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 the pool. Reflection was lost for a moment, and, by a sudden impulse, he bounded over the chasm.

He stood above the projecting oak; the unknown beauty lay like the nymph of the scene; her long black hair, which the fall of her hat had disengaged from its fastenings, drooping through the boughs: he saw that the first thing to be done, was to prevent her throwing her feet off the trunk, in the first movements, of waking. He sat down on the rock, and placed his feet on the stem, securing her ankles between his own: one of her arms was round a branch of the fork, the other lay loosely on her side. The hand of this arm he endeavoured to reach, by leaning forward from his seat; he approximated, but could not touch it: after several tantalising efforts, he gave up the point in despair. He did not attempt to wake her, because he


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 feared it might have bad consequences, and he resigned himself to expect the moment of her natural waking, determined not to stir from his post, if she should sleep till midnight.

In this period of forced inaction, he could contemplate at leisure the features and form of his charmer. She was not one of the slender beauties of romance; she was as plump as a partridge; her cheeks were two roses, not absolutely damask, yet verging thereupon; her lips twin-cherries, of equal size; her nose regular, and almost Grecian; her forehead high, and delicately fair; her eyebrows symmetrically arched; her eyelashes long, black, and silky, fitly corresponding with the beautiful tresses that hung among the leaves of the oak, like clusters of wandering grapes.

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text: Crotchet Castle/Chapter 14

title: Crotchet Castle/Chapter 14


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 force penetrates even to the other extremity, not through its surface only, but through the interior and all through the middle. Electrical bodies have material and corporeal effluvia. Is any such magnetical effluvium given off, whether corporeal or incorporeal? or is nothing at all given off that subsists? If it really has a body, that body must be thin and spiritual, since it is necessary that it should be able to enter into iron. Or what sort of an exhalation is it that comes from lead, when quicksilver which is bright and fluid is bound together by the odour merely and vapour of the lead, and remains, as it were, a firm metal? But even gold, which is exceedingly solid and dense, is reduced to a powder by the thin vapour of lead. Or, seeing that, as the quicksilver has entrance into gold, so the magnetical odour has entrance into the substance of the iron, how does it change it in its essential property, although no change is perceptible to our senses in the bodies themselves? For without ingression into the body, the body is not changed, as the Chemists not incorrectly teach. But if indeed these things resulted from a material ingression, then if strong and dense and thick substances had been interposed between the bodies, or if magnetical substances had been inclosed in the centres of the most solid and the densest bodies, the iron particles would not have suffered anything from the loadstone. But none the less they strive to come together and are changed. Therefore there is no such conception and origin of the magnetick powers; nor do the very minute portions of the stone exist, which have been wrongly imagined to exist by Baptista Porta, aggregated, as it were, into hairs, and arising from the rubbing of the stone which, sticking to the iron, constitute its strength. Electrick effluvia are not only impeded by any dense matter, but also in like manner by flames, or if a small flame is near, they do not allure. But as iron is not hindered by any obstacle from receiving force or motion from a loadstone, so it will pass through the midst of flames to the body of the loadstone and adhære to the stone. Let there be a flame or a candle near the stone; bring up a short piece of iron wire, and when it has come near, it will penetrate through the midst of the flames to the stone; and a versorium turns towards the loadstone nor more slowly nor less eagerly through the midst of flames than through open air. So flames interposed do not hinder the coition. But if the iron itself became heated by a great heat, it is demonstrable that it would not be attracted. Bring a strongly ignited rod of iron near a magnetized versorium; the versorium remains steady and does not turn towards such iron; but it immediately turns towards it, so soon as it has lost somewhat of its heat. When a piece of iron has been touched by a loadstone, if it be placed in a hot fire until it is perfectly red hot and remain in the fire some considerable time, it will lose that magnetick strength it had acquired. Even a loadstone itself through a


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 longish stay in the fire, loses the powers of attracting implanted and innate in it, and any other magnetick powers. And although certain veins of loadstone exhale when burnt a dark vapour of a black colour, or of a sulphurous foul odour, yet that vapour was not the soul, or the cause of its attraction of iron (as Porta thinks), nor do all loadstones whilst they are being baked or burnt smell of or exhale sulphur. It is acquired as a sort of inborn defect from a rather impure mine or matrix. Nor does anything analogous penetrate into the iron from that material corporeal cause, since the iron conceives the power of attracting and verticity from the loadstone, even if glass or gold or any other stone be interposed. Then also cast iron acquires the power of attracting iron, and verticity, from the verticity of the earth, as we shall afterwards plainly demonstrate in Direction. But fire destroys the magnetick virtues in a stone, not because it takes away any parts specially attractive, but because the consuming force of the flame mars by the demolition of the material the form of the whole; as in the human body the primary faculties of the soul are not burnt, but the charred body remains without faculties. The iron indeed may remain after the burning is completed and is not changed into ash or slag; nevertheless (as Cardan not inaptly says) burnt iron is not iron, but something placed outside its nature until it is reduced. For just as by the rigour of the surrounding air water is changed from its nature into ice; so iron, glowing in fire, is destroyed by the violent heat, and has its nature confused and perturbed; wherefore also it is not attracted by a loadstone, and even loses that power of attracting in whatever way acquired, and acquires another verticity when, being, as it were, born again, it is impregnated by a loadstone or the earth, or when its form is revived, not having been dead but confused, concerning which many things are manifest in the change of verticity. Wherefore Fracastorio does not confirm his opinion, that the iron is not altered; "for if it were altered," he says, "by the form of the loadstone, the form of the iron would have been spoiled." This alteration is not generation, but the restitution and reformation of a confused form. There is not therefore anything corporeal which comes from the loadstone or which enters the iron, or which is sent back from the iron when it is stimulated; but loadstone disposes loadstone by its primary form; iron, however, which is closely related to it, loadstone at the same time recalls to its conformate strength, and settles it; on account of which it rushes to the loadstone and eagerly conforms itself to it (the forces of each in harmony bringing them together). The coition also is not vague or confused, not a violent inclination of body to body, no rash and mad congruency; no violence is here applied to the bodies; there are no strifes or discords; but there is that concord (without which the universe would go to pieces), that analogy, namely, of the


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 perfect and homogeneous parts of the spheres of the universe to the whole, and a mutual concurrency of the principal forces in them, tending to soundness, continuity, position, direction, and to unity. Wherefore in the case of such wonderful action and such a stupendous implanted vigour (diverse from other natures) the opinion of Thales of Miletus was not very absurd, nor was it downright madness, in the judgment of Scaliger, for him to grant the loadstone a soul; for the loadstone is incited, directed, and orbitally moved by this force, which is all in all, and, as will be made clear afterwards, all in every part; and it seems to be very like a soul. For the power of moving itself seems to point to a soul; and the supernal bodies, which are also celestial, divine, as it were, are thought by some to be animated, because they move with admirable order. If two loadstones be set one over against the other, each in a boat, on the surface of water, they do not immediately run together, but first they turn towards one another, or the lesser conforms to the greater, by moving itself in a somewhat circular manner, and at length, when they are disposed according to their nature, they run together. In smelted iron which has not been excited by a magnet there is no need for such an apparatus; since it has no verticity, excepting what is adventitious and acquired, and that not stable and confirmed (as is the case with loadstone, even if the iron has been smelted from the best loadstone), on account of the confusion of the parts by fire when it flowed as a liquid; it suddenly acquires polarity and natural aptitude by the presence of the loadstone, by a powerful mutation, and by a conversion into a perfect magnet, and by an absolute metamorphosis; and it flies to the body of the magnet as if it were a real piece of loadstone. For a loadstone has no power, nor can a perfect loadstone do anything which iron when excited by loadstone cannot perform, even when it has not been touched but only placed in its vicinity. For when first it is within the orbe of virtue of the loadstone, though it may be some distance away, yet it is immediately changed, and has a renovated form, formerly indeed dormant and inert in body, now lively and strong, which will be clearly apparent in the demonstrations of Direction. So the magnetick coition is a motion of the loadstone and of the iron, not an action of one; an, of each, not ; a or conjoint action, rather than a sympathy. There is properly no such thing as magnetick antipathy. For the flight and declination of the ends, or an entire turning about, is an action of each towards unity by the conjoint action and of both. It has therefore newly put on the form, and on account of this being roused, it then, in order that it may more surely acquire it, rushes headlong on the loadstone, not with curves and turnings, as a loadstone to a loadstone. For since in a loadstone both verticity and the power disponent have existed through many ages, or from the very beginnings,


