Ernest Thompson Seton - "The Arctic Prairies"

Calvin Coolidge - "State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge"

John Dos Passos - "Three Soldiers"

Robert Louis Stevenson - "The Sea Fogs"

The Whirlpool

G >> George Gissing >> The Whirlpool




'I believe in _that_,' said Carnaby.

'You're going away, then. Where to?'

'That's the point,' replied Hugh, moving uneasily. 'You see, with Sibyl
--. I have suggested Davos. Some people she knows are there -- girls who
go in for tobogganing, and have a good time. But Sibyl's afraid of the
cold. I can't convince her that it's nothing to what we endure here in
the beastliness of a London winter. She hates the thought of ice and
snow and mountains. A great pity; it would do her no end of good. I
suppose we must go to the Riviera.'

He shrugged his shoulders, and for a moment there was silence.

'By-the-bye,' he resumed, 'I have a letter from Miles, and you'd like to
see it.'

From a pile of letters on the table he selected one written on two
sheets of thin paper, and handed it to Rolfe. The writing was bold, the
style vigorous, the matter fresh and interesting. Major Carnaby had no
graces of expression; but all the more engrossing was his brief
narrative of mountain warfare, declaring its truthfulness in every
stroke of the pen.

'Fine fellow!' exclaimed Rolfe, when he had read to the end. 'Splendid
fellow!'

'Isn't he! And he's seeing life.'

'That's where you ought to be, my boy,' remarked Rolfe, between puffs of
tobacco.

'I dare say. No use thinking about it. Too late.'

'If I had a son,' pursued Harvey, smiling at the hypothesis, 'I think
I'd make a fighting man of him, or try to. At all events, he should go
out somewhere, and beat the big British drum, one way or another. I
believe it's our only hope. We're rotting at home -- some of us sunk in
barbarism, some coddling themselves in over-refinement. What's the use
of preaching peace and civilisation, when we know that England's just
beginning her big fight -- the fight that will put all history into the
shade! We have to lead the world; it's our destiny; and we must do it by
breaking heads. That's the nature of the human animal, and will be for
ages to come.'

Carnaby nodded assent.

'If we were all like your brother,' Rolfe went on. 'I'm glad he's
fighting in India, and not in Africa. I can't love the buccaneering
shopkeeper, the whisky-distiller with a rifle -- ugh!'

'I hate that kind of thing. The gold grubbers and diamond bagmen! But
it's part of the march onward. We must have money, you know.'

The speaker's forehead wrinkled, and again he moved uneasily. Rolfe
regarded him with a reflective air.

'That man you saw here tonight,' Carnaby went on, 'the short, thick
fellow -- his name is Dando -- he's just come back from Queensland. I
don't quite know what he's been doing, but he evidently knows a good
deal about mines. He says he has invented a new process for getting gold
out of ore -- I don't know anything about it. In the early days of
mining, he says, no end of valuable stuff was abandoned, because they
couldn't smelt it. Something about pyrites -- I have a vague
recollection of old chemistry lessons. Dando wants to start smelting
works for his new process, somewhere in North Queensland.'

'And wants money, I dare say,' remarked the listener, with a twinkle of
the eye.

'I suppose so. It was Carton that brought him here for the first time, a
week ago. _Might_ be worth thinking about, you know.'

'I have no opinion. My profound ignorance of everything keeps me in a
state of perpetual scepticism. It has its advantages, I dare say.'

'You're very conservative, Rolfe, in your finance.'

'Very.'

'Quite right, no doubt. Could you join us at Nice or some such place?'

'Why, I rather thought of sticking to my books. But if the fogs are very
bad --'

'And you would seriously advise us to give up the house?'

'My dear fellow, how can you hesitate? Your wife is quite right; there's
not one good word to be said for the ordinary life of an English
household. Flee from it! Live anywhere and anyhow, but don't keep house
in England. Wherever I go, it's the same cry: domestic life is played
out. There isn't a servant to be had -- unless you're a Duke and breed
them on your own estate. All ordinary housekeepers are at the mercy of
the filth and insolence of a draggle-tailed, novelette-reading feminine
democracy. Before very long we shall train an army of menservants, and
send the women to the devil.'

'Queer thing, Rolfe,' put in his friend, with a laugh; 'I've noticed it
of late, you're getting to be a regular woman-hater.'

'Not a bit of it. I hate a dirty, lying, incapable creature, that's all,
whether man or woman. No doubt they're more common in petticoats.'

