Dance of the Years (28 page)

William ignored this; it was a tough age, and he did not want the office wrecked. Spurgeon himself had had one of his meetings reduced to a shambles by malicious cries of “Fire,” and the best part of a hundred of the Faithful killed and wounded in the stampede.

Other men more credulous, or perhaps more obstinately charitable, thought William must be a “Tool of Providence,” and it is just possible that in some hands his product did more good than harm. He certainly meant very well, and, in fact, went just as far in the matter as his very good head alone would take him. He assumed
that because his brains were sound his heart was also, and thus did not observe how often his desires and inclinations cheated him and made him not so much a villain as a silly ass.

He was delighted with himself, and congratulatorily affectionate towards the Deity. Ten months after
The Converted World
first appeared, he paid off Counsellor Greatpiece (who never forgave himself for not taking up an interest in the business, or William for not pressing it), and married Miss Julia Cole without the customary two-year betrothal.

With earnest solemnity William explained to James that he had made the decision to marry after reading the instructions on the subject in the seventh chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. James looked it up afterwards and was as deeply shocked as ever he had been in his life, not, of course, by what he read there, for he thought it all very sensible, but by William. That any young man of twenty-three should enter grimly into marriage to save himself from sin horrified James. The idea embarrassed him, and he found himself praying to his own God, who was a countryman too, that the boy might prove to be just a hypocrite. However, whatever William's motives were he married Miss Julia, and by the social notions of the times, he condescended.

Miss Julia was petite and plump and angel-faced. Her eyes were blue saucers and her ringlets had a gilt gleam on them. Her hoops were modest, and were usually covered by a good French plaid, and when she raised her skirts to step out of a hired brougham, gay blue and white ringed stockings showed for a second above her tiny black boots.

It is quite possible that William did marry to save himself from carnal sin, and probably James was wrong and he was right, for against such a battery of suggestiveness few normally sexed young men could have hoped to stand.

All the same Miss Julia was charming. She was shy, but courageous, and when she stood in the chapel aisle where William first saw her, she looked like a dear little tea-cosy. But, and at that time it was a big but in Penton Place, she was the daughter of a greengrocer with several shops in the City. They changed it to ‘dry-grocer' when speaking of it, but even that did not make it good.

To James's surprise, William not only failed to object to this social disability, but it appeared to please him since it put him in the position of the one who conferred. James reacted towards the news in much the same way as he had to William's Non-conformity. He consoled himself with the recollection that William was not his son, anyway, and privately envied the young man because it seemed that he could do what James could not. In this, of course, he was simply in the
position of the mug at the fair who buys back his own pound note in a fake auction, but he did not see that.

Jinny only cared if Julia was fond of William. By that she meant an utter generosity, which was a tall order. But Julia guessed something of this and did her best to reassure the older woman. Miss Julia was nobody's fool. Behind that baby face was intelligence. She sized up the situation accurately, save that she gave William's social position far more importance than it warranted. She was the daughter of a long line of London “cits.” who were sharp and narrow but also as kindly and sensible as had been Dorothy's forefathers, to whom they were after all urban cousins. Julia was far more used to luxury than Jinny when it came to downright creature comforts, but she honestly believed that the next class division above her own was the best in the world, and would make any sacrifice to convince any mortal person she met that she belonged to it. She considered her own family was “trade,” and those beneath it entirely inferior. She believed William belonged to the desired social order and was elated to marry him. Indeed, that was the main reason why she did marry him, and if from modern standards it seems an extraordinary thing to have done, then a lot about the mid-Victorian age was extraordinary.

The basic man and woman were engaged in a curious experiment just then, and were getting rich and “going grand,” and had yet to find the snags in that programme.

As the Dance of the Years led Miss Julia into the Galantry cotillion, other peculiarities of her temperament began to be observed. There were three ingredients in her recipe which flavoured all the rest: she had brains, she was a snob, and she was jealous.

James always thought about people in the same way as he thought about horses, and he noticed this last as a sign of vice and it disturbed him quite as much as would a sign of stifle trouble. But otherwise she seemed sound enough and certainly had good strong legs, a point on which he was very particular, and then once again after all, William was not his blood.

He gave the young people a cheque, a carved oak sideboard, and a mirror with apples and pomegranates round the frame, and Julia wept because the furniture was not in mahogany, which was a choice wood.

William rented a large, ivy-covered house inconsequentially named “Laurel Lodge,” in the decent suburb of Shepherd's Bush. He installed his wife there in a nest of silk plush and silver and crocheted antimacassars, and ever afterwards if he was half an hour late home from the office, he found her in hysterics.

The Converted World
prospered; it seemed as if nothing could go
wrong with it. William profited by the Mellish's experience and kept expenses down. The office consisted of two extremely dirty rooms on the first floor of one of the old houses on the left-hand side of Fleet Street: a large one in front, and a small one at the back. In the front room sat “the staff” on high stools at big double desks, and in the back, sat William and young Mellish.

In those days the Town was the London of popular conception; pea-soup fogs were the rule in winter, and in a yellow gaslit world of adhesive dirt the little paper was made out every week, and the Smike-like boy rushed round to the printers with parts of it every half hour or so on press days.

William was responsible for its success, for it was he who organized the distribution, which was excellent. Young Mellish admired him immensely and did not find him ungenerous.

In the second year of William's marriage, after a child had been born, he took Julia for a holiday abroad, leaving the baby in the care of Jinny who had a nurse and a youngster of her own. In many ways this was a significant step in this history, which never let it be forgotten, is the story of James and the permutations of James.

