CHAPTER XLI. THE RIGHT WAY TO SURRENDER.
It is not in my power, to describe to you all the mixture, or the magnitude, of my feelings, when I entered what our noble journalists—who choose words, like oysters, by their fatness—call the "Portals of St. Stephen."
It is superfluous to say, that a policeman met me; the differentia of that species being to jump up (like the teeth of Cadmus) outside of all requirement, and to vanish (like Berenice's hair) inside it.
"You can't come in here, young man." He made this remark (looking over my head, for his stature was six feet four, and his mouth opened upwards, as all good police-mouths do) in a tone, which conveyed that it was unofficial, and required some apology for excess of affability.
"Peeler, yes he can though! He have a right in there;" exclaimed a voice behind me. "He don't look very nobby p'raps, with all that hair, but he have the same right as I have, Master Bobby. In marches Tommy Upmore, M.P. Tommy, now won't you shake hands with me? One old friend is worth a score of new ones. Without me, so help me Sammy, never would you be here, my boy! But I bears no malice, if your mind is the same. Shake hands, Tommy. There's worse gen'lemen to be found, than Joseph Cowle, Esquire, M.P."
Perhaps I have never received, or inflicted, a stronger sensation of surprise. This may have been, to find my own importance (which must have been growing too rankly) assaulted by a policeman, and asserted by a chimney sweep.
"Mr. Cowl?" I asked, while giving him my hand; though his own would not have been the worse for a "repetatur haustus" of the little boiler engine; "Have you quite recovered from your dreadful cold?"
"All Liberals suffers from throatiness," he replied; "same as Tories does from cheekiness. M.P. for Chimneystacks now I am, Tommy; with an e to the tail of my name as well. The missus would have it, with her education; though beyond me to pronounce it, without 'Cowly.' How you are going up the tree, hot cockles!"
"And you up the chimney!" I replied, with a glance at his dress, which was worthy of the first of May. "I never could have guessed who you were; and how could you recognise me, Mr. Cowly?"
"Come now! Come now!" He spoke, as a groom to a horse cutting too many capers. "After the print of you, on the title-page of all the leading magazines—'Head of hair unparalleled outside the Polar regions, 3s. 6d. per bottle, and then throw away your combs!' Ah, Tommy, dust comes perfessional to me. We know what sends you into this here crib. Five hundred a week, and a royalty on sales. Pays better than ledgery slating!"
I had heard of these absurd reports ere now, and I never hope to hear the last of them. Is there any credulity, among barbarians, a hundredth part as wild as that of the British public, in such matters? People of fair common sense, and with some experience of the world, believed that I was making an enormous income, by lending my name, and my countenance—full-front, profile, and three-quarters—to fellows who advertised hair-oil, balsams, electric, and fifty other sorts of comb, and even my own father's speciality, soap (such as cured all the convicts)—not one of whom, I deeply regret to assure you, upon my honour, as the member for Larkmount, ever paid me a shilling, or even asked me to dinner!
But one is apt to dwell too much upon such trifles. If I have put a penny (one per cent., honest) into any enterprising tradesman's pocket, I make him a present of the honest portion, which would not be worth legal expenses.
Questions of a thousandfold more importance thronged upon me now, as I entered the House, under convoy of the Member for Chimneystacks, who whispered to me, that the Dust-pan Bill was mainly of his own suggestion.
Having been introduced already, at the end of the Autumnal sitting, I did not require his services in that way, but found a quiet corner for my hat, and thought of the time when I put down my trencher some five years ago in the chapel of Corpus.
Then we rushed to hear the Royal Speech, rather like a mob of workmen, when the bell rings; and Sir Roland, whose strength lay in hurrying others more than himself, appeared quite at his leisure, and laughed, as he shook my hand, to find it trembling.
"You'll soon get over that;" he said, as if he had been some fifty years in Parliament. "But who is your friend with the dark complexion?"