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 have been inborn and confirmed, and also the special form of the terrestrial globe cannot easily be changed by another loadstone, as iron is changed; it happens from the constant nature of each, that one has not the sudden power over another of changing its verticity, but that they can only mutually come to agreement with each other. Again, iron which has been excited by a loadstone, if that iron on account of obstacles should not be able to turn round immediately in accordance with its nature, as happens with a versorium, is laid hold of, when a loadstone approaches, on either side or at either end. Because, just as it can implant, so it can suddenly change the polarity and turn about the formal energies to any part whatever. So variously can iron be transformed when its form is adventitious and has not yet been long resident in the metal. In the case of iron, on account of the fusion of the substance when magnetick ore or iron is smelted, the virtue of its primary form, distinct before, is now confused; but an entire loadstone placed near it again sets up its primal activity; its adjusted and arranged form joins its allied strength with the loadstone; and both mutually agree and are leagued together magnetically in all their motions towards unity, and whether joined by bodily contact or adjusted within the orbe, they are one and the same. For when iron is smelted out of its own ore, or steel (the more noble kind of iron) out of its ore, that is, out of loadstone, the material is loosed by the force of the fire, and flows away, and iron as well as steel flow out from their dross and are separated from it; and the dross is either spoiled by the force of the fire and rendered useless, or is a kind of dregs of a certain imperfection and of mixture in the prominent parts of the earth. The material therefore is a purified one, in which the metallick parts, which are now mixed up by the melting, since those special forces of its form are confused and uncertain, by the approach of a loadstone are called back to life, as if to a kind of disponent form and integrity. The material is thus awakened and moves together into unity, the bond of the universe and the essential for its conservation. On this account and by the purging of the material into a cleaner body, the loadstone gives to the iron a greater force of attracting than there is in itself. For if iron dust or an iron nail be placed over a large loadstone, a piece of iron joined to it takes away the filings and nail from the loadstone and retains them so long as it is near the loadstone; wherefore iron attracts iron more than loadstone does, if it have been conformed by a loadstone and remains within the orbe of its communicated form. A piece of iron even, skilfully placed near the pole of a loadstone, lifts up more than the loadstone. Therefore the material of its own ore is better, and by the force of fire steel and iron are re-purged; and they are again impregnated by the loadstone with its own forms; therefore they move towards it by a spontaneous


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 approach as soon as they have entered within the orbe of the magnetick forces, because they were possessed by it before, connected and united with it in a perfect union; & they have immediately an absolute continuity within that orbe, & have been joined on account of their harmony, though their bodies may have been disjoined. For the iron is not taken possession of and allured by material effluvia, after the manner of electricks, but only by the immaterial action of its form or an incorporeal progression, which in a piece of iron as its subject acts and is conceived, as it were, in a continuous homogeneous body, and does not need more open ways. Therefore (though the most solid substances be interposed) the iron is still moved and attracted, and by the presence of loadstone the iron moves and attracts the loadstone itself, and by mutual forces a concurrency is made towards unity, which is commonly called attraction of the iron. But those formal forces pass out and are united to one another by meeting together; a force also, when conceived in the iron, begins to flow out without delay. But Julius Scaliger, who by other examples contends that this theory is absurd, makes in his 344th Exercise a great mistake. For the virtues of primary bodies are not to be compared with bodies formed from and mixed with them. He would now have been able (had he been still alive) to discern the nature of effused forms in the chapter on forms effused by spherical magneticks. But if iron is injured somewhat by rust, it is affected either only slightly or not at all by the stone. For the metal is spoiled when eaten away and deformed by external injuries or by lapse of time (just as has been said about the loadstone), and it loses its prime qualities which are conjoined to its form; or, being worn out by age, retains them in a languid and weak condition; indeed it cannot be properly re-formed, when it has been corrupted. But a powerful and fresh loadstone attracts sound and clean pieces of iron, and those pieces of iron (when they have conceived strength) have a powerful attraction for other iron wires and iron nails, not only one at a time, but even successively one behind another, three, four or five, end to end, sticking and hanging in order like a chain. The loadstone, however, would not attract the last one following in such a row, if there were no nails between. Drawing of nails by loadstone. A loadstone placed as at A draws a nail or a bar B; similarly behind B it draws C; and after C, D. But the nails B and C being removed, the loadstone A, if it remain at the same distance, does not raise the nail D into the air. This occurs for this reason: because in the case of a continuous row of nails the presence of the loadstone A, besides its own powers, raises the magnetick natures of the iron works B and C, and makes them, as it were, forces auxiliary to itself. But B and C, like a continuous magnetical body, extend as far as


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 so many striking, outstanding, thought-arresting, heart-attracting, soul-enrapturing instances of God’s grace and goodness. Of Rajah Rammohan Roy, it was said by an admirer professing even an alien faith that his life affords one noteworthy instance of God’s providential and righteous care for man, by and through the rearing and raising of a witness in unexpected places and circumstances. In the dark day of India, God with His own hand lit the light that India might once again see light, love and joy. Of all miracles, real or supposed, this is the most arrestive of attention, that, as out of hard stone there jets forth a spring of crystal water, so, out of adamantine godlessness or out of self-puzzling superstition, springs up a life which is tender with the throb of faith and clear and firm with the reasoned knowledge of truth. And such an instance was Rajah Rammohan Roy, an instance of God’s perennial providence under the most unpromising conditions. As the story of the Dispensation began wuth him, so it has gone on. We are told that it, too, is proof and evidence


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 of God’s providence, of God’s direct doings in the history of Christianity that mere fishermen, illiterate persons, were translated, transformed, into Apostles of God. That is true, and it is a matter for thankfulness. But the opposite wonder is that those in high places voluntarily abdicate their power and position and come down to the lowly levels of, the poor and the humble; those enjoying vested interests cast aside all personal gains and profits; those recognised, through; traditional rules of judgment, to be by Heaven itself endowed with the supreme privilege of controlling and guiding man’s destiny, give up all, humbling themselves into the lowly service of man in the name of God. That, top, is, in its own way, as much a proof of God’s direct dealing in the history of a dispensation. When Maharshi, who could, for the mere asking, have been a Maharajah, chose to be a Maharshi, giving up his power, place, position and privilege, and put on the garb of humility and wore the ashes of' self-denial, that was a marvel of God’s merciful providence in the history of this our Dispensation.


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 D the forces by which D is taken and conformed, though they are weaker than those which C receives from B. And those iron nails indeed from that contact only, and from the presence of the loadstone even without contact, acquire powers which they retain in their own bodies, as will be demonstrated most clearly in the passage on Direction. For not only whilst the stone is present does the iron assume these powers, and take them, as it were, vicariously from the stone, as Themistius lays down in his 8th book on Physicks. The best iron, when it has been melted down (such is steel), is allured by a loadstone from a greater distance, is raised though of greater weight, is held more firmly, assumes stronger powers than the common and less expensive, because it is cast from a better ore or loadstone, imbued with better powers. But what is made from more impure ore turns out weaker and is moved more feebly. As to Fracastorio's statement that he saw a piece of loadstone draw a loadstone by one of its faces, but not iron; by another face iron, but not loadstone; by another both; which he says is an indication that in one part there is more of the loadstone, in another more of the iron, in another both equally, whence arises that diversity of attraction; it is most incorrect and badly observed on the part of Fracastorio, who did not know how to apply skilfully loadstone to loadstone. A loadstone draws iron and also a loadstone, if both are suitably arranged and free and unrestrained. That is removed more quickly from its position and place which is lighter; for the heavier bodies are in weight, the more they resist; but the lighter both moves itself to meet the heavier and is allured by the other.

HAT a loadstone attracts loadstone, iron and other magnetical bodies, has been shown above in the previous book, and also with what strength the magnetick coition is ordered; but now we must inquire how that vigour is disposed in a magnetick substance. And indeed an analogy must be inferred from a large loadstone. Any magnetick substance joins itself with a loadstone strongly, if the loadstone itself is strong; but more weakly, when it is somewhat imperfect or has been weakened by some flaw. A loadstone does not draw iron equally well with every part; or a magnetick substance does not approach every part of a loadstone alike; because a loadstone has its points, that is its true poles, in which an exceptional virtue excels. Parts nearer the pole are


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180Rh domination everywhere shall be American, because America is the strongest Power financially and commercially. It is to America's interest to secure, in China, certain things consistent with Chinese interests, and certain others inconsistent with them. The Americans, for the sake of commerce and good investments, would wish to see a stable government in China, an increase in the purchasing power of the people, and an absence of territorial aggression by other Powers. But they will not wish to see the Chinese strong enough to own and work their own railways or mines, and they will resent all attempts at economic independence, particularly when (as is to be expected) they take the form of State Socialism, or what Lenin calls State Capitalism. They will keep a dossier of every student educated in colleges under American control, and will probably see to it that those who profess Socialist or Radical opinions shall get no posts. They will insist upon the standard of hypocrisy which led them to hound out Gorky when he visited the United States. They will destroy beauty and substitute tidiness. In short, they will insist upon China becoming as like as possible to "God's own country," except that it will not be allowed to keep the wealth generated by its industries. The Chinese have it in them to give to the world a new contribution to civilization as valuable as that which they gave in the past. This would be prevented by the domination of the Americans, because they believe their own civilization to be perfect.

