trust the mothers to obey the
orders given. He describes it as a moment of agonizing anxiety when the car
arose with its first load, and disappeared in the smoke. But not a voice
ventured to utter a sound. Presently, however, there arose from the multitudes
who were assembled on the outside of the ring of fire, a cry and a shout of joy
which told those within of the safe and unexpected arrival of the car and its
contents. All was delirious delight for a moment, and then came an interval of
suspense. But soon the car returned and carried off more children; and then the
aged and infirm, and then the able bodied, the good padre himself being reserved
for the last, the lava having by this time approached so near that a little
delay would have rendered his escape impossible. The rescue had occupied all the
day and a part of the night, though much time had been saved by the plan of
suspending a large basket beneath the car in which the passengers were carried.
But it was not, and could not be intermitted until completed, though it must
have tasked the endurance of the aërialist and the powers of his machine to the
utmost.”
“You haven’t told us who he was,” said Avenil, who had entered during the
relation. “Was he an Italian?”
“Ah, that is one of the strangest parts of the story,” said Bertie. “When the
people had done congratulating themselves and each other, they bethought
themselves of their deliverer: but on searching for him he was nowhere to be
found. The Government has advertised the thanks of the nation to the unknown
aërialist, and offered to make any acknowledgment of his services in its power.”
“Do you know any professional likely to hare done it?”
“I know none who has an aëromotive corresponding with the description of this
one; and it is not like a professional to think of concealing himself after
doing a piece of business. I suspect it was some accomplished amateur, though I
know of but one in the world capable of the feat.”
“Could it have been Criss?”
“Here he comes to speak for himself,” exclaimed one of the girls, who was
looking out of the window. And presently the Ariel alighted on the broad
verandah, and Criss entered.
(p. 72)
But to all the questions with which they assailed him, he said only that he had
hoped to escape being found out, and that the reason of his delay in returning
was that he was so exhausted with the job that he had hurried off the moment he
had let go the padre and the basket, and slept for twenty-four hours in a
secluded nook on the opposite side of the mountain.
“Well, there is an Italian count ship waiting for you whenever you choose to
come out of your shell and claim it,” said Bertie.
“Count Carol sounds charmingly,” exclaimed the girls. “You may find it of
immense use when you fall in love. A woman likes to be called Countess.”
“Not a woman of much account, though, I suspect,” returned Criss, making his
first and last joke, as he disappeared and went to his own room.
“There, girls,” said Avenil to his younger sisters after Criss was gone. “You
see, a woman who wants to catch him will have to be on her best behaviour. By
the way, has he ever shown any signs of falling in love, any preferences for any
of your sweet sex?”
“Never,” said the youngest, Bessy Avenil, a blooming, practically-disposed
damsel of nearly Criss’s own age, now about seventeen. “And I believe he would
need a good shaking to bring him to the point; or, rather, that a woman would
have to do the proposing herself. But I don’t believe it is ‘goodness’ that will
win him; at least, not if opposites have the most attraction for each other.”
“At any rate he won’t find his duplicate,” said another, who was a little older.
“My belief is that he will be better single, for he is just one to expect so
much that he will always be disappointed with what he finds to be really the
case. He seems to me like one of those men who in old times women would have
thought it a sacrilege to love.”
“At any rate,” added Avenil, “he was now proved himself to be something more
than a visionary; so let us hope that this adventure will develop his practical
side.”
(p. 73)
“Meaning his matrimonial?” asked Bessie.
“Do you know,” said Bertie to Avenil, “That I think you carry your aversion to
the contemplative to an extreme.”
“Call it rather the unpractical speculative,” replied Avenil. “The world’s whole
history down nearly to our own time has been little else than one long
martyrdom, in which man has sacrificed himself at the altar of his own
unverifiable phantasies. Ours is the first millennium of the Emancipation. It is
the product of that scientific spirit, which refuses to divorce belief from
knowledge. It is not that I find dear Criss’s disposition aught but of the
noblest, but that I fear the indulgence of that style of thought may lead to his
sympathizing rather with the world’s ancient worst than with its modern best.”
“You know a good deal about his education,” said Bertie; “have you found him
defective in his views of history?”
“No, far from it. The professor of history at his school told me the boy’s
sympathies, as shewn in his essays, were invariably of the widest and most
radically catholic kind.”
“And in chemistry, which you yourself undertook to teach him?”
“Ah, there is an illustration of what I mean. He applied himself to that with
wonderful assiduity and success, making himself in a short time a complete
master of chemical analysis. Then he suddenly dropped it; and on my enquiring
the reason, said that it would not take him where he wanted to go, inasmuch as
it failed to discover the universal entity that underlies all phenomena. It was
not processes or stages that he cared for, but the ultimate analysis of things,
whereby he could resolve the various material substances into their prime
element. ‘Is it past finding out, Avenil dear?’ he cried, his eyes glistening
with eagerness, as if his whole heart lay in discovering for himself what men
call God. Of course I told him that it is past finding out by chemistry.
“ ‘But it must be there, and must be homogeneous!’ he cried, with the same eager
manner. ‘If it is not homogeneous, it is not God. I cannot think of God as made
up of substances eternally and essentially different.’ And he went on to declare
(p. 74)
that if the crucible failed to carry analysis
back to the stage where all things meet, and to reveal to him the universal
Substance or essential spirit of things, he should exchange the crucible of the
chemist for the crucible of his own mind, and continue the search there.
“Considering it a perilous temperament that prompts the longing to merge one’s
individuality in the inscrutable universal, – for what else is the Nirvana of
the Buddhist? – I endeavoured to check his indulgence of it by saying that as
our faculties, being themselves phenomenal, cannot transcend phenomena, it is
clearly our duty to rest content with phenomena, and not seek to trespass upon
forbidden ground. He asked what the penalty is for making the attempt. I told
him a wasted life, fatuity, and oftimes madness, as the history of the world
amply showed. And I spoke seriously, as I wished to impress him with a sense of
the danger he runs through indulging his theistic tendencies. But he laughed,
and said with that winning way he has, –
‘Dear Master Avenil, if I were made so, no doubt I should be able to remain
content with more phenomena, without seeking to know what it is that appears in
and through them. But I feel that I am not made so. Suppose mo, thon, to be a
bit of the universe, a conscious particle of the great whole, would you have me
balk my longing to recognize, and be recognized of, the whole of which I am a
part? Nay, supposing the theory which you favour to be correct, and that it is
only in our consciousness that the Universe attains self-consciousness, would
you forbid Nature such crowning satisfaction as it may attain through my
consciousness?’
“What could I say? Bertie, what would you have said?”
“If the longing be genuine, fulfil your nature, only do not cultivate fancy to
the neglect of experience.”
“Well, that is very much what I contrived to say, and the boy cried, ‘Ah, that
is just as my own dear wise Bertie would have spoken.’
“He added, too, that even if madness be the penalty for presuming to endeavour
to penetrate the unfathomable, it was a
(p. 75)
penalty that was quite as likely to overtake
him if he refused his nature full liberty of exploration. I suspect that his
habits of physical discursiveness have something to do with this mental
characteristic.”
“You know his favourite motto, which he inscribes in his most private entries?”
asked Bertie.
“No, what is it?”
“A text from Scripture, ‘One with God.’ “
Avenil sighed, for he really loved the lad.
CHAPTER XI
THE women of the Avenil family, both
for their connection with Criss, and as typos of a dominant class, deserve a
special chapter to themselves. Although by describing our recent social
developments and the steps whereby our national church was brought into accord
with them, I may delay my story, my readers must not think that I am digressing
from the main purpose of my book. The connection may not be at once obvious, but
neither in those fortunate days is the special connection obvious between the
church and the female part of the community. It was not so in the times to which
I shall have to recur in order to make my story, as a story of the day should
be, an index to the manners of the age.