I told him the story; but he did not laugh at all heartily, as I had expected.
"An exceedingly dangerous fellow," he exclaimed. "To be sure, I know all about him now. One of the cleverest of all the Clasts, with the true pass-word for the Cabinet. An anarchist, a socialist, a communist, and everything else that rhymes with fist, which is the only tool to meet them with. Chumps is the man for such fellows; but we shall not have him here for a fortnight. There now, Faithful Commons, go home. But they will have no homes to go to, except a common, if all this comes to pass. And yet, how well it has been made to sound, for people who do not care for sense!"
I was not of his opinion, upon that point. To my simple mind, plain English words, mainly of English birth, and showing (one after other) what they mean, without any tangles or knots in them, are the right words to move the English heart. Whoever speaks thus, wins all my ears, and goes a long way towards winning my heart; because he is my brother Englishman. And even for sound, what power is there, whatever the scowl of the cloud may be, in long foreign thunder, below the horizon, and perhaps meaning something, in Italy, or Greece? But the Royal Speech, as usual, meant nothing anywhere; any more than the poor man, who foretells the weather.
"A greenhorn like you, Tommy," said Sir Roland, as if he had served at least through the Long Parliament, "would expect a great fight, and a smash-up, at once, to follow up that palaver. But Thong, who knows everything, tells me that nothing, except little Irish rows, will be on for a fortnight. And we can do a heap more good, he says, by going down to Silverside, and making Chumps safe, than by hanging about for any trumpery divisions. It is jolly to see a fellow in his troubles. Suppose we start to-morrow?"
"With all my heart;" I answered. And in saying this, I had used the right words, at the right moment. Not that I cared to see Bill in the straw so much, although it is a pleasant spectacle; but that I did long, with all my heart, to hear Laura's opinion on politics, with the whole of Her Majesty's speech cut out, and pasted up—as I had told her to do it—in the corner of my little room, where I meditated, and had left a woolly outline of my head against the wall.
Our work was to be at Silverside; where Bill and his father already were in residence, having taken the front that looked over the porch, on the High Street side of the "Bull-and-Mouth Hotel." William Chumps, Esquire, had brought down "his lady, a lovely bride of some nineteen summers," as the Silverside Constitutional described her, though I could depose that she was four and twenty, being eleven months older than myself, and no bride of any summer at all, but married to Bill for three months of the winter. There was no taint of envy in my feelings. She certainly looked very handsome, and had spent a good lump of her £12,000 in apparel; and Bill, of course, was mightily proud of her. But to dream, for a moment, that I was pining, as her melancholy manner towards me conveyed,—I longed very often to bring my Laura; but a scene of that kind was not fitted for her! Patriotic sentiments repressed my private anger; and I worked very hard for Bill; and wrote him some good posters.
"Now, I am off for the Towers," I said to Sir Roland, only two days before the one fixed for the poll; "I can't stand any more of this, and Bill cannot want me any longer. I have had the very kindest letters from your mother; and if you prefer racket to home-life, I don't. I will meet you in London, any day you may appoint. But I must have a little quiet first. 'Tis as bad as a boat-race every day; and at Henley once I lost my nerve, from too much of it, and we got whacked."
"I see;" he replied, as he was fond of doing. "Another man's laurels, wreathed with orange-blossom, are hard to behold philosophically. Go, Tommy, go and recruit your roses. But remember our compact. You have won nothing yet."
He might say what he pleased, when he smiled like Laura; though his smile was strength, and hers was sweetness. That evening, I arrived where I was welcome; and the lovely blush, and soft whisper of a kiss, were worth a world of politics, and Parliament.
The privilege of changing their minds has always been handsomely yielded to fair ladies; so long as they do not change there with their precious hearts, and pure affections. I found my Laura in a vastly different political vein from her previous one. She had taken some peeps into the newspapers, not at all for the sake of the public, but for mine; and all the deep warmth of her nature was stirred, by the Radical outrage, to her country and her home.
