“Shut up!” cried Dr. Aubrey; “you’ve no poetry or sentiment in you—not a bit. You are saturated with ‘Mark Twain,’ and it’s blasphemy to quote Browning in your ribald hearing!”
“Do you think Elsworth has gone into the fruit business ‘in the rosy half of the sky?’” meekly asked Maberley the dresser.
“I’ve no idea,” said Bingley; “but I have known things quite as strange as that. By the way, you were all so anxious to laugh at my poetry that you didn’t wait to hear the dénouement.”
“Oh, isn’t it over?” asked a groggy individual on the sofa, smoking a churchwarden. “How could he get back out of the rosy sky?”
“That I can’t say; but he did, and is now living in a pretty villa on Hampstead Heath, is very fat and jolly, and sketches in fine weather ‘bits’ which he exhibits at the Academy.”
“Then I say it’s a beastly shame,” cried Ryder, the “Resident Acc.,” “to come to a public place like Hampstead and dissipate all that beautiful poetry and rend asunder those rosy skies and appear as a fat sketcher amongst donkey boys and nursemaids, to say nothing of girls’ schools. It’s indecent, and Robert Browning ought to go at him for damages. I would! ‘Avatar’ indeed.”
“Now, joking apart,” said Dr. Aubrey, “don’t you think poor Elsworth got a sudden sense of disgust with his rackety life, which was always, I thought, rather assumed—never sat upon him quite naturally—and in a moment resolved to cut it all? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear that he had settled down in some quiet nook abroad, and was leading a philosophical life. Do you remember Bartley Coleman? You do, don’t you, Fourneaux?—he was of your year. You remember how promising he was? We all made sure he would take the medical scholarship. One fine morning he was missed, and nobody heard of him here till Dr. Sales went into a little grocer’s shop in a Scotch village for some fish-hooks, and was served by the missing Coleman. His father had become bankrupt while he was a student, had a fit of apoplexy soon after, and died, leaving a widow and five girls unprovided for. Poor Coleman heard the call of duty, laid down the scalpel and took up the cheese-cutter, and so supported his mother and his sisters. Noble wasn’t it?”
“Oh, I say, Aubrey,” said Maberley, “you don’t mean to imply that Elsworth is keeping a chandler’s shop?”
“I imply nothing. I say we know very little of the under-currents of half the men’s lives we are familiar with; we see the surface-water and what floats on it; that is all. The wonder to me is how we keep between the banks as well as we do. Some from inclination, others from duty, more from defective control, get away from the old course, wander off down the rapids, under the rocks, and disappear. Is it any marvel? For my own part, there are times when I long to cast off the restrictions of your so-called civilized existence, and go with a gun or a lasso to the Pampas and the virgin forests.”
“Yes, all very fine, and make the welkin ring with cries for your slippers and your grog when tired and heated with the chase. After a very few months of that sort of work, the fit would cool down; and the next thing that the world would see of you, you would be dining with your father at the Fishmongers’ banquet, eating your turtle and drinking your très sec like the rest of the ‘domine diriges.’”