I wish that it carne within my scope fully to delineate the characters of old
Mr. and Mrs. Avenil, who disappear from the scene about the time at which we
have arrived. It is only permitted to me to say that they died as they had
lived, contentedly resigned to the operation of the laws of that Nature which
had ever been the subject of their deepest study. United, in harmony with the
dictates of their consciences, in a marriage of the third class, and therefore
trusting solely to their own sense of mutual fitness and sympathy for the
continuance of their association, no cloud had ever intervened between them
(p. 76)
and the full sunshine of their happiness.
Hand in hand they lived and loved and worked, trusting to their respect for the
physical laws of life to find its due issue in the development of their moral
natures. So they passed through life cheerful, reliant, and self-sustaining,
emulating in their own method the consummate ease and enchanting rhythm of the
order of the universe; keenly enjoying in their heyday the rewards reaped of
knowledge and obedience, and, in their decline, still finding pleasure in
tracing and recognizing the inevitable sequence of the steps which marked their
decay. To the very last, their delight in studying the phenomena of the present,
made them indifferent to those of the past or future. Neither regret nor hope
found a place in their minds. Wherever is existence, they said, we shall find
something worthy to be studied. Whatever lasts as long as we do is sufficient
for us. Anticipation serves only to spoil the actual. Anxiety about the future
implies dissatisfaction with the present. Such was their religion, a term surely
not misapplied, though devoid of that yearning towards a personified ideal which
constitutes spirituality.
They left a large and distinguished family to inherit a temperament in which the
intellectual faculties dominated to the exclusion of the spiritual. For they
held it as an axiom that the spiritual faculty which has not the intellectual
and moral for its basis – that is, which ignores evidence and utility – is apt
to be as pernicious as the imagination which ignores experience and fact. Of
this family Mistress Susanna Avenil (to give her the usual designation of women
living in such wedlock as she insisted on) was the eldest; Charles himself
coming next; and the younger ones, whom I have termed the Avenil girls, bringing
up the rear. There was thus a very considerable interval between the eldest and
the youngest of the brothers and sisters.
Bright, intelligent, cheerful, and active, the sisters were a model of
self-helpfulness and prudence. Though not devoid of sentiment in regard to the
delicate matters of the affections, they were too practical in their management
to let their affections minister to their discomfort. They had one and all
asserted the privilege accorded to girls now-a-days, of quitting
(p. 77)
the parental shelter at the same age that
their brothers quit it, in order, like them, to follow the vocations they have
chosen.
No sickly exotics were they, such as their foremothers of ages long past. For
them was no herding together under the perpetual parental eye; like silly sheep
sure to be lost if once they strayed; no sacrificing the individuality of their
genius or their characters, and passing their lives in worthless frivolity or
listless indolence, envious of the active careers of their brothers, powerless
to earn or to spend, and absolute slaves to the exigencies or caprices of their
parents, until marriage should come to deliver them to a new bondage. The days
happily are long past, in which, while to men all careers were open, to women
there was but one, and it depended upon the will of individual men to accord
them that. It is little wonder that, thus placed, the women of those times
should have devoted themselves to the pursuit of marriage, with an eagerness
commensurate with the uncertainty of success, and reckless whether the issue
promised ill or well. Nor is it strange that, caring nothing for the characters
of the men, but only for their wealth, the women should have so deteriorated in
their own characters that the men ceased to care for them, except as companions
of the moment, and declined to ally themselves with them in any hut the most
temporary manner. The literature of the Victorian era, just preceding the
Emancipation, abounds in evidences of the hapless condition of the British
female of that period, particularly in the middle and upper classes. It was the
very intensity of her despair of any amelioration of her condition by
conventional remedies, that precipitated the radical change of which we are now
so richly reaping the benefits. That this change was not effected long before,
was owing, n must be confessed, to the timidity of the men, and their want of
faith in the inherent goodness of the female heart. The men had suffered the
women to retain their belief in ecclesiastical infallibility long after they
themselves had abandoned such belief. The irrevocability of marriage, dictated
as it was by priests, had at least the appearance of being a revenge taken by
them
(p. 78)
for their own exclusion from it. It was the
disastrous result of ecclesiastical restriction upon the relations of the sexes,
far more than a process of rational investigation, that opened the female mind
to the baselessness of ecclesiastical pretensions. The men fought their own way
to freedom by dint of hard brainwork. It was for them a battle royal between
truth and falsehood, or rather between the right to obey the dictates of their
own minds and consciences, and the claims of antiquated tradition. But they did
not take their women with them. Either through difference of nature or
difference of training, these were not amenable to the considerations which had
influenced the men. Woman cared nothing for the abstract truth or falsehood of
her religion. Her heart was the sole instrument whereby she judged such matters.
The ordinance of the church which rigidly forbade all intercourse with the other
sex, save on condition of an indissoluble life-long contract, had come to have
the effect of abolishing even those very contracts. While those who were already
involved in them, finding themselves unable to part, were driven more and more
to desert. Woman had so far subordinated her intellect and moral sense to the
authority of her priests, so far forgotten her heart, as to accept at their
hands a deity and a faith which were independent of any considerations
recognizable by those faculties. Her new-born infant might be consigned to
everlasting torture for the omission by its parents of a prescribed
ecclesiastical ceremony; but the system that kept her from getting a husband in
this world was intolerable. And by insisting on the absolute permanence of the
tie, the church had virtually abolished marriage.
That a great change was necessary and inevitable, was seen by both men and women
long before the particular nature of the change could be forecast. The patience
of the British people never received a more signal illustration. Desiring
gradual amelioration, and not sharp revolution, generation after generation went
on hoping against hope. But the evil continued to increase. The women flocked to
their temples, and performed ardent devotions; but they did not obtain husbands;
(p. 79)
neither did they lose the desire for them. In
those few generations, when the evil was at its worst, millions of fair,
well-grown, noble-minded women, lived and died in hapless longing to fulfil
their nature, and find a scope for their affections. The causes were numerous,
but they were all traceable to one general cause, the violation of natural law.
Destructive wars, huge standing armies, colonization by males alone – these had
served to destroy the proper numerical proportion between the sexes. Added to
this was the artificial tone of society, whereby women had come to be regarded
as weaklings unfit to bear the storms of life, or to help men to fight and win
their way in the world; equal, however, to sharing the spoils after the victory
had been won. Even parents preferred to see their daughters pine and wither in
singlehood, to their wedding on other terms.
It was not to destroy, but to restore marriage that the country at length
consented to extend the principle of limited liability to the relations between
the sexes. The evil was at its height when the legislature passed an enactment
recognizing as valid other contracts than those on which-it had hitherto
insisted in marriage. As is well-known, the relief was instantaneous, the morals
of the country were saved, marriage was restored, the family was preserved.
Many, remembering the ancient feuds, declared that this only was wanting to
complete the triumph of Protestantism. Our institutions were now free from the
reproach of immorality attaching to all vows involving irrevocability. While
many took this view of the indissoluble contract, unions without any contract
were held in universal reprobation. People were free to make their own terms of
partnership, but a contract cognizable by the state was regarded as
indispensable for all persons possessing self-respect, and to marry without a
formal contract was, as is still the case, regarded as highly improper. But it
is for breaches of contract, whether formal or implied, that society reserves
its strongest condemnation.
The ingenuity of the lawyers proved equal to the requirements of the new regime.
Forms of contract suitable to all
(p. 80)
tastes and circumstances were duly invented.
Practically, the marriages were (and are) of three kinds: those which were
dissoluble only through the intervention of a court of law: those which required
the mutual consent of the parties: and those which were voidable at the will of
one of the parties. But in all of them room is generally found for legal
assistance. They are called, respectively, marriages of the first, second, and
third class.