'Been to the Frothinghams' lately?'

'No.'

'I used to think you were there rather often.'

Rolfe gave a sort of grunt, and kept silence.

'To my mind,' pursued the other, 'the best thing about Alma is that she
appreciates my wife. She has really a great admiration for Sibyl; no
sham about it, I'm sure. I don't pretend to know much about women, but I
fancy that kind of thing isn't common -- real friendship and admiration
between them. People always say so, at all events.'

'I take refuge once more,' said Rolfe, 'in my fathomless ignorance.'

He rose from his chair, and sat down again on a corner of the table.
Carnaby stood up, threw his arms above his head, and yawned with animal
vehemence, the expression of an intolerable ennui.

'There's something damnably wrong with us all -- that's the one thing
certain.'

'Idleness, for one thing,' said Rolfe.

'Yes. And I'm too old to do anything. Why didn't I follow Miles into the
army? I think I was more cut out for that than for anything else. I
often feel I should like to go to South Africa and get up a little war
of my own.'

Rolfe shouted with laughter.

'Not half a bad idea, and the easiest thing in the world, no doubt.'

'Nigger-hunting; a superior big game.'

'There's more than that to do in South Africa,' said Harvey. 'I was
looking at a map in Stanford's window the other day, and it amused me.
Who believes for a moment that England will remain satisfied with bits
here and there? We have to swallow the whole, of course. We shall go on
fighting and annexing, until -- until the decline and fall of the
British Empire. That hasn't begun yet. Some of us are so over-civilised
that it makes a reaction of wholesome barbarism in the rest. We shall
fight like blazes in the twentieth century. It's the only thing that
keeps Englishmen sound; commercialism is their curse. Happily, no sooner
do they get fat than they kick, and somebody's shin suffers; then they
fight off the excessive flesh. War is England's Banting.'

'You'd better not talk like that to Sibyl.'

'Why, frankly, old man, I think that's your mistake. But you'll tell me,
and rightly enough, to mind my own business.'

'Nonsense. What do you mean exactly? You think I ought to --'

Hugh hesitated, with an air of uneasiness.

'Well,' pursued his friend cautiously, 'do you think it's right to
suppress your natural instincts? Mightn't it give her a new interest in
life if she came round a little to your point of view?'

'Queer thing, how unlike we are, isn't it?' said Carnaby, with a sudden
drop of his tone to amiable ingenuousness. 'But, you know; we get along
together very well.'

'To be sure. Yet you are going to rust in the Riviera when you want to
be on the Himalayas. Wouldn't it do your wife good to give up her books
and her music for a while and taste fresh air?'

'I doubt if she's strong enough for it.'

'It would make her stronger. And here's a good opportunity. If you give
up housekeeping (and housekeepers), why not reform your life altogether?
Go and have a look at Australia.'

'Sibyl hates the sea.'

'She'd soon get over that. Seriously, you ought to think of it.'

Carnaby set his lips and for a moment hung his head.

'You're quite right. But --'

'A little pluck, old fellow.'

'I'll see what can be done. Have another whisky?'

They went out into the hall, where a dim light through coloured glass
illumined a statue in terracotta, some huge engravings, the massive
antlers of an elk, and furniture in carved oak.

'Queer feeling of emptiness,' said Carnaby, subduing his voice. 'I feel
as if they'd carried off everything, and left bare walls. Sibyl couldn't
stay in the place. Shall I whistle for a cab? By Jove! that reminds me,
the whistle has gone; it happened to be silver. A wedding present from
that fool Benson, who broke his neck in a steeplechase three weeks
after.' Harvey laughed, and stepped out into the watery fog.


CHAPTER 3


A cab crawling at the upper end of the terrace took him quickly home. He
entered with his latch-key as a church clock tolled one.

It was a large house, within a few minutes' walk of Royal Oak Station.
Having struck a match, and lit a candle which stood upon the hall table
(indicating that he was the last who would enter tonight), Harvey put up
the door-chain and turned the great key, then went quietly upstairs. His
rooms were on the first floor. A tenancy of five years, with long
absences, enabled him to regard this niche in a characterless suburb as
in some sort his home; a familiar smell of books and tobacco welcomed
him as he opened the door; remnants of a good fire kept the air warm,
and dispersed a pleasant glow. On shelves which almost concealed the
walls, stood a respectable collection of volumes, the lowest tier
consisting largely of what secondhand booksellers, when invited to
purchase, are wont to call 'tomb-stones' that is to say, old folios, of
no great market value, though good brains and infinite labour went to
the making of them. A great table, at one end of which was a tray with
glasses and a water-bottle, occupied the middle of the floor; nearer the
fireplace was a small writing-desk. For pictures little space could be
found; but over the mantelpiece hung a fine water-colour, the flood of
Tigris and the roofs of Bagdad burning in golden sunset. Harvey had
bought it at the gallery in Pall Mall not long ago; the work of a man of
whom he knew nothing; it represented the farthest point of his own
travels, and touched profoundly his vague historico-poetic
sensibilities.