"About the suffrage, and the Constitution, and the Abstinence-cause, I know nothing, or less than nothing—as gentlemen express it, though I don't see how there can be less than nothing;" she said to me, the very day after my arrival. "But about right and wrong, everybody has a right to some opinion. For poor landowners, what is it but robbery, downright robbery, to take away their land, and compel them to start afresh to earn more? But, oh, Tommy, Tommy, it takes all my breath away, to think of surrendering the English fleet to the bitterest enemies of England! Oh, come in here, that I may show you something it will strengthen all your principles to see."
There are few things more impressive to the model British mind—of which mine is, I am proud to say, a very tidy specimen—than a genuine series of ancestors in oil, proved (by internal and external evidence) extraneous to Wardour Street. Monuments perhaps have a still grander savour, especially recumbent figures of the Knight, and his Lady, on a slab together, with the little ones that failed to come to harm, sculpturally coming up, like frogs for the blessing. But these are very rarely to be found in any Chancel, or Chapel, by the dozen; while the pictures have an old family habit of keeping together. And to me it appeared that the Twentifold race were what our dear cousins, (who supply our slang, after stealing our standards) call "real grit," for never having driven me, or anybody else, into this caravan of dead Twentifolds. For my gallery of ancestors was restricted to a photograph of my dear father, and an ancient daguerreotype of Uncle Bill.
"Oh, Laura," I cried, when I saw them stretching, (like the windows of a Stop-at-all-Stations-train) for a furlong without any corner; "how can you look at all these great people, and come down from them, to a nobody like me?"
"Hush!" she said. "How dare you talk like that? I didn't bring you here, to be impudent, Tommy."
"But I am astonished," I replied, "astonished, that with all these looking at you, you can look at me!"
"What is there astonishing in it?" she asked, coming up, and putting both hands on my shoulders. "It is, because I love you, dear."
At any other time, I must have kissed her, for those simple, and noble words. It was no thought of all those ancestors that robbed me of that pleasure; but I could not bear that she should look into my eyes, and see how full they were of tears. Then I ventured to put my arm round her waist, and she gave me her left hand, to comfort me.
"Here's the fine old gentleman, I brought you in to look at;" her voice was quite gay again, to pass the fuss over; "does he look, as if he would surrender our fleet, to the enemies of England?"
"He looks fitter to make all her enemies surrender. What a resolute face, and how his foot is planted! Ah, if we had any man to plant his foot, and shut his mouth in that style, now! All open mouth now—as Roly says—open mouth, tongue instead of chin, and instead of strong fist, chattering fingers. A man of that stamp can never have belonged to any time later than Nelson's. No Government would employ him now, in any of our trumpery 'demonstrations.' Let me look at him. It does me good."
The picture, being by no well-known artist, would doubtless be called a daub, by all art-critics rightly flourishing. But to me it seemed full of life and spirit, not always to be found in mighty masters. An Admiral of the ancient days, and himself growing ancient, stood at a gangway before his men, to repel assault of boarders. In his right hand was a big sword, flashing almost as brightly as his eyes, while his left hand pointed to the Union-jack, waving through a cloud of smoke above.
"Who was he?" I asked. "He means to do it. I should have been sorry to board that ship?"
She drew from behind the frame a plate of gilt metal, engraved in red, "Admiral Sir Rupert Towers-Twentifold, A.D. 1740."
"Yes, he did it;" she answered, with her eyes almost as bright as his; "He cut three men down, with his own hand, and then leaped on board the Spanish ship, drove the crew below, and captured it. He was the sixth back in straight line from Roly; and Roly sometimes looks exactly like him. That makes it my favourite picture of them all. Though I like Roly better, when he looks quiet."
"It won't do to look quiet always;" I replied, with the spirit of the conflict caught; "except for such sweet souls as you. Darling, you make lovely patchwork. Will you do a little job for me, without a word to any one?"