Thus, the sequel showed how huge is the mistake made by man when he seeks to
regulate existing society by ideas belonging to a remote past. The feelings of
the living will not be ignored. Admitted to their due share in the council, they
are an indispensable ally. The Maids’ Revolt, as the woman’s movement, which
had its origin on the other side “of the
It was a comparatively small spark that fired so great a train. Had the
ecclesiastical mind been of a more practical cast, it would have consented to
concessions that might have saved the edifice for a long time to come.
A movement was made (it was in the latter part of the nineteenth century) for
relieving the church-going public from the recitation of a creed which contained
clauses repugnant alike to their intellect, their moral sense, and their good
taste. This creed, called, according to ecclesiastical wont, by the name of a
person who was well known to have had no hand in its production, not only
contained statements which were altogether incomprehensible or
self-contradictory, but by virtue of what, in the vocabulary of the female
theologians of the period, were designated its dratatory clauses, it consigned to
everlasting misery all who failed implicitly to accept those statements.
The ecclesiastical mind, incapable of appreciating that finer sense of
truthfulness, which led the laity to hesitate about declaring their belief in
statements avowedly beyond evidence and probability; or of charity, which made
them demur to passing upon their neighbours such sentence, and for such cause,
(p. 81)
stuck to the obnoxious formulary with all the
obstinacy of a papal infallibility. The so-called “Creed of St. Athanasius” thus
operated as a set on to keep the sore open, until at length all the other creeds
and dogmas of the church were brought into question. Of these, the dogma of
marriage was the one that ultimately enlisted the women on the side of freedom;
and for the first time in the history of the world the Woman was arrayed against
the Priest. The cause of freedom was won once for all. Thenceforth, for all
civilized peoples, experience took the place of tradition and authority in the
guidance of life.
It was in pursuance of the same principle that the enfranchisement of women was
restricted to matters purely social. In all that affected the mutual convenience
of the sexes, they were allowed to bear their part. Prom politics, as resting
upon strength of muscle, and therefore fitted only for men, they were excluded.
It is true they did not readily acquiesce in the limitation. And the argument
based upon Babies failing, the men fell back on the argument based upon Biceps.
“When you can share,” they said, “our place as policemen, soldiers, and sailors,
by land, sea and air, then we shall be happy to admit you to a share in the
enactment of laws, of which, at present, the execution falls upon us. We grant
that taxation involves a certain right, but it is, so far as you are concerned,
the right, not of representation, but of protection,”
But though we declined to confer public legislative and executive functions upon
women, we were not unwilling to conciliate them by utilizing their suggestive
powers, and so created the chamber which bears the name of the House of Female
Convocation, the members of which are elected by women, though they need not
themselves be women. The powers of this body are investigatory, deliberative,
and recommendatory, in regard to the Houses of Legislature. It thus serves as a
place for initiating the discussion of questions especially affecting women and
children. It is worthy of remark, that although in the first enthusiasm for its
institution, a very small proportion
(p. 82)
of those elected were men, the number of
women has, ever since, steadily declined, until it now amounts to scarcely five
per cent. of the whole body. Considering moreover, the greatness and importance
of its constituency, the House of Female Convocation has not attained the
eminence and influence which might fairly have been expected for it.
Two hypotheses have been framed to account for this comparative failure. One,
that women do not choose the best persons to represent them. The other, that the
circumstance of being chosen by and having to represent women, has a deleterious
effect upon the persons chosen.
Mistress Susanna Avenil, who was for a term Vice President of the chamber, is
acknowledged to have been one of the most useful it has ever possessed.
CHAPTER XII
AND what had the Church to say for
the new social development? Its once famous Reformation had delivered it from
the tyranny of
For one reared as I was, in the ranks of the old orthodox Remnant, such questions as these involve
far greater significance than is now-a-days generally recognized. I can see now
that what I and my fellow-religionists took for the church’s life-blood, was in
reality its death-poison. I shall save space in my narrative, and at the same
time fulfil one essential part of its design, if I anticipate by some years the
introduction of myself into the story, and relate here the incident which led,
ultimately, to my return to The Triangle, and intimacy with Christmas
Carol.
From all things external to our own sect, we of the Remnant
(p. 83)
rigidly kept aloof, regarding ourselves as a
peculiar people, endowed with the high duty of keeping alive on earth the light
of Divine tradition, as derived from remote antiquity, and interpreted by the
teachers whom for the correctness of their views we selected to be its
exponents.
We thus represented the secession from the Emancipation, for we consisted of
that party which refused to acknowledge, as being a church at all, an
institution which did not define the faith and practice of its members according
to standards derived from antiquity, but left it to the congregations and their
teachers to follow their own individual perceptions in faith and morals.
As was to be expected, so vast a movement was not made without causing
considerable inconvenience and distress. The number of the malcontent clergy was
too great for more than a fraction of them to find employment within the
Remnant. Of the rest, some entered upon a secular life, and others, to a
considerable number, accepted a proposal made by the Emperor of Abyssinia, that
they should settle in that country, which already was Christian, and attempt the
conversion of his newly acquired provinces in Soudan. It is owing to their
labours that throughout nearly the whole of the Central African plateau, from
the Nile to the
Of course, I see now plainly enough, that a civil government cannot with any
reasonableness or propriety claim to be qualified to decide between different
points and modes of faith, or to select one form of belief in preference to
another. All that such a government can know is that it depends for its own
existence and stability upon the general intelligence and moral sense of its
citizens; so that it cannot with any show of consistency, or regard for the
common security, maintain a system which sets that intelligence and moral sense
at nought.
But we of the Secession did not think so, for those whom we had appointed to be
our teachers did not think so, and we
(p. 84)
were bound to follow them. And so it came,
that while the vast mass of our countrymen were rejoicing in the freedom of the
Emancipation, we stood aloof under the old banners and declined all advance
towards compromise or reconciliation. We declined even to read books and
newspapers which emanated from the other side, but were content with those which
we could ourselves produce. And, though existing like a congested mass in the
midst of an otherwise healthy system, we were entirely without thankfulness for
the tolerance which left us unmolested.
Such tolerance, I remember, struck me in my early youth as inexplicable, except
on the ground that our opponents were possessed by a secret conviction that they
were in the wrong. Had our side been in a large majority, we certainly should
not have suffered any who differed from us to exist. Why, then, did the other
side, who must often be irritated by our contemptuous assumption of superiority,
and even of infallibility, not annihilate us? We assuredly could not put forward
our good citizenship as a plea for their forbearance; for we made a point of
subordinating our duties as citizens to our sectarian obligations, and this
especially as regarded the education of our youth, and thus were a constant
thorn in the sides of our countrymen. Could it be that they despised us for
sentimentality and feebleness, or for the paucity of our numbers? I could not
comprehend it; for all the lessons I had ever been taught were those of the most
rigid intolerance in respect of that which we considered wrong, namely,
difference in opinion from ourselves.
One evening I had gone to hear a performance of sacred music at the Alberthalla;
– that noble monument to the virtues of a famous prince of the Victorian era –
which, with its galleries of the busts of British worthies, fulfils a double use
as a national
After getting to my seat, I found that I had mistaken the evening, and that the
vast crowd which prevented my leaving on discovering my error, had met to
witness an elocutionary
(p. 85)
exhibition, and in particular to hear a new
orator, who was said to be gifted with the finest voice and manner ever known.
I may here mention for the benefit of my younger readers, that the institution
of a class of professional orators, – reasonable and necessary as it appears to
us, who are accustomed to it – was altogether unknown to our ancestors of a few
generations back. In their days a man might be gifted intellectually with the
loftiest and most convincing eloquence, and yet be physically incapable of
uttering a word in public. Of course, when the whole of the faculties, mental
and physical, requisite to make the complete orator, happened to be combined in
one person, the result was one of the highest achievements of humanity. But this
was necessarily rare, and in numberless instances it happened that the noblest
souls were dumb, the noblest sentiments unuttered, simply because nature had not
chosen to endow the same individual with the requisite combination of powers. On
the other hand, there were numbers of splendid physiques and capacities, so far
as voice, manner, and dramatic faculty were concerned, but who yet lacked the
genius, culture, or position, which were needful to supply them with aught to
say, or the opportunity for saying it. For a long time the only resource for
such as these was the Stage, for there the actor is not called upon to supply
the matter.