William and Julia availed themselves of the services of Mr. Thomas Cook, but only in so far as their tickets were concerned. Julia wept when William proposed “joining the party”; not only did she suspect the clergyman's daughter and the widow with the son and the bride with the young husband, all of making one concerted effort to allure her William, but she felt that travelling in a party like an orphan school outing was not at all what her “dear Pa” would have subjected her to even though he was a mere greengrocer.

William felt rather the same way about it himself, but for economy and convenience there was nothing to beat Mr. Cook's little books of tickets, and it was very convenient to have a courier who could at least speak the language on a foreign quay where there was no one but a pack of jabbering Mossoos to deal with one's somewhat complicated baggage.

In the end they went in typical British fashion with the party and not with the party, and those foreigners who observed them doing this thought they were mad. William and Julia were not much worse than some of the other Britons whose good money let them loose sightseeing over an exhausted warring continent at that time. It was the period when the British got their bad name with other Europeans, the name they have been trying to live down ever since.

William and Julia went to Germany, for of all the Mossoos the Germans were then thought the least impossible. German Mossoos were considered almost human beings, honest, religious, romantic people. But Italian Mossoos were thought to be oleaginous and always
dressed absurdly in
evening
black; Spanish Mossoos were no better, and even less lively; Dutch Mossoos spoke English as if they had a cold; Greek Mossoos were dangerous and sly, and French Mossoos worst of all, a frog-like people only happy when surrounded “by a general atmosphere of Mossoo tawdriness and trumpery.” At any rate so said Edmund Yeats who invented the generic name, when speaking of the foreigners who came over to England for the Great Exhibition; and if they were like this when on a visit to London, God alone knew what fantasies they might get up to in their own benighted countries.

Some days later William and Julia found themselves seated side by side at a huge but nearly empty table in “The Three Moors” at Augsberg. They had discovered that to eat at the table d'hôte was the only means of getting a really good meal in this uncouth land, but had still refused to take their main dinner at the proper time, which was two o'clock. Since they were not alone in this conservatism the proprietor had instigated a five o'clock English table d'hôte for which the food was warmed up from the earlier meal. No foreigner ate at the English table if he could help it, so it usually fell out that William and Julia dined at teatime with the distrusted members of their own party, together with a few stragglers who had missed the day's great culinary occasion.

On this particular evening, the rest of the Cook's party was absent, having gone off on some excursion, and the couple were alone save for a German, who ate in the less attractive fashion of the country, holding his fork like an awl and flicking the chopped meat into his mouth with a knife, and one other man. The second stranger was thin and dark and inclined to smallness, so that William and Julia decided immediately that he was French. He was a little older than William, and although he did not stare his quick bright eyes took in the fair young man and his wife and noted every detail of their appearance. No one spoke, even Julia and William passed the salt to each other in silence, and it was not until the end of the meal that any word was exchanged. When it came it was unfortunate.

Having finished his food, the German belched faintly, and taking out his case lit a cigar. He behaved quite naturally, as might any man in a latter-day restaurant, but as the first pale blue stink curled across the table towards Julia, it was not what he said (sir, a lady is present), which incensed the native, for the words were unintelligible to him, nor yet the tone which was at most reproachful. It was the Look, the awful British Look.

William had the face for the Look and he stared at the cigar as if it were something so vulgar, so utterly disgraceful and disgusting that he could scarce credit his eyes. It is probable that no insult gets under
the skin quite so successfully as the Look; for the simple reason that its meaning has no limit; it implies the worst the other man can think. William's victim took it very seriously. He sprang to his feet, small-eyed with rage, and let out a stream of threats which amazed the Englishman and made Julia cry. The noise was considerable and waiters came hurrying in, while the proprietor himself hovered anxiously in the doorway. The situation was saved by the dark man who spoke rapidly and deferentially in German. William could not understand him, but to his indignation he appeared to be apologizing to the vulgarian. He appeared to be successful, for finally the German laughed abruptly, eyed William with insolent amusement, and went out.

The dark man smiled shyly at the English people.

“I'm afraid sir,” he said to William, “we strangers have to be very diplomatic over here. These minor officials think themselves tremendous swells.”

“Officials?” said William with disgust.

“Yes. He's a Government servant; they're important here.”

“God bless my soul!” William was astounded. “I have to thank you, sir. I'm deeply indebted to you. It's their own country, I suppose.”

“Yes,” said the dark man, “yes.”

The incident was considered an introduction, and they fell to talking. The stranger turned out to be a compatriot. He had a curious accent which was slightly uneducated, and there was a friendliness in his manner which was not fashionable. William was interested in him, though, for there was a strong flavour of wealth about him which made a favourable impression on the shrewd young proprietor of
The Converted World
. They exchanged cards, and the man's address in the then elegant Westbourne Terrace, West, convinced William that his impression was correct and that Mr. Walter Raven was ‘perfectly all right really.' He told the suspicious Julia so afterwards, and as he reassured her, he looked so much like his grandfather that James would have confused them.

However, the effect that Mr. Walter Raven had on William was trivial to the effect Mr. William Galantry had on Walter Raven. Mr. Raven was an extreme example of a familiar type not then nearly so common as it became later. He was one of those nerve-wracked, over-sensitive, over-fastidious, gifted men, who are a prey to violent likes and dislikes. As soon as William spoke to him he was afraid, not of William but of himself. It is all very well to say this when events which happened later are known, but the instinct was there in the beginning, or so Raven always said. He said afterwards (but he was not himself at the time), that he saw William sitting across the table
at “The Three Moors” at Augsberg looking like a yellow nemesis, golden and horrible. He said as soon as he heard William's voice he knew that there would come a time when it would be unpleasantly familiar. He said—but the things that man did say one way and another! He was always talking, always lying, if one took some people's word for it, always inventing something anyway.