The ideal of capitalism, if it could be achieved, would be to destroy competition among capitalists by means of Trusts, but to keep alive competition among workers. To some extent Trade Unionism


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Rh outer world which makes élite of them. I have done such a thing as serve on a committee of the Society, and report on a paper: they had the sense to ask, and I had the sense to see that none of my opinions were compromised by compliance. And I will be of any use which does not involve the status of homo trium literarum; as I have elsewhere explained, I would gladly be Fautor Realis Scientiæ, but I would not be taken for Falsæ Rationis Sacerdos.

Nothing worse will ever happen to me than the smile which individuals bestow on a man who does not groove. Wisdom, like religion, belongs to majorities; who can wonder that it should be so thought, when it is so clearly pictured in the New Testament from one end to the other?

The counterpart of paradox, the isolated opinion of one or of few, is the general opinion held by all the rest; and the counterpart of false and absurd paradox is what is called the 'vulgar error,' the pseudodox. There is one great work on this last subject, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of the Religio Medici; it usually goes by the name of Browne 'On Vulgar Errors' (1st ed. 1646; 6th, 1672). A careful analysis of this work would show that vulgar errors are frequently opposed by scientific errors; but good sense is always good sense, and Browne's book has a vast quantity of it.

As an example of bad philosophy brought against bad observation. The Amphisbæna serpent was supposed to have two heads, one at each end; partly from its shape, partly because it runs backwards as well as forwards. On this Sir Thomas Browne makes the following remarks:—

There may be paradox upon paradox: and there is a good instance in the eighth century in the case of Virgil, an Irishman,


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24 Bishop of Salzburg and afterwards Saint, and his quarrels with Boniface, an Englishman, Archbishop of Mentz, also afterwards Saint. All we know about the matter is, that there exists a letter of 748 from Pope Zachary, citing Virgil—then, it seems, at most a simple priest, though the Pope was not sure even of that —to Rome to answer the charge of maintaining that there is another world (mundus) under our earth (terra), with another sun and another moon. Nothing more is known: the letter contains threats in the event of the charge being true; and there history drops the matter. Since Virgil was afterwards a Bishop and a Saint, we may fairly conclude that he died in the full flower of orthodox reputation. It has been supposed—and it seems probable—that Virgil maintained that the earth is peopled all the way round, so that under some spots there are antipodes; that his contemporaries, with very dim ideas about the roundness of the earth, and most of them with none at all, interpreted him as putting another earth under ours—turned the other way, probably, like the second piece of bread-and-butter in a sandwich, with a sun and moon of its own. In the eighth century this would infallibly have led to. an underground Gospel, an underground Pope, and an underground Avignon for him to live in. When, in later times, the idea of inhabitants for the planets was started, it was immediately asked whether they had sinned, whether Jesus Christ died for them, whether their wine and their water could be lawfully used in the sacraments, &c.

On so small a basis as the above has been constructed a companion case to the persecution of Galileo. On one side the positive assertion, with indignant comment, that Virgil was deposed for antipodal heresy, on the other, serious attempts at justification, palliation, or mystification. Some writers say that Virgil was found guilty; others that he gave satisfactory explanation, and became very good friends with Boniface: for all which see Bayle. Some have maintained that the antipodist was a different person from the canonised bishop: there is a second Virgil, made to order. When your shoes pinch, and will not stretch, always throw them away and get another pair: the same with your facts. Baronius was not up to the plan of a substitute: his commentator Pagi (probably writing about 1690) argues for it in a manner which I think Baronius would not have approved. This Virgil was perhaps a slippery fellow. The Pope says he hears that Virgil pretended licence from him to claim one of some new bishoprics: this he declares is totally false. It is part of the argument that such a man as this could not have been


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RV 58 (ROADS INTO LONDON) bankments and crash through the town itself, boring straight ways into the heart of it with a fine contempt for natural obstacles. If we could see the underlying fineness of these things, the fineness that shall be on the surface when these embankments are as venerable as to-day the wall of Hadrian, it might make our world more inspiring. There are deep cuttings, coming into London where brick walls, fifty feet high, are black, sombre, and austere. You are in a kind of underworld, savagely impressive enough. The square fronts of houses peep down on you as you run beneath; constant footbridges overhead give to the thin light of day a constant shudder and quiver. We, who are not made for strong impressions, are ourselves inclined to shudder.

Or one may grow bewildered to the point of losing 58

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RV 59 (ROADS INTO LONDON) hold of one's identity amid the crash and charge of goods trucks. There are great open spaces all over London where the transfers are made from line to line. At night they are most active. Electric lights glare and seem to drop sparks from very high in the air, blue and mistily; rails glimmer here and there underfoot like marsh pools of water; hooded trucks seem to wander alone and to charge each other in all the black distances. One might be on some primæval plain, watching, in the glare of lightning, to the unceasing crash of thunder, primordial beasts grazing, wandering, or in violent combat. Yet at these things, too, we are apt to shudder, as in his day Horace disliked the Via Flaminia.

Or we cry out: "These things are bringing in the millennium." Perhaps they are. To really descend, not in body alone, but with the spirit receptive, into this whirl and crash, to see men running with set faces, at the continual risk of their lives, that they may link up wagons bringing screws from Birmingham, corn from Canada, pine-planks from Norway, pork from the United States, to whirl oneself in the whirl of it, is to be overcome with convictions. We live in spacious times. Humanity is on the march somewhere, tomorrow the ultimate questions shall be solved and the soul of man assuaged. Perhaps it shall. It is possible in the contagion of these things to see the opening up of Empires wider of sway than Rome, clearer of sight than Greece, kinder of heart than Carthage, purer in joy than was to be had among the hanging gardens of Babylon. Or is this only rhetoric, or only romance? 59

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RV 60 (ROADS INTO LONDON) For myself, when on a train into London, I feel almost invariably a sense of some pathos and of some poetry. To the building up of this railway, of this landscape of roofs, there went so many human lives, so much of human endeavour, so many human hopes. Small houses, like the ranks of an infinite number of regiments caught in the act of wheeling, march out upon the open country; in the mists of the distance they climb hills, and the serrated roofs look like the jagged outlines of pinewoods with, at the top, the thin spike of a church tower. The roofs come closer together; at last, in their regular furrows, they present the appearance of fields ploughed in slate, in tiles, in lead, with the deeper channels of the streets below. Certain details strike at the eye: parallel lines of white cement set diagonally in the slate courses whirl past, bewilderingly, like snow in a wind; lines of rails shoot suddenly from beneath the embankments; and, rather surprisingly, bits of black field lie in the very heart of it all, with cabbages growing, and a discoloured donkey tethered to a peg. The plain of roof tops broadens out again. Perhaps the comparative quiet fosters one's melancholy. One is behind glass as if one were gazing into the hush of a museum; one hears no street cries, no children's calls. And for me at least it is melancholy to think that hardly one of all these lives, of all these men, will leave any trace in the world. One sees, too, so many little bits of uncompleted life. As the train pauses one looks down into a main street—and all streets are hardly recognizable from a height. A 'bus is before the steps of a church, 60

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RV 61 (ROADS INTO LONDON) a ragged child turns a catherine wheel in the road, and holds up her hand to the passengers. Suddenly a blue policeman steps into the roadway. The train moves on.

The other day, too, we were moving rather slowly. I looked down upon black and tiny yards that were like the cells in an electric battery. In one, three children were waving their hands and turning up white faces to the train; in the next, white clothes were drying. A little further on a woman ran suddenly out of a door; she had a white apron and her sleeves were tucked up. A man followed her hastily, he had red hair, and in his hand a long stick. We moved on, and I have not the least idea whether he were going to thrash her, or whether together they were going to beat a carpet. At any rate, the evening papers reported no murder in Southwark.

Incidents even so definite as these are more or less the exception, but the constant succession of much smaller happenings that one sees, and that one never sees completed, gives to looking out of train windows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction. It is akin to the sentiment ingrained in humanity of liking a story to have an end. And it is the "note" of all roads into London.

To indulge in the feeling to any extent would be to add a new morbidity to life. One would, quite literally, never get any for'arder if one stayed to inquire to the end of every tragi-comedy of which, on one's road, one caught a glimpse. And it is unpractical to wish that every bricklayer and mortar carrier who added his wall 61

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RV 66 (ROADS INTO LONDON) these pile structures across the broad gray sweep of water and air. It marks the gates of the lowest docks, and here, for the river, psychological London begins. It does not much matter whether the ship turns in there at Tilbury or whether it works up to the docks in Gallions Reach, or to the others in the heart of town itself. Work for them ends there.

It is taken up by the red-sailed barges. They tack in their engrossed manner across and across the wide reaches; they pass under the shadow of dull clouds, of rain squalls, under watery sunlight, the arms of aligned cranes, the smoke from factory chimneys. They linger, going about, in front of bluffs covered with gray buildings and black trees; in exposed stretches of water they are covered, right over the hatches, by the wash from the sea-tarnished sides of steamers so vast, so silent in their motions, so centred in themselves, that as, from the deck of a barge, one looks at their passing, it is hard to realise that they and not the low banks that they obscure and seem to swallow up, are gliding by.