At length it occurred to two men – I do not know whether they were brothers, or
friends – to combine the faculties which they possessed in a remarkable degree;
the one as a thinker and composer of orations, the other as an elocutionist; and
join in the advocacy of some great public question which they had at heart.
Carefully and patiently did they work together at their respective parts, until
the time came for public utterance; the composer, who had an impediment in his
speech, elaborating his matter and readjusting his sentences, until the argument
and its expression perfectly fitted each other, and the elocutionist practising
his delivery of the speech thus perfected, under the supervision of the
composer, just as is done in learning a part for the stage.
(p. 86)
The partners made no secret of their method, and the result was so gratifying to
the public that they soon found imitators. In this way the practice of oratory
became, like the Stage, a regular and liberal profession, and one that persons
of position and culture were not ashamed to follow. And we now possess a class
of professional orators, always ready, for a fee, to stand up and deliver a
speech on any question, or side of a question, required, it being well
understood that they are responsible neither for the words or the sentiments,
but are mere machines of eloquence and grace. To them the vast audiences of
modern times are indebted for many an intellectual treat, of which, but for such
addition to the author’s function, they would be altogether deprived.
The convenience of the system at length procured its introduction into
Parliament and the Church; and so it has come to be no unusual thing for a
minister of state to have his oratorical secretary, whom he deputes to deliver
his speeches in the Legislature; or a teacher, his deputy in the pulpit, or on
the platform.
Sometimes a party of orators combine to give an exhibition of their skill, and
few exhibitions prove more attractive than such a performance, or more valuable
as an educational agency. Our co-operative artisan classes have always taken
especial delight in them. They say it is the best way of learning history.
On the evening of my presence for the first time at one of these contests, the
subject for the recitations was an ancient parliamentary debate, partly real and
partly imaginary, in the upper chamber of the Legislature towards the triumphant
close of the great emancipation controversy in the Victorian era.
It was with no slight uneasiness that I found myself compelled to witness a
performance which was strictly prohibited by the rules of the Remnant, but as I was not a transgressor
by intention, and could not get out except by being hoisted over the heads of a
mass of people, – an operation from which my retiring disposition made me
shrink, – I reluctantly acquiesced in my fate.
(p. 87)
The first speech, however, served to reconcile me to my position. The precise
subject for the evening was, The Church: should it be loosened from the State,
to follow its own traditions, or should it be made that which it has since
actually become – a national, rather than a denominational, institution – and
retained as a department of the State.
The leader of the discussion opened with a speech which completely satisfied me,
so convincing on my side of the question did his arguments appear. He took the
line that, the Church being altogether a Christian institution, and Christianity
consisting of dogmas, to deprive the Church of its dogmatic basis would be to
un-Christianize it. The secular power of course was not competent to judge of
dogmas; it must therefore leave the Church sole mistress of itself. If the
connection between them was to be maintained, it was for the benefit of the
State, for the Church needed it not. She preferred to be independent. Only,
under either alternative she must retain her possessions. To deprive her of
these would be a fraud.
After this clear statement of the case for the Church, I breathed more freely,
and felt indifferent as to what might be said on the other side.
But I was perplexed by the heartiness of the cheers which greeted the orator;
even at the points which told most against the popular view of the day – the
view which I knew to be probably unshared by a single person present except
myself. I tried, therefore, to think that it was the orator, not the arguments,
for whom the applause was given. Of the beauty of method in statement, I was then
altogether ignorant.
The progress of the debate made me very uncomfortable. The tone of it was
admirable in its elevation, and wonderfully illustrative of the difficulties
through which our ancestors had to steer their way. I began to feel more
tolerant of my opponents, now that for the first time I was enabled to
comprehend somewhat of their stand-point. I experienced, too, a certain twinge
of bitterness at having been so long shut out from the advantages enjoyed by my
fellow-citizens. For the first time the real history of my country began to
unfold itself to me. It
(p. 88)
was very curious to see how completely the
attention of the vast audience became engrossed by the merits, not of the rival
orators, but of the controversy itself. The assembly seemed to have receded from
the present, and to be composed in reality of tories and radicals, churchmen,
nonconformists, positivists, and all the other strangely nomenclatured sects of
those ages. And they shouted their assent and their dissent as eagerly as
ancient records tell us used to be done in the Legislature itself; though of
course without the vocal excesses, savouring of the farm-yard, which disfigured
those ruder times.
I was already in a state of intense mental conflict when the new orator rose to
produce what was expected to be the sensation of the evening. Should this story”
ever come under the eyes of any who are still in the bondage that afflicted my
youth, they will comprehend and share the anguish I felt on first hearing it
seriously asserted and plausibly argued that our dearly cherished religion is a
mode of life, and not a set of opinions! and that whatever it be, whether
practical or doctrinal, if it be not capable of development and adaptation by
modification, it cannot be divine or suited to humanity; inasmuch as the divine
life of the universe, of which man is a portion, is ever advancing towards
loftier capacities and more complex conditions.
Well, at length it came to the turn of the man of the evening. Little availed
the buzz of curiosity round me to remind me that the debate was but a
recitation, and no real conflict of opinions. Like a half-drawn tooth, I was too
far gone to be recalled. The process could not be stayed there. Of the new
orator himself I can say little. My inability to describe him, or his style, is
perhaps the best testimony to his power. Under the first strong impressions
analysis fails. The maidens of old, when visited by a god in their sleep, did
not forget their rapture to note the details of the interview. At least, the
rapture must have been very much qualified to admit of their taking such notes.
In a few short sentences he dismissed much of what had been said as worthier of
a council of ecclesiastics, than of a national senate.
(p. 89)
“Our function,” he said, turning to his fellow-orators who sat upon the
platform, looking wonderfully like a real senate, “our function is not to
discover abstract truth, or determine historical problems, but to do justice and
prevent spoliation.”
Now when he said this, I thought, why he is going to speak on my side, for if
ever there was a case of injustice and spoliation, it was when the legislature
turned the Church out of the Establishment, and appropriated its property to
other uses.
“Whatever religion be the true one,” he continued, “It cannot be incompatible
with honesty and justice. And it is not honesty, not justice, to take from a
nation that which it has set apart for the whole, and give it over to a sect
which comprises but a part. Thus, the first question we have to deal with is not
one of disestablishment, not one even of reform, but one of ownership. Who is it that is entitled to have a voice
in the management and direction of the Church, or of any reform to be made in
it?”
And then he went on to answer this question in terms which I can but indicate,
without any claim adequately to reproduce the original, or describe their
effect.
“I, sir,” he said, “speaking neither as Churchman, nor as Nonconformist, but as
a simple citizen, utterly repudiate the notion that this, our National
Institution for promoting. not the suppression of Thought, but the highest
welfare of our whole people, – (for such is my definition of a State-Church,) –
is in any sense whatever the rightful exclusive property of that limited company
which at present sits within and enjoys the monopoly of it, holding fast the
door in the faces of the rest of their fellow-citizens – even of us, who stand
without and knock, seeking in vain for admission, or else turn away in disgust,
and resign ourselves hopelessly to our exclusion. No – as a citizen I claim this
noble appanage of the Established Church, this splendid and far-reaching
organization, this affluence of resource, this accumulation of prestige, as
Ours! ours to use and enjoy, ours to preserve and amend, ours to hand down as a
fair inheritance to our posterity, in the highest degree of efficiency to which
we can raise it. It is not that we have out-grown
(p. 90)
all need of such an institution. The fact
that we have called into existence, or are actively maintaining, numerous
private institutions of a similar character, proves that day to be still far
distant. It is not that its shortcomings are due to its connection with the
State. As well might the shortcomings of the Police, the Railways, or the Post
Office, be ascribed to their connection with the State. No, the shortcomings of
which we complain in the Established Church are due solely and exclusively to
the self-imposed limitations of that body to which the State has committed the
management and control of the department. Namely, those limitations upon opinion
and expression which have led to the exclusion of more than one-half of the
people, and at least nine-tenths of the intelligence, of the country, from
participating in its conduct and advantages.