Three letters lay on the desk. As soon as he had lit his lamp, and
exchanged his boots for slippers, he looked at the envelopes, and chose
one addressed in a woman's hand. The writer was Mrs. Bennet Frothingham.

'We have only just heard, from Mrs. Carnaby, that you are back in town.
_Could_ you spare us tomorrow evening? It would be so nice of you. The
quartet will give Beethoven's F minor, and Alma says it will be well
done -- the conceit of the child! We hope to have some interesting
people What a shocking affair of poor Mrs. Carnaby's! I never knew
anything _quite_ so bad. -- Our united kind regards.'

Harvey thrust out his lips, in an ambiguous expression, as he threw the
sheet aside. He mused before opening the next letter. This proved to be
of startling contents: a few lines scribbled informally, undated,
without signature. A glance at the postmark discovered 'Liverpool'.

'The children are at my last address, -- you know it. I can do no more
for them. If the shabby Abbotts refuse -- as I dare say they will -- it
wouldn't hurt you to keep them from the workhouse. But it's a devilish
hard world, and they must take their chance.'

After a stare and a frown, Harvey woke the echoes with boisterous
laughter. It was long since any passage in writing had so irresistibly
tickled his sense of humour. Well, he must let Abbott know of this. It
might be as well, perhaps, if he called on Mrs. Abbott tomorrow, to
remove any doubt that might remain in her mind. The fellow Wager being
an old acquaintance of his, he could not get rid of a sense of far-off
responsibility in this matter; though, happily, Wager's meeting with Mrs
Abbott's cousin, which led to marriage and misery, came about quite
independently of him.

The last letter he opened without curiosity, but with quiet interest and
pleasure. It was dated from Greystone; the writer, Basil Morton, had a
place in his earliest memories, for, as neighbours' children, they had
played together long before the grammar-school days which allied him
with Hugh Carnaby.

'For aught I know,' began Morton, 'you may at this moment be drifting on
the Euphrates, or pondering on the site of Alexandreia Eschate. It is
you who owe me an account of yourself; nevertheless, I am prompted to
write, if only to tell you that I have just got the complete set of the
Byzantine Historians. A catalogue tempted me, and I did buy.'

And so on in the same strain, until, in speaking of nearer matters, his
style grew simpler.

'Our elder boy begins to put me in a difficulty. As I told you, he has
been brought up on the most orthodox lines of Anglicanism; his mother --
best of mothers and best of wives, but in this respect atavistic -- has
had a free hand, and I don't see how it could have been otherwise. But
now the lad begins to ask awkward questions, and to put me in a corner;
the young rascal is a vigorous dialectician and rationalist -- odd
result of such training. It becomes a serious question how I am to
behave. I cannot bear to distress his mother, yet how can I tell him
that I literally believe those quaint old fables? _Solvetur vivendo_, of
course, like everything else, but just now it worries me a little.
Generally I can see a pretty clear line of duty; here the duty is
divided, with a vengeance. Have you any counsel?'

Harvey Rolfe mumbled impatiently; all domestic matters were a trial to
his nerves. It seemed to him an act of unaccountable folly to marry a
woman from whom one differed diametrically on subjects that lay at the
root of life; and of children he could hardly bring himself to think at
all, so exasperating the complication they introduced into social
problems which defied common-sense. He disliked children; fled the sight
and the sound of them in most cases, and, when this was not possible,
regarded them with apprehension, anxiety, weariness, anything but
interest. In the perplexity that had come upon him, Basil Morton seemed
to have nothing more than his deserts. 'Best of mothers and of wives',
forsooth! An excellent housekeeper, no doubt, but what shadow of
qualification for wifehood and motherhood in this year 1886? The whole
question was disgusting to a rational man -- especially to that vigorous
example of the class, by name Harvey Rolfe.

