For this unfortunate but remarkably-organised youth every displeasure or gratification of the visual sense coloured his whole mind, and though he lived in Pentonville and worked in Soho, though he was poor and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable desires, nothing in life had such an interest or such a price for him as his impressions and reflexions. They came from everything he touched, they made him vibrate, kept him thrilled and throbbing, for most of his waking consciousness, and they constituted as yet the principal events and stages of his career. Fortunately they were often an immense amusement. Everything in the field of observation suggested this or that; everything struck him, penetrated, stirred; he had in a word more news of life, as he might have called it, than he knew what to do with—felt sometimes as he could have imagined an overwhelmed man of business to whom the post brought too many letters. The man of business indeed could keep a secretary, but what secretary could have cleared up for Hyacinth some of the strange communications of life? He liked to talk about these things, but it was only a few here and there he could discuss with Milly. He allowed Miss Pynsent to imagine that his hours of leisure were almost exclusively dedicated to this young lady, because, as he said to himself, if he were to account to her for every evening in the week it would make no difference—she would stick to her suspicion; and he referred this perversity to the general weight of misconception under which he at this crude period of his growth held it was his lot to languish. It didn’t matter if one was a little more or a little less misunderstood. He might indeed have remembered it mattered to Pinnie, who, after her first relief at hearing him express himself so properly on the subject of a matrimonial connexion with Miss Henning, allowed her faded, kind, weak face little by little to lengthen out to its old solemnity. This came back as the days went on, for it wasn’t much comfort that he didn’t want to marry the young woman in Pimlico when he allowed himself to be held as tight as if he did. For the present, however, she simply said, “Oh well, if you see her as she is I don’t care what you do”—a sentiment implying a certain moral recklessness on the part of the good little dressmaker. She was irreproachable herself, but she had lived more than fifty years in a world of wickedness; like so many London women of her class and kind she had little sentimental softness for her own sex, whose general “paying” seemed the simplest and most natural arrangement; and she judged it quite a minor evil that Millicent should be left lamenting if only Hyacinth might get out of the scrape. Between a young person who had taken a gross risk and a premature, lowering marriage for her beloved little boy she very well knew which she preferred. It should be added that her view of Millicent’s power to look after herself was such as to make it absurd to pity her in advance. Pinnie thought Hyacinth the cleverest young man in the, or at least in their, world, but her state of mind implied that the young lady in Pimlico was cleverer. Her ability, at any rate, was of a kind that precluded the knowledge of suffering, whereas Hyacinth’s was somehow fairly founded on it.
By the time he had enjoyed for three months the acquaintance of the brother and sister in Audley Court the whole complexion of his life seemed changed; it was pervaded by an element of romance which overshadowed, though by no means eclipsing, the brilliant figure of Miss Henning. It was pitched in a higher key altogether and appeared to command a view of horizons equally fresh and vast. Millicent therefore shared her dominion without knowing exactly what it was that drew her old playfellow off and without indeed demanding of him an account she was not on her own side prepared to give. Hyacinth was, in the language of the circle in which she moved, her personal fancy, and she was content to fill as regards himself the same eminent and somewhat irresponsible position. She had the assurance that she was a beneficent friend: fond of him and careful of him as an elder sister might be; warning him as no one else could do against the dangers of the town; putting that stiff common sense, of which she was convinced that she possessed an extraordinary supply, at the service of his incurable verdancy; looking after him generally as no one, poor child, had ever done. Millicent made light of the dingy dressmaker in this view of her friend’s meagre little past (she thought Pinnie no better than a starved cat) and enjoyed herself immensely in the character of guide and philosopher. She felt that character never so high as when she pushed the young man with a robust elbow or said to him, “Well, you are a sharp ’un, you are!” Her theory of herself, as we know, was that she was the “best sort” in the world, as well as one of the greatest beauties and quickest wits, and there could be no better proof of her kindness of heart than her disinterested affection for a snippet of a bookbinder. Her sociability was certainly immense, and so were her vanity, her grossness, her presumption, her appetite for beer, for buns, for entertainment of every kind. She represented for Hyacinth during this period the eternal feminine, and his taste, considering he was fastidious, will be wondered at; the judgement will be that she didn’t represent it very favourably.