“We hear,” he continued, after a brief pause, “Those who affect to be friends of
liberty, demanding what they are pleased to call the liberation of religion from
State control.
“No, no, there is but one way of liberating religion, of nationalizing the
Church establishment. Let the State, for that alone is competent for the task,
abolish all limitation of Article, Test, and Creed, which serve but to close the
human soul to the divine voice speaking through man’s developed mind and
conscience. Let it abolish these barriers, which were
(p. 91)
reared in the dark ages of the past, and put
Humanity in direct rapport with its Maker. In place of a caste and a
sect of narrowly educated perfunctionaries, let all good and capable men be free
to speak to their fellows that which the universe has revealed to them
concerning itself. Then, and then only, shall we be free to hearken to the voice
of that Spirit of Truthfulness of which long ago it was declared that, when it
is come, it will guide us into all truth.”
I was fast being vanquished, when he proceeded to describe the results of the
opposite course, and showed the danger that would inevitably accrue to the State
by erecting in its midst a vast power like the Establishment, bound by virtue of
its traditions for evermore to crush the souls of men beneath a load of
incomprehensible and unverifiable statements, and restrain the development of
that very intellect and moral sense upon which the State itself subsisted. The
proposed rival scheme of Disestablishment he denounced as being thus a suicide
for the State, and a robbery for the nation, inasmuch as it would involve the
transfer of all organization and appliances invaluable for the nation’s
educational uses, to a sect comprising but a fragment of the nation, and vowed
to repress the development of the national mind. “Let it not be for nothing,” he
said, “That we once dared to use
After a rapidly sketched comparison between England torn by religious factions,
and oppressed by dogmas and traditions, and England united and free, he
concluded by asking, in the words of one who in that age was regarded as being
at once poet and prophet: –
“Is it never to be true that ‘God fulfils himself in many ways? ‘If so, if the
Church is to declare that He shall fulfil Himself in but one way, and that the
Church’s way, – that is, if He is to be prevented from ‘fulfilling Himself’ at
all, let us leave the Church as it is, or rather, let us raise higher its
barriers,
(p. 92)
and strengthen its chains; let us stereotype
our minds and consciences into dull inanimate uniformity, and sink resignedly to
the monotonous level and torpid existence of marsh monsters; but no longer let
us flatter ourselves that we are made in the image of Him who loves to ‘fulfil
himself in many ways.’ Lacking such faith in the All-Living and All-Being, it is
the Church, not the world, that is Atheist.”
After the conclusion of the recitations, I sat absorbed in my reflections,
heedless of the buzz and tramp of the departing crowd; heedless even of the
darkness in which the hall was fast being wrapped, through the withdrawal of the
lights. So real for me had been the whole scene and controversy, that it seemed
as if the ages had rolled back, and I was an interested partaker in the
conflicts of the past. But, far back, in one respect, as the ages seemed to have
rolled, in another respect they had made a wondrous advance. The change in me
was as great and profound as that which passes over a woman between the day
before and the day after her marriage. I felt that I could never become again as
I had been. The leprous scales of bigotry and sectarianism had dropped from me,
and I was now a citizen and a free man. And more than this. I felt that it might
yet be possible for the god of this world to be other than the devil. I looked
round for some one to greet as brother, I who had ever been walled-up in the
pharisaism of orthodoxy!
At this moment a light step, coining from the room whither the orators had
retired after the contest, approached, and stopped by me. Looking wistfully u p,
I beheld a face bent upon mine, a face such as I had never before seen except in
ancient paintings. It was the face of a man about double my own age – I was
about sixteen – and beautiful exceedingly, it seemed to me upon reflection, for
at the moment I was conscious of nothing beyond the glance of the most
mysterious, and penetrating, yet kindest eyes, which, as it were, took in my
whole being, and made all self-revelation superfluous. Then a voice, low,
measured, distinct, and-unutterably sympathetic, said to me:
(p. 93)
“My young friend, – pardon my freedom in addressing you, – I sat near you this
evening, and read all that passed in your soul. The times of which we have been
hearing were the grandest in their issues that the world has seen. Had you and I
lived then, how eagerly would we have thrown ourselves into the conflict, and
struck for God and Humanity! What were ever the battles of flesh and blood
compared to that tremendous conflict of principles, which happily for us
resulted in the Emancipation? You feel this, now, at last?”
Won by his look and tone, I said, –
“Ah, sir, what then becomes of the Revelation?”
“My friend,” he replied solemnly, “so long as there exist God and a soul, there
will be a revelation, but the soul must be a free one.”
I make no answer, and he added, –
“I must not aggravate the impertinence of which I have already been guilty in
addressing you, by withholding my name, though I am satisfied you do not
consider it one. Here is my card, and if ever you desire to improve our
acquaintance, or think I can serve you, seek me out. Good night.”
On the card was C.
Carol, Triangle. It was not until long afterwards that I saw him again.
CHAPTER XIII
THE Nationalization of the Church
Establishment – achieved as it was by the practical sense of the English people,
and in spite of those who loudly clamoured for a policy of severance or
destruction, – proved to be the gateway of the Emancipation. By it religion,
education and society were at once set free to remodel themselves in accordance
with the perceptions and needs of the age. The desire to separate the Church
from the State, vanished entirely so soon as the department was thrown open and
adapted to the wants of the people now, for the first time
(p. 94)
in the history of the world, was there a
really free church, and it was to the scientific spirit that the achievement was
due – the spirit that said that if a thing were true and necessary to be
received, men could always hold it in virtue of its demonstrability and
usefulness, so that dogma was a mischievous superfluity. Under the accession of
a new bond of citizenship, the vast majority of the dissenting sects brought
their wealth of organization and appliances, their learning and their zeal, and
added them to the common national stock. The “religious difficulty,” as I have
already explained, vanished, and thence-forward Church and School worked
together in the common cause of universal education, and upon a common basis;
for there was no longer a conflict between faith and knowledge, religion and
science, theology and morals – except, of course, in the little clique to which
I belonged, arrogantly self-styled The Remnant. In the newly-constituted
Thus the Emancipation consisted in the substitution of experimental and
intuitional morality for the old traditional system. This involved the release
of women from their previous condition of social dependence. The adoption by
them of several new modes of living was the instantaneous result of their
enfranchisement. And from the first the experiment was found to work better than
even its advocates had anticipated, multitudes of persons who had hitherto lived
together un-married, eagerly entering into contracts recognizable by the State,
and thereby legitimatizing their children. Indeed, the proportion that abused
their newly-won liberty was almost inappreciable, and these few would doubtless
have proved failures under any system. Moreover, being made far easier of
attainment through the relaxation of its conditions, marriage ceased to be an
object of morbid desire. Women had something else to occupy their thoughts, and
were more frequently content to follow other careers. Girls were brought up to
look upon it as a thing that might some day overtake them as an
(p. 95)
accident, more or less happy, but in no wise
as their sole destiny, to miss which would be to fail in life. Our ancient
customs in regard to women were such that we can hardly refer to them without a
blush: so fatal to their morals was apt to be the struggle to secure their
virtue. The Emancipation changed all this. It reinstated Modesty in the high
place so long monopolized by mere Chastity. And, woman having learnt to respect
herself, man, no longer a prey hunted and scared, learned to respect her also.