Late as it was, he did not care to go to bed. This morning he had
brought home a batch of books from the London Library, and he began to
turn them over, with the pleasure of anticipation. Not seldom of late
had Harvey flattered himself on the growth of intellectual gusto which
proceeded in him together with a perceptible decline of baser appetites,
so long his torment and his hindrance. His age was now seven and thirty;
at forty he might hope to have utterly trodden under foot the instincts
at war with mental calm. He saw before him long years of congenial
fellowship, of bracing travel, of well-directed studiousness. Let
problems of sex and society go hang! He had found a better way.

On looking back over his life, how improbable it seemed, this happy
issue out of crudity, turbulence, lack of purpose, weakness,
insincerity, ignorance. First and foremost he had to thank good old Dr
Harvey, of Greystone; then, his sister, sleeping in her grave under the
old chimes she loved; then, surely himself, that seed of good within him
which had survived all adverse influences -- watched, surely, by his
unconscious self, guarded long, and now deliberately nurtured. Might he
not think well of himself.

His library, though for the most part the purchase of late years,
contained books which reminded him of every period of his life. Up
yonder, on the top shelf, were two score volumes which had belonged to
his father, the share that fell to him when he and his sister made the
ordained division: scientific treatises out of date, an old magazine,
old books of travel. Strange that, in his times of folly, he had not
sold these as burdensome rubbish; he was very glad now, when love and
reverence for things gone by began to take hold upon him. There, at the
same height, stood a rank of school-books preserved for him by his
sister till she died; beside them, medical works, relics of his abortive
study when he was neither boy nor man. Descending, the eye fell upon
yellow and green covers, dozens of French novels, acquired at any time
from the year of his majority up to the other day; in the mass, they
reminded him of a frothy season, when he boasted a cheap Gallicism, and
sneered at all things English. A sprinkling of miscellaneous literature
accounted for ten years or more when he cared little to collect books,
when the senses raged in him, and only by miracle failed to hurl him
down many a steep place. Last came the serious acquisitions, the bulk of
his library: solid and expensive works --historians, archaeologists,
travellers, with noble volumes of engravings, and unwieldy tomes of
antique lore. Little enough of all this had Rolfe digested, but more and
more he loved to have erudition within his reach. He began to lack room
for comely storage; already a large bookcase had intruded into his
bedroom. If he continued to purchase, he must needs house himself more
amply; yet he dreaded the thought of a removal.

He knew enough and to spare of life in lodgings. His experience began
when he came up as a lad to Guy's Hospital, when all lodgings in London
shone with the glorious light of liberty. It took a wider scope when,
having grasped his little patrimony, he threw physic to the dogs, and
lived as a gentleman at large. In those days he grew familiar with many
kinds of 'apartments' and their nomadic denizens. Having wasted his
substance, he found refuge in the office of an emigration agent, where,
by slow degrees, he proved himself worth a couple of hundred pounds per
annum. This was the 'business' to which Hugh Carnaby vaguely referred
when people questioned him concerning his friend's history.

Had he possessed the commercial spirit, Harvey might have made his
position in this office much more lucrative. Entering nominally as a
clerk, he undertook from the first a variety of duties which could only
be discharged by a man of special abilities; for instance, the literary
revision of seductive pamphlets and broadsheets issued by his employer
to the public contemplating emigration. These advertisements he
presently composed, and, from the point of view of effectiveness, did it
remarkably well. How far such work might be worthy of an honest man, was
another question, which for several years scarcely troubled his
conscience. Before long a use was found for his slender medical
attainments; it became one of his functions to answer persons who
visited the office for information as to the climatic features of this
or that new country, and their physical fitness for going out as
colonists. Of course, there was demanded of him a radical
unscrupulousness, and often enough he proved equal to the occasion; but
as time went on, bringing slow development of brain and character, he
found these personal interviews anything but agreeable. He had
constantly before him the spectacle of human misery and defeat, now and
then in such dread forms that his heart sank and his tongue refused to
lie. When disgust made him contemplate the possibility of finding more
honourable employment, the manifest difficulties deterred him.

He held the place for nearly ten years, living in the end so soberly and
frugally that his two hundred pounds seemed a considerable income; it
enabled him to spend his annual month of holiday in continental travel,
which now had a significance very different from that of his truancies
in France or Belgium before he began to earn a livelihood. Two deaths, a
year's interval between them, released him from his office. Upon these
events and their issue he had not counted; independence came to him as a
great surprise, and on the path of self-knowledge he had far to travel
before the significance of that and many another turning-point grew
clear to his backward gaze.