These barges running up from Rotherhithe or from much farther out to sea, pass cement factories, sand works, anchored groups of skiffs where sand is hauled laboriously in buckets from the bottom of the river; they pass petroleum depôts where, side by side, gray retorts are like those of gas works; they pass candle factories and manure warehouses. They tack about gravely one after another beside a black smallpox hospital that, out in the river, is one half ship and the other a pier with a dingy and mournful resemblance to those 66

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RV 67 (WORK IN LONDON) of fashionable watering places. They move, these barges, in squadrons in a continual and mazy slant, red sail cutting diagonally across red sail, with here and there a large rent, and here and there a white patch. They give the "character" to this road into London, to this river of toil. Their only rivals are the sludge boats, a fleet of large steamers owned by the County Council. These are running in a continuous string; they go swiftly down stream, low in the water, and showing all black. They come back empty, so high in the bows that a great streak of red shows from the keel upwards; they swing round in front of one or other of the sewage works, ready to take in another cargo to drop into the sea beyond the Nore as soon as the tide serves. The barges, however, carry coke, carry sand, carry gravel, and a hundred other things. Occasionally one loaded very high with a stack passes them all, looking for all the world like a man buried beneath a haycock; occasionally these, too, are passed by very gaily painted, astonishingly swift, racing barges, that thread the close traffic like brilliant shuttles, and roar and rustle through the water.

So at last, keeping out of the way of the sludge boats, out of the way of powder barges, of great steamers of the famous Lines, of swift fish carriers that raise an enormous wash, and of the Belle steamers that they detest most of all, the small flotillas come to the top of Tipcock Reach. Hitherto the factories have been scarce, mostly unsavoury and solitary. But a beacon rises up beyond the wharf of a powder factory 67

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RV 68 (WORK IN LONDON) that faces a manure warehouse. This beacon is spindly, tall, of iron lattice work. And all beyond it the river runs as between high walls, shining with a more metallic glitter under smoke and the shadows of groves of masts, crane-arms, chains, cordage. A train of the large steamers lies heavy on the water, hooting signals to agents ashore, waiting at the dock gates for water enough to enter. This is Gallions Reach, and from here upwards London offers a solid black facing to its river. From here, too, the little companies of barges begin to break up. Some stop near the dock gates, some turn into the London canals. Some wait near Waterloo, some go far above the bridges. Here at any rate the river as a road into London ends. It is all the time a gray tide of work, a moving platform of workers.

Workers in London divide themselves, roughly, into those who sell the labour of their bodies and those who sell their attentions. You see men in the streets digging trenches, pulling stout wires out of square holes in pavements, pecking away among greasy vapours at layers of asphalte, scattering shovelfuls of crushed gravel under the hoofs of slipping horses and under the crunching tyres of wheels. If walls would fall out of offices you would see paler men and women adding up the records of money paid to these others. That, with infinite variations, is work in London.

You get the two things united here and there. The other day I was in Tilbury Docks. (It is difficult to get away from this river.) The vast, empty squares of water lay parapeted, arbitrary and dim in their eternal 68

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200 least let me off such efforts! However, if it strikes you as gracefully filial to apply to your father's conduct so invidious a word," he went on less scathingly, "you must take from him, in your turn, his quite other view of what makes disloyalty—understanding distinctly, by the same token, that he enjoins on you not to give an odious illustration of it, while he's away, by discussing and deploring with any one of your extraordinary friends any aspect or feature whatever of his walk and conversation. That—pressed as I am for time," he went on with a glance at his watch while she remained silent—"is the main sense of what I have to say to you; so that I count on your perfect conformity. When you have told me that I may so count"—and casting about for his hat he espied it and went to take it up—"I shall more cordially bid you good-bye."

His daughter looked as if she had been for some time expecting the law thus imposed upon her—had been seeing where he must come out; but in spite of this preparation she made him wait for his reply in such tension as he had himself created. "To Kitty I've practically said nothing—and she herself can


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Rh tell you why: I've in fact scarcely seen her this fortnight. Putting aside then Amy Sandgate, the only person to whom I've spoken of your 'sacrifice,' as I suppose you'll let me call it?—is Mr. Hugh Crimble, whom you talk of as my 'confederate' at Dedborough."

Lord Theign recovered the name with relief. "Mr. Hugh Crimble—that's it!—whom you so amazingly caused to be present, and apparently invited to be active, at a business that so little concerned him."

"He certainly took upon himself to be interested, as I had hoped he would. But it was because I had taken upon my self"

"To act, yes," Lord Theign broke in, "with the grossest want of delicacy! Well, it's from that exactly that you'll now forbear; and 'interested' as he may be—for which I'm deucedly obliged to him!—you'll not speak to Mr. Crimble again."

"Never again?"—the girl put it as for full certitude.

"Never of the question that I thus exclude. You may chatter your fill," said his lordship curtly, "about any others."

"Why, the particular question you forbid,"


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202 Grace returned with great force, but as if saying something very reasonable—"that question is the question we care about: it's our very ground of conversation."

"Then," her father decreed, "your conversation will please to dispense with a ground; or you'll perhaps, better still—if that's the only way!—dispense with your conversation."

Lady Grace took a moment as if to examine this more closely. "You require of me not to communicate with Mr. Crimble at all?"

"Most assuredly I require it—since it's to that you insist on reducing me." He didn't look reduced, the master of Dedborough, as he spoke—which was doubtless precisely because he held his head so high to affirm what he suffered. "Is it so essential to your comfort," he demanded, "to hear him, or to make him, abuse me?"

"'Abusing' you, father dear, has nothing whatever to do with it!"—his daughter had fairly lapsed, with a despairing gesture, to the tenderness involved in her compassion for his perversity. "We look at the thing in a much larger way," she pursued, not heeding that she drew from him a sound of scorn for her "larger."


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Rh "It's of our Treasure itself we talk, and of what can be done in such cases; though with a close application, I admit, to the case that you embody."

"Ah," Lord Theign asked as with absurd curiosity, "I embody a case?"

"Wonderfully, father—as you do everything; and it's the fact of its being exceptional," she explained, "that makes it so difficult to deal with."

His lordship had a gape for it. "'To deal with'? You're undertaking to 'deal' with me?"

She smiled more frankly now, as for a rift in the gloom. "Well, how can we help it if you will be a case?" And then as her tone but visibly darkened his wonder: "What we've set our hearts on is saving the picture."

"What you've set your hearts on, in other words, is working straight against me?"

But she persisted without heat. "What we've set our hearts on is working for England."

"And pray who in the world's 'England,'" he cried in his stupefaction, "unless I am?"

"Dear, dear father," she pleaded, "that's all we want you to be! I mean"—she didn't fear firmly to force it home—"in the real, the right,


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204 the grand sense; the sense that, you see, is so intensely ours."

"'Ours'?"—he couldn't but again throw back her word at her. "Isn't it, damn you, just in ours?"

"No, no," she interrupted "not in ours!" She smiled at him still, though it was strained, as if he really ought to perceive.

But he glared as at a senseless juggle. "What and who the devil are you talking about? What are 'we,' the whole blest lot of us, pray, but the best and most English thing in the country: people walking—and riding!—straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting others to mind theirs?" So he let her "have" the stout sound truth, as it were—and so the direct force of it clearly might, by his view, have made her reel. "You and I, my lady, and your two decent brothers, God be thanked for them, and mine into the bargain, and all the rest, the jolly lot of us, take us together—make us numerous enough without any foreign aid or mixture: if that's what I understand you to mean!"


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Rh "You don't understand me at all—evidently; and above all I see you don't want to!" she had the bravery to add. "By 'our' sense of what's due to the nation in such a case I mean Mr. Crimble's and mine—and nobody's else at all; since, as I tell you, it's only with him I've talked."

It gave him then, every inch of him showed, the full, the grotesque measure of the scandal he faced. "So that 'you and Mr. Crimble' represent the standard, for me, in your opinion, of the proprieties and duties of our house?"

Well, she was too earnest—as she clearly wished to let him see—to mind his perversion of it. "I express to you the way we feel."

"It's most striking to hear, certainly, what you express"—he had positively to laugh for it; "and you speak of him, with your insufferable 'we,' as if you were presenting him as your—God knows what! You've enjoyed a large exchange of ideas, I gather, to have arrived at such unanimity." And then, as if to fall into no trap he might somehow be laying for her, she dropped all eagerness and rebutted nothing: "You must see a great deal of your fellow-critic not to be able to speak of yourself without him!"


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 ated Christopher might feel she would not be with him to witness his humiliation; the other that, oaf as she had taken Perowne to be in casual society, in close daily relationship he was such an oaf as to be almost insufferable. She had imagined that he would prove a person out of whom it might be possible to make something by a judicious course of alternated mothering and scorn: she discovered that his mother had already done for him almost all that woman could do. For, when he had been an already rather backward boy at a private school, his mother had kept him so extremely short of pocket-money that he had robbed other boys' desks of a few shillings here and there—in order to subscribe towards a birthday present for the head master's wife. His mother, to give him a salutary lesson, had given so much publicity to the affair that he had become afflicted with a permanent bent towards shyness that rendered him by turns very mistrustful of himself or very boastful and, although he repressed manifestations of either tendency towards the outside world, the continual repression rendered him almost incapable of any vigorous thought or action

That discovery did not soften Sylvia towards him: it was, as she expressed it, his funeral and, although she would have been ready for any normal job of smartening up a roughish man, she was by no means. prepared to readjust other women's hopeless maternal misfits.