It is worthy of note that in some cases the consciousness of freedom produced an
astringent effect upon manners. For instance, previously to the removal of the
prohibition against the intermarriage of brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law,
such marriages were exceedingly frequent, but since that event they have rarely
or never occurred. Not that there is anything against them, but it is a notable
commentary on the principle of artificial restraints, to find that the restraint
itself operated against itself. It was the intimacy fostered under cover of the
legal fiction of relationship between persons so situated, that produced the
desire for a closer connection. When there was no longer any law against a man’s
marrying his wife’s sister, such sister could no longer enter her
brother-in-law’s house, except on the same terms of distance which regulated his
intercourse with other women. There was thus no longer the attraction so apt to
be engendered of custom and propinquity.
There is yet another variety in our mode of marrying to which reference must be
made, as it is that which was adopted by Susanna Avenil. Her marriage was not
only of the third class, but it was of that class and the separate system
combined. Though married, she did not live with her husband. These marriages are
far from rare, and their origin is somewhat curious. It had from time immemorial
been an almost universal practice of girls, and even of grown women, of
independent means and gentle nurture, to surround themselves with pet animals,
upon which they were proud to be seen expending their tenderest sympathies.
Scarce a maiden lady in
(p. 96)
At length, some time after the Emancipation, some ingenious and benevolent
person, seeing how many destitute children the country still contained in its
streets and other asylums, proposed to place a heavy tax on all animals which
were kept for luxury and not for use, but to convert it into a premium where the
pet in question was an adopted destitute child.
The suggestion was favourably received by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
a supposed descendant of the once famous occupant of that office who excited
boundless ridicule and wrath by a proposal to tax certain indispensable machines
for procuring light and fire, called Matches. Many a sly innuendo was launched
to the effect that the new tax now proposed might operate as a set-off to the
previous one, by its tendency to multiply matches, a poor joke indeed, yet not
at the time deemed too poor to find frequent utterance. The suggestion, however,
was adopted, and many a pet beast was discarded in favour of an adopted youth or
damsel. Young women who lived and worked alone, were found especially willing to
take upon themselves the charge of some destitute child. And such was the
independence of spirit which they acquired under the Emancipation, that they
boldly faced the charges brought against them by some of their more conservative
fellow-citizens with the answer, –
“Well, and why not? If we choose to exercise our maternal sympathies without
parting with our liberty, why should we not do so?”
Tradition being discarded, there were no grounds on which to found a
remonstrance. Parents could not complain, for their daughters, no longer
dependent upon them, had ceased to encumber the paternal roof. They were free
also from the obligation of making marriage settlements, and providing costly
trousseaux. It is even said that the young women themselves, finding themselves
prized for their more solid qualities, came to place less value upon their dress
– dress, that supreme temptation of the sex, before which even our mother Eve is
represented as having succumbed: for with her perfections she must have foreseen
thus much of the consequences of her disastrous action.
(p. 97)
It is true that there had as yet been no experience to justify the practice. But
life has room for varieties, and experience said Try. And so the women of England,
considering that all social expedients are necessarily the result of experiment,
did try; and not being degraded by the consciousness that their unions were
unrecognized by the law, succeeded beyond their most sanguine anticipations. For
the men, finding them worthier of their love and confidence in their new-born
independence and consequent elevation of character, offered themselves far more
readily as partners in the higher classes of marriage than in any period of our
history. Indeed, to have already proved her qualifications as a tender and
judicious mother, came to be regarded by men of sense as a woman’s strongest
recommendation for marriage and the question they asked was, not “Is she already
a mother?” but “What sort of a mother is she?”
It is thus that modern society has escaped the evil which once constituted the
greatest blot upon our social system. No longer called upon in the struggle for
existence, to sell themselves either with or without marriage for the means of
existence, women now give themselves only where they have already given their
affections. Those affections being, by virtue of their very nature, not readily
transferable, sexual vagabondage is reduced to a minimum, and its evils are
altogether abrogated. Inheriting the strongly marked independence of character
belonging to her race, Susanna Avenil was one of those women who valued liberty
above love, and placed her own individuality and work before her affections. She
felt that as a woman she had a right to complete herself, and she regarded no
human being as complete until he or she had become a parent. In her own case, it
was a duty owed to the race, as well as to herself; a duty from which, had she
been weakly in body or brain, she would have considered herself exempt; or,
rather, her duty would have lain the other way. The lowest types and worst
specimens of humanity, she argued, are sure to breed; so that if the best
abstain, the world will soon be given up to the worst, and the struggle for
existence will end in the survival of the least fit.
(p. 98)
Her brother used to twit her by declaring that if she had her way, all the links
would soon be missing which connected man with his rudimentary basis. Already
had the ape, the savage, and the negro nearly disappeared, each in turn thrust
out of existence by the race just above it, and she would still further widen
the gap by eliminating the inferior specimens of the higher types.
It was without a particle of vanity that she regarded her own noble development
of constitution and form. She had inherited them, and it was no merit of hers to
have them. But the inheritance brought a duty with it. Having inherited, she
must transmit them. It was only by repaying to posterity the debt owed to her
ancestry, that she would deserve well of her kind.
The old-fashioned domestic life had no charm for her. She deemed it fatal to
independence and individuality; and scorned, as an oriental extravagance, the
notion that it is a woman’s chief end to minister to the comfort of a man. She
scorned also the man who wanted such comfort. People had said that although so
fine a creature, she was of a hard nature. But a time came when she appeared to
them to soften. She had experienced a grief, a mortification, and for some time
held her head less high than had been her wont. Had she been crossed in love?
No; the man with whom she had entered into matrimonial partnership had exhibited
no symptom of indifference to her. He was a noble fellow, but she had failed to
become a mother, and the failure was to her a bitter sorrow. she feared that,
after all, she was not to be a complete woman, and at this thought her stately
head drooped. The terms of her contract made a severance easy, even had the
legislature not regarded childlessness as a valid plea. Their compact had been
one into which but little of sentiment, as commonly understood, entered.
Mingling with his feeling of profound respect for her nobility of character, was
a regret on the score of the too business-like nature of her disposition. Her
temperature could not rise to the level of such love as was likely to prove
creative.
(p. 99)
At least, such was his theory. As for himself, he soon married again, and then
came a new mortification for Susanna. It did not consist in that which
ordinarily constitutes a humiliation for women. She knew not how to be jealous.
But in his new association her late husband became a father.
At length she gathered courage to try again. This time, to her joy and pride,
she had the success for which she pined. It seemed then as if nature had
reversed its usual order of sequence. Love for her children was followed by love
for their father. Under this feeling she wished to renounce the principle upon
which she had dwelt apart from him in a home of her own, with independent
establishment and liabilities, and follow the ordinary domestic usage. She was
ready even to encounter the taunts and reprobation of the party of whose tenets
she was one of the most distinguished exponents. Disapproving of the familiar
intimacy of ordinary married folk, as ministering to indifference and contempt,
the conception which this party had of wedlock was that of men and women
dwelling apart from each other, like gods and goddesses on the peaks of
(p. 100)
Susanna was long inconsolable; but as her
children grew up and flourished under her sole direction, she gradually became
reconciled to her bereavement, and forgot how nearly her heart had betrayed her
into turning renegade to her most cherished principles. It was thus that her own
experience served to confirm her belief in the soundness of her views respecting
the relations of the sexes; at least, for persons of her own temperament.