Seeking for a comfortable abode, he discovered these rooms in Bayswater.
They were to let furnished, the house being occupied by a widow not
quite of the ordinary type of landlady, who entertained only bachelors,
and was fairly conscientious in the discharge of her obligations. Six
months later, during Harvey's absence abroad, this woman died, and on
his return the house had already been stripped of furniture. For a
moment he inclined to take a house of his own, but from this perilous
experiment he was saved by an intimation that, if he were willing to
supply himself with furniture and service, an incoming tenant would let
him occupy his old quarters. Harvey grasped at the offer. His landlord
was a man named Buncombe, a truss manufacturer, who had two children,
and seemingly no wife. The topmost storey Buncombe assigned to relatives
of his own -- a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Handover, with a sickly grownup
son, who took some part in the truss business. For a few weeks Rolfe was
waited upon by a charwoman, whom he paid extravagantly for a maximum of
dirt and discomfort; then the unsatisfactory person fell ill, and,
whilst cursing his difficulties, Harvey was surprised by a visit from
Mrs. Handover, who made an unexpected suggestion -- would Mr. Rolfe accept
her services in lieu of the charwoman's, paying her whatever he had been
accustomed to give? The proposal startled him. Mrs. Handover seemed to
belong pretty much to his own rank of life; he was appalled at the
thought of bidding her scrub floors and wash plates; and indeed it had
begun to dawn upon him that, for a man with more than nine hundred a
year, he was living in a needlessly uncomfortable way. On his reply that
he thought of removing, Mrs. Handover fell into profound depression, and
began to disclose her history. Very early in life she had married a man
much beneath her in station, with the natural result. After some years
of quarrelling, which culminated in personal violence on her husband's
part, she obtained a judicial separation. For a long time the man had
ceased to send her money, and indeed he was become a vagabond pauper,
from whom nothing could be obtained; she depended upon her son, and on
the kindness of Buncombe, who asked no rent. If she could earn a little
money by work, she would be much happier, and with tremulous hope she
had taken this step of appealing to her neighbour in the house.

Harvey could not resist these representations. When the new arrangement
had been in operation for a week or so, Harvey began to reflect upon Mrs
Handover's personal narrative, and in some respects to modify his first
impulsive judgment thereon. It seemed to him not impossible that Mr
Handover's present condition of vagabond pauper might be traceable to
his marriage with a woman who had never learnt the elements of domestic
duty. Thoroughly well-meaning, Mrs. Handover was the most incompetent of
housewives. Yet such was Harvey Rolfe's delicacy, and so intense his
moral cowardice, that year after year he bore with Mrs. Handover's
defects, and paid her with a smile the wages of two first-rate servants.
Dust lay thick about him; he had grown accustomed to it, as to many
another form of sluttishness. After all, he possessed a quiet retreat
for studious hours, and a tolerable sleeping-place, with the advantage
of having his correspondence forwarded to him when he chose to wander.
To be sure, it was not final; one would not wish to grow old and die
amid such surroundings; sooner or later, circumstance would prompt the
desirable change. Circumstance, at this stage of his career, was
Harvey's god; he waited upon its direction with an air of wisdom, of
mature philosophy.

Of his landlord, Buncombe, he gradually learnt all that he cared to
know. The moment came when Buncombe grew confidential, and he, too, had
a matrimonial history to disclose. Poverty played no part in it; his
business flourished, and Mrs. Buncombe, throughout a cohabitation of five
years, made no complaint of her lot. All at once -- so asserted Buncombe
-- the lady began to talk of dullness; for a few months she moped, then
of a sudden left home, and in a day or two announced by letter that she
had taken a place as barmaid at a music-hall. There followed an
interview between husband and wife, with the result, said Buncombe, that
they parted the best of friends, but with an understanding that Mrs
Buncombe should be free to follow her own walk in life, with a moderate
allowance to supplement what she could earn. That was five years ago.
Mrs. Buncombe now sang at second-rate halls, and enjoyed a certain
popularity, which seemed to her an ample justification of the
independence she had claimed. She was just thirty, tolerably
good-looking, and full of the enjoyment of life. Her children,
originally left in the care of her mother, whom Buncombe supported, were
now looked after by the two servants of the house, and Buncombe seemed
to have no conscientious troubles on that score; to Harvey Rolfe's eye
it was plain that the brother and sister were growing up as vicious
little savages, but he permitted himself no remark on the subject.

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