So she had got no farther than Ostend, where they had proposed to spend a week or so at the tables, before she found herself explaining to some acquaintances whom she met that she was in that gay city merely for an hour or two, between trains, on the way


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206 "Yes, we're fellow-critics, father"—she accepted this opening. "I perfectly adopt your term." But it took her a minute to go further. "I saw Mr. Crimble here half an hour ago."

"Saw him 'here'?" Lord Theign amazedly asked, "He comes to you here—and Amy Sandgate has been silent?"

"It wasn't her business to tell you—since, you see, she could leave it to me. And I quite expect," Lady Grace then produced, "that he'll come again."

It brought down with a bang all her father's authority. "Then I simply exact of you that you don't see him."

The pause of which she paid it the deference was charged like a brimming cup. "Is that what you really meant by your condition just now—that when I do see him I shall not speak to him?"

"What I 'really meant' is what I really mean—that you bow to the law I lay upon you and drop the man altogether."

"Have nothing to do with him at all?"

"Have nothing to do with him at all."

'In fact"—she took it in—"give him wholly up."

He had an impatient gesture. "You sound


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 to join her mother in a German health resort. The impulse to say that had come upon her by surprise, for, until that moment, being completely indifferent to criticism, she had intended to cast no veil at all over her proceedings. But, quite suddenly, on seeing some well-known English faces in the casino it had come over her to think that, however much she imagined. Christopher to be humiliated by her going off with an oaf like Perowne, that humiliation must be as nothing compared with that which she might be expected to feel at having found no one better than an oaf like Perowne to go off with. Moreover she began to miss Christopher.

These feelings did not grow any less intense in the rather stuffy but inconspicuous hotel in the Rue St. Roque in Paris to which she immediately transported the bewildered but uncomplaining Perowne, who had imagined that he was to be taken to Wiesbaden for a course of light gaieties. And Paris, when you avoid the more conspicuous resorts, and when you are unprovided with congenial companionship can prove nearly as overwhelming as is, say, Birmingham on a Sunday.

So that Sylvia waited for only just long enough to convince herself that her husband had no apparent intention of applying for an immediate divorce and had, indeed, no apparent intention of doing anything at all. She sent him, that is to say, a postcard saying that letters and other communications would reach her at her inconspicuous hotel—and it mortified her not a little to have to reveal the fact that her hotel was so inconspicuous. But, except that her own correspondence was forwarded to her with regularity, no communications at all came from Tietjens.


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Rh as if I asked you to give up a fortune!" And then, though she had phrased his idea without consternation—verily as if it had been in the balance for her—he might have been moved by something that gathered in her eyes. "You're so wrapped up in him that the precious sacrifice is like that sort of thing?"

Lady Grace took her time—but showed, as her eyes continued to hold him, what had gathered. "I like Mr. Crimble exceedingly, father—I think him clever, intelligent, good; I want what he wants—I want it, I think, really, as much; and I don't at all deny that he has helped to make me so want it. But that doesn't matter. I'll wholly cease to see him, I'll give him up forever, if—if—!" She faltered, however, she hung fire with a smile that anxiously, intensely appealed. Then she began and stopped again, "If—if—!" while her father caught her up with irritation.

"'If,' my lady? If what, please?"

"If you'll withdraw the offer of our picture to Mr. Bender—and never make another to any one else!"

He stood staring as at the size of it—then translated it into his own terms. "If I'll


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 In an air-resort in the centre of France to which she next removed Perowne, she found herself considering rather seriously what it might be expected that Tietjens would do. Through indirect and unsuspecting allusions in letters from her personal friends. she found that if Tietjens did not put up, he certainly did not deny, the story that she had gone to nurse or be with her mother, who was supposed to be seriously ill That is to say, her friends said how rotten it was that her mother, Mrs. Satterthwaite, should be so seriously ill; how rotten it must be for her to be shut up in a potty little German kur-ort when the world could be so otherwise amusing: and how well Christopher whom they saw from time to time seemed to be getting on considering how rotten it must be for him to be left all alone

At about this time Perowne began to become, if possible, more irritating than ever. In their air-resort, although the guests were almost entirely French, there was a newly opened golf-course, and at the game of golf Perowne displayed an inefficiency and at the same time a morbid conceit that were surprising in one naturally lymphatic. He would sulk for a whole evening if either Sylvia or any Frenchman beat him in a round, and, though Sylvia was by then completely indifferent to his sulking, what was very much worse was that he became gloomily and loud-voicedly quarrelsome over his games with foreign opponents.

Three events, falling within ten minutes of each other, made her determined to get as far away from that air-resort as was feasible. In the first place she observed at the end of the street some English people called Thurston, whose faces she faintly knew, and the emotion she suddenly felt let her know how ex-


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208 obligingly announce to the world that I've made an ass of myself you'll kindly forbear from your united effort—the charming pair of you—to show me up for one?"

Lady Grace, as if consciously not caring or attempting to answer this, simply gave the first flare of his criticism time to drop. It wasn't till a minute passed that she said: "You don't agree to my compromise?"

Ah, the question but fatally sharpened at a stroke the stiffness of his spirit. "Good God, I'm to 'compromise' on top of everything?—I'm to let you browbeat me, haggle and bargain with me, over a thing that I'm entitled to settle with you as things have ever been settled among us, by uttering to you my last parental word?"

"You don't care enough then for what you name?"—she took it up as scarce heeding now what he said.

"For putting an end to your odious commerce—? I give you the measure, on the contrary," said Lord Theign, "of how much I care: as you give me, very strangely indeed, it strikes me, that of what it costs you—!" But his other words were lost in the hard long look at her from which he broke off in turn as for disgust.


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Rh It was with an effect of decently shielding herself—the unuttered meaning came so straight—that she substituted words of her own. "Of what it costs me to redeem the picture?"

"To lose your tenth-rate friend"—he spoke without scruple now.

She instantly broke into ardent deprecation, pleading at once and warning. "Father, father, oh—! You hold the thing in your hands."

He pulled up before her again as to thrust the responsibility straight back. "My orders then are so much rubbish to you?"

Lady Grace held her ground, and they remained face to face in opposition and accusation, neither making the other the sign of peace. But the girl at least had, in her way, held out the olive-branch, while Lord Theign had but reaffirmed his will. It was for her acceptance of this that he searched her, her last word not having yet come. Before it had done so, however, the door from the lobby opened and Mr. Gotch had regained their presence. This appeared to determine in Lady Grace a view of the importance of delay, which she signified to her companion in a "Well—I must think!"


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210 For the butler positively resounded, and Hugh was there.

"Mr. Crimble!" Mr. Gotch proclaimed—with the further extravagance of projecting the visitor straight upon his lordship.

 VII

young man showed another face than the face his friend had lately seen him carry off, and he now turned it distressfully from that source of inspiration to Lord Theign, who was flagrantly, even from this first moment, no such source at all, and then from his noble adversary back again, under pressure of difficulty and effort, to Lady Grace, whom he directly addressed. "Here I am again, you see—and I've got my news, worse luck!" But his manner to her father was the next instant more brisk. "I learned you were here, my lord; but as the case is important I told them it was all right and came up. I've been to my club," he added for the girl, "and found the tiresome thing—!" But he broke down breathless.


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700-738] second battle, took prisoner Liutpert, who had again advanced against Pavia, and sent the duke Rothari of Bergamo, who aspired to the throne, into exile to Turin, where he was killed after a few days. Now Ansprand was also obliged to leave his refuge on Lake Como and fly to the duke Teutpert of Bavaria. Liutpert was killed, Ansprand's eldest son blinded, his wife and daughter mutilated, and only his youngest son Liutprand spared. So the family of Godepert ruined the race of Perctarit. But no change of policy took place. King Aripert II was peaceable and friendly towards the Romans, and even gave back to the pope the patrimony in the Cottian Alps. He was dethroned in winter 712, when Ansprand came back to Italy, after nine years of exile, with a Bavarian army. Aripert fled to Pavia and was drowned when trying to swim through the Ticino, burdened with all his treasures. Ansprand was acknowleged as king but only reigned for three months; but on his death-bed he was told that the Lombards had raised his son Liutprand upon the buckler and thereby legitimated his own usurpation as well. He died 13 June 712.