CHAPTER XIV
AS CHRISTMAS CAROL
approached manhood, he manifested certain tendencies which ofttimes indicated to
his friends a sympathy with the Remnant and its doctrines. Cultivating an ideal in
accordance with his own strongly religious temperament, and regarding love as a
deep devotion and life-worship, involving the gathering up of all the relations
and clues of being, and casting them at the feet of the beloved object, – he
hardly could bring himself to recognize as capable of love at all those to whom
it was a diversion and an amusement, a pleasant pastime for occasional
indulgence, and capable of transference from one object to another. Even the
frequent companionship of the Avenils, who found other engrossments more
absorbing than those of the affections, and consequently respected the light and
changeable of heart, rather than those for whom love was the supreme passion,
failed to operate as a corrective to Criss’s tendency to intolerance on this
subject.
He did not, however, imitate the Remnant, and condemn people for having dispositions
and principles different to his own. But he could not help wishing that nature
had in this respect made everybody more like himself.
The Avenils held, and not without reason, that Criss’s addiction to a
contemplative life served to foster an ideal which bore little relation to the
real. It was his wont, whenever the
(p. 101)
real, either in act or in word, jarred on
him, to jump into his Ariel, saying, –
“I shall go and lose the taste of it in the society of my angels.”
And presently he would be soaring far above the clouds, in regions where – for
ordinary eyes – all was blank and still; but which for him contained sweet
sights and exquisite sounds; for his ideal became real, and heaven opened itself
to him.
“Is it not very lonely up there?” asked one of the Avenil girls of Criss, on his
return from a long flight.
He was in a more communicative mood than usual. And the girls left their various
occupations, and gathered round him while he held forth.
“Lonely up there! Oh no, it is never dull in heaven. There is quite as much
variety in life there as here. I see what is in your minds. You fancy the people
of the ideal world are all grown folk who do nothing but talk profoundly. That
they cannot suffer from hunger, and therefore have no need to work. That they
run no risk of sickness or death, and therefore need not to be careful. That
there are no young angels who require to be tended and trained. That they all
love God, and therefore do not love each other. Ah, no wonder you think it dull.
Perhaps you think, too, that they are made of a material too attenuated and
transparent to be visible to the eye, and too rare of density to be perceptible
to the touch? Perhaps you even think they are all alike in the uniformity or
rather lack of sex?”
Criss did not know that Bertie had already reported many of his aërial
experiences. The girls manifested great curiosity, and said –
“Are there such distinctions in those regions? Do tell us, dear Criss.”
But they showed no levity; that, they knew, would at once close his heart and
his lips.
They could not, moreover, help feeling a certain degree of awe on recognizing
the manifest likeness of character subsisting
(p. 102)
between him and those mystics of antiquity
who founded the various religions of the world. Occasionally, in his absence,
they would discuss the question how far his peculiarity was due to an
extraordinary vividness in the faculty of personification, whereby the ideas
perceived by his mind were at once transmuted into bodily form by his eyes; and
how far they had a basis in fact.
Criss’s own theory involved an identification of material and spiritual
substances.
“Thought,” he argued, “does not think. It is the product of something that does
think; – that is, of a really existing entity. This entity may be the basis of
all things; and it is a mere assumption to regard it as incapable of manifesting
individuality and intelligence under forms other than our own, and without
transmutation into the grosser plasms.”
The general conclusion of the Avenils was that he was subject to a tendency to
dream without entering the condition of sleep. The strong asseverations of
impossible events with which history abounds, they held to be due, by no means
necessarily to conscious falsehood, but rather to that unconscious and abnormal
activity of the imagination which has its results in the waking-dream. Such
dream may endure but for an instant, and come in the midst of a crowd of
distractions, and be manifestly based on facts of which we were previously
aware; but it is not the less a dream. The confusion of the objective with the
subjective, caused by this characteristic, was, they believed, so liable to he
mischievous in its effects, that they ardently hoped that Criss would, as he
became older, grow out of it.
It was in reply to their eager questioning respecting the sex of his aërial
friends, that he said – speaking in his most serious tone, –
“The love of God in the heart of the creature must expend itself on the
creature, otherwise it would madden or destroy. Were there no sex, there would
be nought but self-love. Therefore is Duality the universal law of life. There
are, however, mysteries which the Angels themselves cannot fathom.
(p. 103)
Outwardly, their form of government is
republican, having no visible head. Inwardly, it is monarchical and theocratic,
for the idea of God rules in the breast of each. Every individual angel has a
voice in the common affairs. It would be impossible to exclude the female angels
from taking an equal share with the male, in political as well as in social
matters, for all dress and look alike, save only to the eye of love.
“Down here, with us, should a woman approach the polis, the official, being a
male, and constituting himself a judge of dress and fashion, as well as of
nomenclature, would say, ‘By the character of your dress, or the termination of
your name, I adjudge you to be a woman. You must therefore retire. The privilege
of voting is not accorded to those who are thus attired or styled.’
“The universal development of sex with us, makes such out-ward distinctions
indispensable. But, above, sex is a matter of private concern, unrevealed to the
official eye, and manifest only to the loved one. Indeed, until love comes, I
understand sex has no existence, being produced only under the influence of a
natural affinity. When two young angels first conceive an affection for each
other, they know not into which sex either of them will develop. But these
things are mysteries, not yet fully revealed to me.”
“My difficulty,” remarked one of the elder girls, “In comprehending a perfect
existence, is mostly of this kind. Of course there must be desires to be
indulged, and gratifications to be obtained; for without them existence would be
devoid of an object and aim. But if what one wants comes without effort, it
possesses little value and brings little happiness. And if the requisite effort
be great, it may surpass the powers of some to make it successfully, and so lead
to disappointment and despair. I should like to know how the inhabitants of the
ideal world contrive to balance between the two conditions.”
“You are imagining a perfection,” answered Criss, “That is impossible, save for
two, the All-being, and the Non-existent. The happiness of the Angels consists
in the perfection of their sympathies, which tell them what is within their
power of
(p. 104)
attainment, and what is beyond it; and of
their good sense, which leads them to be satisfied with the former. The leading
rule of their lives is found in their own Inmost. The worship of the Inmost is
the ritual of heaven. It alone is sacred to each, for to each it is the whisper
of the All-being. God is to them neither Sphinx nor Fiend, but truly a Father of
Lights. There, no church would be catholic, no conventionalism moral, which
sought to override this Divine voice in any individual soul.”
“Why, that is the essence of the Emancipation,” said another of the party; “To
follow our individual temperaments, instead of laying down an identical rule for
all.”
“But it does not follow that one temperament is not capable of a far higher
degree of happiness than another,” said Criss.
“That may be,” was the reply; “yet I suspect that frequency of repetition is,
for many of us poor mortals, a very fair substitute for intensity of emotion.”
“I ought to have said,” answered Criss, “That the angels exempt love from the
category of variables. That is always a serious matter with them.”
“I don’t care to be an angel, then,” exclaimed the charming; and vivacious
Bessie. “And I pity them, for they evidently don’t know the pleasure of
flirting.”
While his friends of the Emancipation credited him with approximating to The Remnant, those of the latter with whom he held occasional intercourse, thought him
terribly far gone in the other direction.
They held the strong old-fashioned doctrines respecting the heinous nature of
“sin;” and Criss maintained that they had no right to judge of such matters
except by analogy. “No human parent,” he argued, “ever considers his child to
have erred past forgiveness. You have no right to think that the Universal
Parent is harder. As for our own repentance for our faults, if He can allow them
to find a place in his domain, it is possible that we may find things better
worthy to absorb our attention.”
(p. 105)
He even became bitter and sarcastic in his reprobation of the slavishness and
timidity of their orthodoxy.
“Love God!” he exclaimed to a group with whom he was discussing these matters.
“Surely you would not have the presumption. Fear to do wrong! Of course it is
better to do nothing than to do wrong. Much better had it been if the Creator
had acted on your principles, and abstained from creating. Had there been no
Universe, there had been no sin.”
Some of his hearers thought they detected a blasphemy in this utterance. It
seemed to imply that the Creator himself preferred to do wrong rather than do
nothing.