Though Liutprand did not reverse the Lombard State's development during the last hundred and fifty years, he favoured Roman influence within his realm in every way. He left no doubt concerning his orthodoxy and attachment to the Roman faith, while nobody surpassed his generosity towards churches and monasteries, but he still followed the glorious traditions of the victorious kings which had been interrupted after Grimoald, and strictly kept in view his aim of uniting Italy under the Lombard kingdom, although he chose various ways of approaching it in the course of his reign. For this reason he was opposed by the Roman Empire and the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, who had been nearly independent during the Bavarian dynasty's reign. Mixed up in quarrels about the Bavarian throne through his affinity with the dukes of Bavaria, he advanced the Lombard boundaries to Mais near Meran; for the rest the northern frontier was well defended by his friendship with the Frankish Charles Martel, whose son Pepin he had adopted by shaving of the hair according to an old custom, and to whom he had even brought help against the Saracens in Provence (737-738). In domestic politics he continued his predecessor's legislation, endeavoured to protect his subjects against denial of legal help, and intervened with great energy in administration and jurisdiction by the royal court of justice in Pavia and by special missi. His aim was naturally to replace the loose structure of the Lombard State by a series of officials ruled by the king, and one of his most efficient means was to give the preference to the Gasindi, and another was to instal relations and other fideles in all duchies and bishoprics. His ideal of kingship, which is evident in his laws, already shews a great difference from that of the former Lombard kings and is strongly influenced by Roman and ecclesiastical interpretations.


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212 The time was favourable for an aggressive policy, because Roman Italy, led by the pope, rose in rebellion against the Emperor. Common hostility against the Emperor formed a link between Liutprand and Pope Gregory II for a while, but the pope soon came to see clearly that the king near him was more dangerous than the distant Emperor. As a token of friendship Liutprand, following the pope's admonition, restored to him his confiscated patrimony in the Cottian Alps. For the moment peace was only endangered by the duke Romuald II of Benevento, who attacked the castle of Cumae by surprise; but after the duke of Naples, aided by the pope's militia, had regained the place and killed the garrison, the pope even paid Romuald the indemnification which he had offered for a peaceable evacuation, and thereby won his friendship. Meanwhile the duke Faroald of Spoleto began to move as well; Narni was taken, Liutprand occupied Classis, the port of Ravenna, and carried booty and prisoners away. He gained other successes at the cost of the respublica; the frontier castles surrendered to him and so he was able to extend the Lombard boundary to Bologna; Osimo in Pentapolis went over to him as well. Then he turned southwards, and attacked the castle of Sutri by surprise (728); this was too much for the pope; the king approached too nearly his own sphere of action. After Liutprand had been in possession of the castle for one hundred and seventy days, the pope insisted on his "restoring and donating" it to the apostles Peter and Paul. Meanwhile the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento had entered into a league with the pope and defended the frontier of the ducatus Romae against the troops of the Emperor. The new exarch Eutychius, who had landed at Naples, did not succeed in making the two dukes desert the league with the pope; his entreaties had no effect on Liutprand till he offered a very important service to the king, placing his own troops at the king's disposal against the independent dukes, so as to take them in the rear and force them to render homage to the king and send hostages in token of their fidelity. The king repaid this service by leading the exarch to Rome, and as the pope could not think of resistance, he again submitted to the Emperor. But the Lombard troops did not enter the imperial town and Liutprand paid homage to the graves of the Principes apostolorum whom he had never intended to combat (729). So the Italian revolution brought double success to Liutprand: territorial acquisition of land in the north and the two dukes' formal submission in the south; and at the same time he had appeared as principal arbiter in these differences on Italian soil.

Liutprand's next care was to make the two duchies' formal dependency real and effective. When difficulties arose after the death of Romuald II of Benevento (731-732), on account of the succession, he marched on Benevento, carried away the young duke Gisulf for education, and installed his own nephew Gregorius, relying upon his own sovereign power. Nearly at the same time, after a breach of the league with the


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42 while her merchants travelled as far as the Indies. Syria found a market for her manufactures as far away as China. But above all, Constantinople, with her incomparable situation between Europe and Asia, was a wonderful mart, towards which, according to a contemporary, the ships of the world's commerce sailed, freighted with expectation. Her numerous industrial societies, and the active commerce in silver carried on there with wealthy bankers, increased her riches still further; and seeing the prosperity of his capital, Justinian was able, with his usual optimism, to congratulate himself on "having given another flower to the State by his splendid conceptions."

But in spite of the Emperor's good intentions, his administrative reform miscarried. From 535 until the end of the reign Justinian was constantly obliged to renew his ordinances, think out new measures, and blame the zeal of his officials. In the great ordinance of 556 he was forced to repeat everything which he had laid down twenty years earlier. From the statements of the public documents themselves we learn that the peace continued to be disturbed, the officials continued to steal openly "in their shameful love of gain"; the soldiers continued to pillage, the financial administration was more oppressive than ever; while justice was slow, venal, and corrupt, as it had been before the reform.

More and more Justinian needed money. He needed it for his wars of conquest, for his buildings, for the maintenance of his imperial luxury, and for the expenses of his policy with regard to the barbarians. Thus after having ordered that the subjects of the Empire should be treated leniently, and having declared that he would be content with the existing taxes, he was himself forced to create new dues, and to exact the returns with a merciless severity. Worse still, thanks to the financial distress against which he struggled, he was obliged to tolerate all the exactions of his officials. As long as money came to the treasury, no one troubled to enquire how it was obtained: and as it had been necessary to yield to the venality of the public offices, so the only course was to appear as blind to the dealings of the administration as to the sufferings of the subjects. Besides, a corrupt example was set in high quarters. John of Cappadocia, brutal and covetous as he was, speculating on everything, stealing from everyone, still maintained the Emperor's credit in a wonderful way until 541 "by his constant labours to increase the public revenue." Peter Barsymes who succeeded him in 543 was the prince's chief favourite until 559, in spite of his shameless traffic in the magistracies, and his scandalous speculation in corn, simply because he was able, in some degree, to supply money for all Justinian's needs. The provincial officials followed the lead of their chiefs, and even rivalled them in exactions and corruption, while the Emperor looked the other way. The financial tyranny had reached such a pitch by this time that a contemporary tells us that "a foreign invasion seemed less formidable to the taxpayers than the arrival of the officials of the fisc." The misery


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590-605] boundary, at all events, was secured, and the Lombards were only threatened from one side, by the imperials. But Authari did not live to see the definite treaty of peace; he is said to have been poisoned and died (5 Sept. 590). The result of his active life was the establishment of a kingdom and the Lombard State, though many difficulties still awaited the Lombards from within and without.

Two months after Authari's death, Agilulf, duke of Turin, obtained the crown and married his predecessor's widow, Theodelinda. In May 591 an assembly of Lombards at Milan acknowledged him solemnly, but a number of North Italian dukes had then to be subdued in repeated battles; also Piacenza and Parma were again subjected, and in the latter town the king's son-in-law was established as duke, as the king generally claimed the right to nominate the dukes himself. He ensured the northern boundary by an agreement with the Avars which became a defensive and offensive alliance later on. The time had now come for a systematic attack on the imperialists. The newly nominated duke of Benevento, Arichis, who had consolidated his duchy by gaining nearly all the territories in South Italy with the exception of a few towns on the coast, had the especial task of marching against Naples and threatening Rome from the south, while Ariulf of Spoleto had already destroyed the land communication between Rome and Ravenna in April 592, and even appeared before Rome in the summer, afterwards turning to the north and taking the castles on the upper Tiber. To be sure, the exarch succeeded in regaining them during the time he was free of Agilulf; but in 593 the king himself advanced southward, occupied Perusia, and appeared before Rome. The siege ended in a treaty with Pope Gregory who only wished for peace, but it was not acknowledged by the exarch after the king had marched off; the war did not cease, and the Lombards made constant progress. It was only after the Exarch Romanus' death (596) that, by the pope's urging, the transactions were renewed seriously; it is true that the new exarch, Callinicus, carried on the war in North Italy, but he concluded an armistice of a year in autumn 598 on the basis of the status quo and engaged himself to pay 500 pounds in gold to the Lombard king. The armistice was renewed for the time from spring 600-601 but, when the war was taken up again, the exarch succeeded in making prisoners of the duke of Parma and his wife, Agilulf's daughter; but the Lombard king took Padua, devastated Istria with Slav and Avar troops, conquered the fortified town of Monselice, enforced peace on the rebellious dukes of Friuli and Tridentum, and occupied in 603 Cremona and Mantua. The central position of the imperialists at Ravenna appeared to be endangered after the subjugation of all the north of Italy, and the Exarch Smaragdus, who was again sent to Italy after the fall of the Emperor Maurice, hastily concluded a new armistice till 605, and surrendered the king's daughter. Then Agilulf crossed the Apennines


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Rh "And it isn't good?" she cried with the highest concern.

Ruefully, yet not abjectly, he confessed, "Not so good as I hoped. For I assure you, my lord, I counted"

"It's the report from Pappendick about the picture at Verona," Lady Grace interruptingly explained.

Hugh took it up, but, as we should well have seen, under embarrassment dismally deeper; the ugly particular defeat he had to announce showing thus, in his thought, for a more awkward force than any reviving possibilities that he might have begun to balance against them. "The man I told you about also," he said to his formidable patron; "whom I went to Brussels to talk with and who, most kindly, has gone for us to Verona. He has been able to get straight at their Mantovano, but the brute horribly wires me that he doesn't quite see the thing; see, I mean"—and he gathered his two hearers together now in his overflow of chagrin, conscious, with his break of the ice, more exclusively of that—"my vivid vital point, the absolute screaming identity of the two persons represented. I still hold," he


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212 persuasively went on, "that our man is their man, but Pappendick decides that he isn't—and as Pappendick has so much to be reckoned with of course I'm awfully abashed."

Lord Theign had remained what he had begun by being, immeasurably and inaccessibly detached—only with his curiosity more moved than he could help and as, on second thought, to see what sort of a still more offensive fool the heated youth would really make of himself. "Yes—you seem indeed remarkably abashed!"

Hugh clearly was thrown again, by the cold "cut" of this, colder than any mere social ignoring, upon a sense of the damnably poor figure he did offer; so that, while he straightened himself and kept a mastery of his manner and a control of his reply, we should yet have felt his cheek tingle. "I backed my own judgment strongly, I know—and I've got my snub. But I don't in the least knock under."

"Only the first authority in Europe doesn't care, I suppose, whether you do or not!"

"He isn't the first authority in Europe, thank God," the young man returned—"though he is, I admit, one of the three


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Rh or four first. And I mean to appeal—I've another shot in my locker," he went on with his rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. "I had already written, you see, to dear old Bardi."

"Bardi of Milan?"—she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without her father's presence.

It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. "You know of him?—how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel," he quickly explained, "he must have most the instinct—and it has come over me since that he'd have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing the Verona picture."

She had fairly hung on his lips. "But does he know ours?"

"No—not ours yet. That is"—he consciously and quickly took himself up—"not yours! But as Pappendick went to Verona for us I've asked Bardi to do us the great favour


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214 to come here—if Lord Theign will be so good," he said, bethinking himself with a turn, "as to let him examine the Moretto." He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who, simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler guest, had plainly "elected," as it were, to give them rope to hang themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man, bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that is, equally to the two companions. "It's not at all impossible—for such curious effects have been!—that the Dedborough picture seen after the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the Dedborough."

"And so awfully long after—wasn't it?" Lady Grace asked.

"Awfully long after—it was years ago that Pappendick, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible."


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Rh "Oh of course we don't see every one!" she heroically kept it up.

"You don't see every one," Hugh bravely laughed, "and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi," he pursued, "to go again to Verona"

"The last thing before coming here?"—she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for assent. "How happy they should like so to work for you!"

"Ah, we're a band of brothers," he returned—"'we few, we happy few'—from country to country"; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: "though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappendick and me now. The thing, you see, is the ripping interest of it all; since," he developed and explained, for his elder friend's benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an assurance superficially at least recovered, "when we're really 'hit' over a case we'll do almost anything in life."

Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what


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216 her father let alone. "It must be so lovely to feel so hit!"

"It does spoil one," Hugh laughed, "for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance—putting it at the merest chance—of Bardi's own wet blanket! But that's again so very small—though," he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, "you'll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappendick's veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you'll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!" he sublimely insisted.

"How can we prevent your using it?" Lady Grace again interrupted; "or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst"

"The thing"—he at once pursued—"will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah," he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, "the worst sha'n't come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to


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Rh express"—and he faced Lord Theign again—"for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!"

Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that attitude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every element of the scene—so that it was of this full view his participation had effectively consisted. "I haven't the least idea, sir, what you're talking about!" And he squarely turned his back, strolling toward the other room, the threshold of which he the next moment had passed, remaining scantily within, however, and in sight of the others, not to say of ourselves; even though averted and ostensibly lost in some scrutiny that might have had for its object the great enshrined Lawrence.

There ensued upon his words and movement a vivid mute passage, the richest of commentaries, between his companions; who, deeply divided by the width of the ample


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218 room, followed him with their eyes and then used for their own interchange these organs of remark, eloquent now over Hugh's unmistakable dismissal at short order, on which obviously he must at once act. Lady Grace's young arms conveyed to him by a despairing contrite motion of surrender that she had done for him all she could do in his presence and that, however sharply doubtful the result, he was to leave the rest to herself. They communicated thus, the strenuous pair, for their full moment, without speaking; only with the prolonged, the charged give and take of their gaze and, it might well have been imagined, of their passion. Hugh had for an instant a show of hesitation—of the arrested impulse, while he kept her father within range, to launch at that personage before going some final remonstrance. It was the girl's raised hand and gesture of warning that waved away for him such a mistake; he decided, under her pressure, and after a last searching and answering look at her reached the door and let himself out. The stillness was then prolonged a minute by the further wait of the two others, Lord Theign where he had been standing and his daughter


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Rh on the spot from which she had not moved. It presently ended in his lordship's turn about as if inferring by the silence that the intruder had withdrawn.

"Is that young man your lover?" he said as he drew again near.

Lady Grace waited a little, but spoke as quietly as if she had been prepared. "Has the question a bearing on the promise you a short time ago demanded of me?"

"It has a bearing on the so extraordinary appearance of your intimacy with him!"

"You mean that if he should be—what you ask me about—your exaction would then be modified?"

"My request that you break it short off? That request would, on the contrary," Lord Theign pronounced, "rest on an immense new ground. Therefore I insist on your telling me the truth."

"Won't the truth be before you, father, if you'll think a moment—without extravagance?" After which, while, as stiffly as ever—and it probably seemed to her impatience as stupidly—he didn't rise to it, she went on: "If I offered you not again to see


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220 him, does that make for you the appearance?"

"If you offered it, you mean, on your condition—my promising not to sell? I promised," said Lord Theign, "absolutely nothing at all!"

She took him up with all expression. "So I promised as little! But that I should have been able to say what I did sufficiently meets your curiosity."

She might, wronged as she held herself, have felt him stupid not to see how wronged; but he was in any case acute for an evasion. "You risked your offer for the great equivalent over which you've so wildly worked yourself up."

"Yes, I've worked myself—that, I grant you and don't blush for! But hardly so much as to renounce my 'lover'—if," she prodigiously smiled, "I were so fortunate as to have one!"

"You renounced poor John mightily easily—whom you were so fortunate as to have!"

Her brows rose as high as his own had ever done. "Do you call Lord John my lover?"

"He was your suitor most assuredly," Lord Theign inimitably said, though without looking at her; "and as strikingly encouraged as he was respectfully ardent!"


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Rh "Encouraged by you, dear father, beyond doubt!"

"Encouraged—er—by every one: because you were (yes, you were!) encouraging. And what I ask of you now is a word of common candour as to whether you didn't, on your honour, turn him off because of your just then so stimulated views on the person who has been with us."

Grace replied but after an instant, as moved by more things than she could say—moved above all, in her trouble and her pity for him, by other things than harshness: "Oh father, father, father!"

He searched her through all the compassion of her cry, but appeared to give way to her sincerity. "Well then if I have your denial I take it as answering my whole question—in a manner that satisfies me. If there's nothing, on your word, of that sort between you, you can all the more drop him."

"But you said a moment ago that I should all the more in the other case—that of there being something!"

He brushed away her logic-chopping. "If you're so keen then for past remarks I take up


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222 your own words—I accept your own terms for your putting an end to Mr. Crimble." To which, while, turning pale, she said nothing, he added: "You recognise that you profess yourself ready"

"Not again to see him," she now answered, "if you tell me the picture's safe? Yes, I recognise that I was ready—as well as how scornfully little you then were!"

"Never mind what I then was—the question's of what I actually am, since I close with you on it. The picture's therefore as safe as you please," Lord Theign pursued, "if you'll do what you just now engaged to."

"I engaged to do nothing," she replied after a pause; and the face she turned to him had grown suddenly tragic. "I've no word to take back, for none passed between us; but I won't do what I mentioned and what you at once laughed at. Because," she finished, "the case is different."

"Different?" he almost shouted—"how, different?"

She didn't look at him for it, but she was none the less strongly distinct. "He has been


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Rh here—and that has done it. He knows," she admirably emphasised.

"Knows what I think of him, no doubt—for a brazen young prevaricator! But what else?"

She still kept her eyes on a far-off point. "What he will have seen—that I feel we're too good friends."

"Then your denial of it's false," her father fairly thundered—"and you are infatuated?"

It made her the more quiet. "I like him very much."

"So that your row about the picture," he demanded with passion, "has been all a blind?" And then as her quietness still held her: "And his a blind as much—to help him to get at you?"

She looked at him again now. "He must speak for himself—I've said what I mean."

"But what the devil do you mean?" Lord Theign, taking in the hour, had reached the door as in supremely baffled conclusion and with a sense of time lamentably lost.

Their eyes met upon it all dreadfully across the wide space, and, hurried and incommoded as she saw him, she yet made him still stand


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224 a minute. Then she let everything go. "Do what you like with the picture!"