“Well,” said Criss, with a smile that horribly perplexed them, “do you hold that
there is no evil in the Universe? If there be any, whence came it? And if there
be none, what becomes of your favourite theory of things? Ah, if you would only
fear less to see things with your own eyes.”
“We fear nothing, for our souls are safe in his hands who has saved them,” they
said.
“None can save the soul of another,” replied Criss. “Even he in whom you trust,
can only shew us how to save our souls ourselves. It is not to be done by
thinking or appearing, but by being and doing. Each of us is a force, to be put
into action and utilized. It would be a poor sort of locomotive that discharged
all its power into the air, for fear that, if it, commenced to travel, it might
run off the line.”
His friends in the Triangle knew nothing of this side of his character.
He was near his majority when Avenil, taking advantage of a visit from him,
sought to sound him on the subject of his settlement in life.
“I sometimes fear,” he said, “That we shall soon lose sight of you altogether.
Your sympathies seem to be more with the old Orthodoxy of the Remnant than with us votaries of science.
I shall not be surprised at seeing you finally captured by those daughters of
Heth.”
“Do I strike you in that light?” exclaimed Criss, surprised. “I had no idea of
it. No, no, Mr., I mean Lord, Avenil dear. If I am not in perfect accord with
you, I am far less in accord
(p. 106)
with them. For me the first essential is
genuineness. If ever I marry, than which nothing at present seems less likely,
it is not among the fettered and conventional that I shall seek a wife. Her
nature must be nature, not art; real, not manufactured. I do not quarrel with
your method, so far as it goes; only, it seems to me to stop short by so much.
In that your science has for its end and aim the development and satisfaction of
the affections, it possesses my entire sympathy. They of the Remnant would crush those affections as
being merely natural. You work with nature; they work against it. But I always
feel that there are departments in nature of which you take no account. Delicate
and sensitive as are the instruments with which you gauge the finer material
elements and their phenomena, they are still utterly inadequate to appreciate
the existence and phenomena of the mind. There is thus a whole universe of facts
lying entirely outside of your range, and to me the most interesting of all
facts.”
“Granted what you say,” returned Avenil, “There will ever be this difficulty to
be overcome: – the same mind cannot at once be in motion arid at rest. Study
implies activity, and in order to be studied the object must be at rest. A man
therefore cannot investigate his own mind; and it is impossible to see into that
of another.”
“For me,” replied Criss, “There seems to be an intermediate condition, of which
you take no account; and it is that which I love to cultivate. I find I can do
so with more SUCCOES in the finer airs aloft, than down in these denser strata. It is a
condition in which the mind becomes clear and luminous as crystal: absolutely at
rest, so far as effort is concerned, but still self-conscious. It is a
condition, not of thought, but of reverie; the condition in which alone since the world
began, man has found it possible to hold converse with God. Your scientific
activities can embrace but the limited; and these, parts only of the organism of
the Universe. Spiritual reverie reveals the highest results of the whole. The
value of such reverie, I grant willingly, is in proportion to the amount of
moral and scientific training the mind has received. Knowledge and feeling
(p. 107)
taken separately, are worth nothing. It is
through their union alone that we can know God. It was because the intuitions of
the ancients were unenlightened by science, or exact knowledge of nature, that
they produced those hideous ideals of the deity which make the ancient religions
so repulsive to us. Now, my reveries,” he added, smiling, “have the benefit of
all the knowledge I owe to your goodness to me; but surely I should be making
light of that knowledge were I to interpret I c by anything short of the best of
the faculties I find in me, I mean my intuitive perception.”
“You will remember,” said Avenil, “That I have uttered no word against the
possibility either of intuitive perceptions or of revelation. I say only that,
without the capability of being verified by repetition and experience, it is
impossible to communicate them to others. They remain in the region of dreams.”
“I see,” replied Criss, “and will think over what you say. But I did not come
here to take up all your time in talking, but to congratulate you on your new
dignity. I cannot tell you how pleased I am, both for your own sake and the
country’s.”
Criss alluded to Avenil’s appointment to a seat in the Upper Chamber of the
Legislature, which had just been conferred, un-sought, upon him. It was a
grateful proof of the country’s appreciation of his labours on behalf of
science, especially in its sanitary and agricultural relations.
I may as well inform my younger or foreign readers, that it had been one of the
achievements of the Emancipation to abolish the hereditary principle in respect
of all offices, excepting only the Crown; and to substitute for it, in the Upper
House, a system of election akin to one which had been suggested so long ago as
the Victorian period. By this method any man who had won the confidence of the
country at large might, without holding special relations with any particular
district, and without putting himself forward as a candidate, find himself
elevated to a peerage for life, together with a moderate allowance in money, and
the historic prefix of lord to his own name, so as not to merge his
identity in a new
(p. 108)
appellation. The number of these lords was,
after some fluctuation, fixed at five hundred. The Prime Minister of the day had
also the power of nominating a certain small percentage of the peers.
The lower chamber – (I mention this that all my readers at least may know the
political constitution of this country) – consists of representatives and
delegates from various localities. It rests between a constituency and its
member, and depends mainly on the calibre of the latter, whether he should be a
representative exercising his own judgment, or a delegate recording the opinions
of a majority of his constituency.
The position of the country in respect of the crown, has for some time been very
peculiar. Of all the nations of Europe, those only which retained their
monarchical institutions were
It was on the death of the famous queen, whose prolonged grief for the loss of
her almost ideal husband has made her the heroine of many a tale and poem as a
model of widowed constancy, that the splendour and cost of royalty in this
country was reduced within reasonable limits. Her successor, a sensible, frank,
and genial man, readily fell in with the new tariff, and he and his descendants
enacted the part, rather of hereditary president than of sovereign, until, a few
generations ago, when the family unfortunately became extinct. Unfortunately, I
say, not because we have consciously suffered any appreciable damage as a people
in consequence, but because it is impossible
(p. 109)
to help regretting the fall of a noble old
tree that has for ages made a feature in the landscape, and braved the storms
which have raged round it and us; because, also, we know not what may be in
store for us in the future.
But when, through failure of heirs, the dynasty carne to an end, something had
to be done. What should it be? The country would not hear of sending abroad for
a new royal family, and indeed there was no abroad to send to for one, unless we
were prepared to accept a scion of
All the plans in operation in the rest of the world were discussed and
re-discussed, and a good deal of ill-feeling was making itself apparent, when a
proposition was made to post-pone the discussion of the question for six months,
and in the meanwhile to consider the Prime Minister for the time being as
invested with the presidential functions of the sovereign.
The interval allowed men’s minds to become quiet, and at the end of the six
months, no inconvenience having occurred, and no acceptable suggestion having
been made, the Primo Minister was confirmed in his new functions for another six
months. It has thus come about that our country has for-several generations been
in the enjoyment of a government far more republican than any
deliberately-formed constitution in the world; for in all other republics there
is a president who is virtually irremovable during a fixed term of office,
whereas our president holds office only so long as he retains the confidence of
the Legislative Chambers.
It is true that there was for some time a void in the mi ml of the nation which
nothing seemed able to fill. The spectre of the vacant throne and crown, with
piteous forlornness continually appealed to the popular imagination, so powerful
do hereditary impressions sometimes become. And it was even feared that in some
period of popular excitement a party might
(p. 110)
be found to make political capital out of the
supposed grievance. So, on a happy thought, it was determined to place the
throne in one of the Chambers immediately behind the place occupied by the
Minister-president, with the crown lying on the seat, and the national flag
suspended above it. This combination of the symbols of the monarchy and the
nation, had the happiest effect in reconciling both royalists and republicans;
and the new system of government has been found to work so well that we have
allowed it to continue in operation ever since. Being avowedly only provisional,
it involves no principle, and therefore no one considers it a point of honour to
try to upset it on principle.
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