He jerked up his arm and guarding hand as before a levelled blow at his face, and with the other hand flung open the door, having done with her now and immediately lost to sight. Left alone she stood a moment looking before her; then with a vague advance, held apparently by a quickly growing sense of the implication of her act, reached a table where she remained a little, deep afresh in thought—only the next thing to fall into a chair close to it and there, with her elbows on it, yield to the impulse of covering her flushed face with her hands.


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The Outcry (London: Methuen & Co., 1911)/Book 3

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 * Chapter 1
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 * Chapter 2
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 * Chapter 3
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 * Chapter 4
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 * Chapter 4
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 * }
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 I

waited again in the Bruton Street drawing-room—this time at the afternoon hour; he restlessly shifted his place, looked at things about him without seeing them; all he saw, all he outwardly studied, was his own face and figure as he stopped an instant before a long glass suspended between two windows. Just as he turned from that brief and perhaps not wholly gratified inspection Lady Grace—that he had sent up his name to whom was immediately apparent—presented herself at the entrance from the other room. These young persons had hereupon no instant exchange of words; their exchange was mute—they but paused where they were; while the silence of each evidently tested the other for full confidence. A measure of this comfort came first, it would have appeared, to Hugh; though he then at once asked for confirmation of it.

"Am I right, Lady Grace, am I right?—to 227


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Rh flogged the Emperor's mother, Anastasia, during his absence, and the public logothete, Theodotus, an ex-monk, who used to hang men up over fires for purposes of extortion. Such abuses were promoted by the fact that Justinian, as in other matters, so in the love of building followed the model of his namesake, and for these operations large sums were needed; and his unpopularity was increased by the conduct of Stephen, who, acting as superintendent of the works, had the workmen and their overseers tortured or stoned if they did not satisfy him. Further, on one occasion, in spite of the opposition of the patriarch Callinicus, the Emperor pulled down a church to gain room for building, and so made the clergy of the capital his enemies. Again, whereas in earlier times prisons had generally been used to keep persons in custody for a short time, it now became the practice to detain men for long periods in the praetorium by way of punishment; and, though this may often have been a mitigation, the novelty roused hostility, and the existence of many disaffected persons in one place constituted a danger which brought about the Emperor's fall.

Among the prisoners was Leontius, who commanded in Armenia in 687. One night towards the end of 695, after he had been in prison three years, he was suddenly released, named general of Hellas (as this theme is not otherwise known at this time, it was perhaps a temporary commission), supplied with a military train sufficient to fill three cutters, and told to start immediately. Unable to believe in the Emperor's sincerity, he consulted two of his friends, Paul, a monk and astrologer, and Gregory the archimandrite, an ex-military officer, who urged him to strike a blow at once, assuring him of success. Leontius and his small following then went to the praetorium and knocked at the gate, saying that the Emperor was there. The praefect hastily opened the gate and was seized, beaten, and bound hand and foot; and the prisoners, of whom many were soldiers, were released and armed. The whole force then went to the Forum, where Leontius raised the cry, "All Christians to St Sophia!" and sent messengers to do the same all over the city, while a report was spread that Justinian had given orders for a massacre (perhaps of the Blue faction), and that the life of the patriarch was in danger. A great crowd, especially of the Blues, collected in the baptistery of the cathedral, while Leontius with a few followers went to the patriarch and compelled him to come to the baptistery, where he gave his sanction to the rising by the words, "This is the day that the Lord hath made," which the crowd answered by the formula of imprecation, "May the bones of Justinian be dug up!" They then rushed to the circus, to which at daybreak the Emperor, deserted by all, was brought. The people demanded his immediate decapitation; but Leontius was content with cutting off his nose and tongue (not so completely as to prevent him from speaking) and banishing him to Cherson. The multitude then seized Stephen and Theodotus, dragged them by ropes along


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228 have come, I mean, after so many days of not hearing, not knowing, and perhaps, all too stupidly, not trying." And he went on as, still with her eyes on him, she didn't speak; though, only, we should have guessed, from her stress of emotion. "Even if I'm wrong, let me tell you, I don't care—simply because, whatever new difficulty I may have brought about for you here a fortnight ago, there's something that to-day adds to my doubt and my fear too great a pang, and that has made me feel I can scarce bear the suspense of them as they are."

The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yet declined a dread. "Of what suspense do you speak? Your still being without the other opinion?"

"Ah, that worries me, yes; and all the more, at this hour, as I say, that—" He dropped it, however: "I'll tell you in a moment! My real torment, all the while, has been not to know, from day to day, what situation, what complication that last scene of ours with your father here has let you in for; and yet at the same time—having no sign or sound from you!—to see the importance of not making anything


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410 the main street till they were dead, and burnt their bodies. The Blues proclaimed Leontius emperor, and he was crowned by the patriarch.

As the Arabs were preparing to reconquer Africa, there was little fighting in Asia Minor during Leontius' reign. In 697 the Caliph's son, Walīd, invaded the Empire from Melitene, and the patrician Sergius, who commanded in Lazica, betrayed that country to the Arabs. Further invasions were prevented by a plague and famine; and in 698 the Romans entered the district of Antioch and gained an unimportant victory.

In 697 Leontius sent the whole fleet under John the patrician to recover Africa, which had for the second time fallen into the hands of the Arabs; and John, having expelled the enemy from Carthage and the other fortified towns on the coast, reported his success to the Emperor and remained in Carthage for the winter. But early in 698, when a larger armament arrived from the east, he was unable to withstand it, and, abandoning his conquests, returned for reinforcements. When he reached Crete however, the crews renounced their allegiance and proclaimed Apsimar, drungarius (vice-admiral) of the Cibyrrhaeots, emperor under the imperial name of Tiberius. They then sailed to Constantinople, which was suffering from plague, and after a short resistance the besiegers were admitted through the gate of Blachernae at the N.W. corner by the treachery of the custodians, and plundered the capital like a conquered city. Leontius was deprived of his nose and sent to a monastery, and his friends and officers were flogged and banished and their property was confiscated (end of 698).

The new Emperor, as a sailor, gave special attention to the defence of the Empire on the sea side, restoring the sea-wall of Constantinople, and settling the Mardaites on the Pamphylian coast. He further repeopled Cyprus by sending back the inhabitants whom Justinian had removed (699). Military operations also were conducted with considerable success, which must be ascribed to an innovation which Tiberius immediately after his accession introduced by appointing his brother Heraclius, who as a general shewed himself not unworthy of his name, commander-in-chief of all the Asiatic themes, and charging him with the custody of the Cappadocian frontier. In 701 the Romans made a successful raid as far as Samosata, and in 704 Heraclius killed or captured the whole of an Arab force which was besieging Sisium in Cilicia. On the other hand Walīd raided Roman territory in 699, his brother 'Abdallāh took Theodosiopolis in 700, in 703 Mopsuestia was occupied and Armenia Quarta betrayed to the Arabs, and in 705 the Caliph's son, Maslama, took two fortresses, and a Roman army was defeated in Armenia.

Meanwhile Justinian was living in Cherson, a place which, while acknowledging the supremacy of the Emperor, was not governed by any


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Rh possibly worse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I've been in the dark," he pursued, "and feeling that I must leave you there; so that now—just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at any cost—I don't know whether I most want or most fear what I may learn from you."

Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between different ways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture, marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of what she gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. "Have you had—first of all—any news yet of Bardi?"

"That I have is what has driven me straight at you again—since I've shown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hoped and like a regular good 'un," Hugh was able to state; "I've just met him at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in Clifford Street, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to my extreme exasperation, to 'sample' Canterbury, and I leave him to a bath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to


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230 Bond Street, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension, oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be the flash-light projected—well," said the young man, to wind up handsomely, but briefly and reasonably, "over the whole field of our question."

She panted with comprehension. "That of the two portraits being but the one sitter!"

"That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything so to the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the golden nail of authenticity, and"—he quite glowed through his gloom for it—"we take our stand in glory on the last Mantovano in the world."

It was a presumption his friend visibly yearned for—but over which, too, with her eyes away from him, she still distinguished the shadow of a cloud. "That is if the flash-light comes!"

"That is if it comes indeed, confound it!"—he had to enlarge a little under the recall of past experience. "So now, at any rate, you see my tension!"

She looked at him again as with a vision too


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Rh full for a waste of words. "While you on your side of course keep well in view Mr. Bender's."

"Yes, while I keep well in view Mr. Bender's; though he doesn't know, you see, of Bardi's being at hand."

"Still," said the girl, always all lucid for the case, "if the 'flash-light' does presently break!"

"It will first take him in the eye?" Hugh had jumped to her idea, but he adopted it only to provide: "It might if he didn't now wear goggles, so to say!—clapped on him too hard by Pappendick's so damnably perverse opinion." With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. "Ah, of course, these wretched days, you haven't known of Pappendick's personal visit. After that wire from Verona I wired him back defiance"

"And that brought him?" she cried.

"To do the honest thing, yes—I will say for him: to renew, for full assurance, his early memory of our picture."

She hung upon it. "But only to stick then to what he had telegraphed?"

"To declare that for him, lackaday! the