It may easily be believed that he criticised his inclination even while he gave himself up to it, and that he often wondered he should find so much to attract in a girl in whom he found so much to condemn. She was vulgar, clumsy and grotesquely ignorant; her conceit was proportionate and she hadn’t a grain of tact or of quick perception. And yet there was something so elementally free in her, by his loose measure, she carried with such an air the advantages she did possess, that her figure constantly mingled itself even with those bright visions hovering before him after Paul Muniment had opened a queerly-placed but far-reaching window. She was bold and generous and incalculable, and if she was coarse she was neither false nor cruel. She laughed with the laugh of the people and if you hit her hard enough would cry with their tears. When he himself was not letting his imagination wander among the haunts of the aristocracy and stretching it in the shadow of an ancestral beech to read the last number of the Revue des Deux Mondes he was occupied with contemplations of a very different kind; he was absorbed in the struggles and sufferings of the millions whose life flowed in the same current as his and who, though they constantly excited his disgust and made him shrink and turn away, had the power to chain his sympathy, to raise it to passion, to convince him for the time at least that real success in the world would be to do something with them and for them. All this, strange to say, was never so vivid as in Millicent’s company—which is a proof of his fantastic, erratic way of seeing things. She had no such ideas about herself; they were almost the only ideas she didn’t have. She had no theories about redeeming or uplifting the people; she simply loathed them, for being so dirty, with the outspoken violence of one who had known poverty and the strange bedfellows it makes in a very different degree from Hyacinth, brought up (with Pinnie to put sugar in his tea and let him never want for neckties) like a regular little swell.
Millicent, to hear her talk, only asked to keep her skirts clear and marry some respectable tea-merchant. But for our hero she was magnificently plebeian, in the sense that implied loud recklessness of danger and the qualities that shine forth in a row. She summed up the sociable humorous ignorant chatter of the masses, their capacity for offensive and defensive passion, their instinctive perception of their strength on the day they should really exercise it; and as much as any of this their ideal of something smug and prosperous, where washed hands and oiled hair and plates in rows on dressers and stuffed birds under glass and family photographs of a quite similar effect would symbolise success. She was none the less plucky for being at bottom a shameless Philistine, ambitious of a front garden with rockwork; and she presented the plebeian character in none the less plastic a form. Having the history of the French Revolution at his fingers’ ends, Hyacinth could easily see her (if there should ever be barricades in the streets of London) with a red cap of liberty on her head and her white throat bared so that she should be able to shout the louder the Marseillaise of that hour, whatever it might be. If the festival of the Goddess of Reason should ever be enacted in the British Capital—and Hyacinth could consider such possibilities without a smile, so much was it a part of the little religion he had to remember always that there was no knowing what might happen—if this solemnity, I say, should be revived in Hyde Park, who was better designated than Miss Henning to figure in a grand statuesque manner as the heroine of the occasion? It was plain she had laid her inconsequent admirer under a peculiar spell, since he could associate her with such scenes as that while she consumed beer and buns at his expense. If she had a weakness it was for prawns; and she had, all winter, a plan for his taking her down to Gravesend, where this luxury was cheap and abundant, when the fine long days should arrive. She was never so frank and facetious as when she dwelt on the details of a project of this kind; and then Hyacinth was reminded afresh that it was an immense good fortune for him she was so handsome. If she had been ugly he couldn’t have listened to her; but the rare bloom and grand style of her person glorified even her accent, interfused her cockney genius with prismatic hues, gave her a large and constant impunity.
XI
She desired at last to raise their common experience to a loftier level, to enjoy what she called a high-class treat. Their commerce had been condemned for the most part to go forward in the streets, the wintry, dusky, foggy streets, which looked bigger and more numerous in their perpetual obscurity and in which everything was covered with damp, gritty smut, an odour extremely agreeable to Miss Henning. Happily she shared Hyacinth’s relish of vague perambulation and was still more addicted than he to looking into the windows of shops, before which, in long, contemplative halts, she picked out freely the articles she shouldn’t mind having put up for her. He invariably pronounced the objects of her selection hideous and made no scruple to assure her she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing he could say to her affronted her so much, for her pretensions in the way of a cultivated judgement were boundless. Had not indeed her natural aptitude been fortified, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace (there was scarcely anything they didn’t sell in the great shop of which she was an ornament), by daily contact with the freshest products of modern industry? Hyacinth laughed this establishment to scorn and made the point that there was nothing in it from top to bottom that a real artist would look at. She inquired with answering derision if this were a description of his own few inches; but in reality she was fascinated as much as she was provoked by his attitude of being difficult to please, of seeing indescribable differences among the smartest things. She had given herself out originally as very knowing, but he could make her gape with doubts. When once in a while he pointed out a commodity that he condescended to like (this didn’t happen often, because the only shops in which there was a chance of his making such a discovery were closed at nightfall) she stared and bruised him with her elbow, declaring that if any one should give her such a piece of rubbish she would sell it for fourpence. Once or twice she asked him to be so good as to explain to her in what its superiority consisted—she couldn’t rid herself of a suspicion that there might be something in his judgement and was angry at not finding herself as positive as any one. Then he would reply that it was no use attempting to tell her; she wouldn’t understand and had better continue to admire the insipid productions of an age that had lost the sense of fineness—a phrase she remembered, proposing to herself even to make use of it on some future occasion, but was quite unable to interpret.
When her companion demeaned himself in this manner it was not with a view of strengthening the tie that united him to his childhood’s friend; but the effect followed on Millicent’s side and the girl was proud to think herself in possession of a young man whose knowledge was of so high an order that it was inexpressible. In spite of her vanity she was not so convinced of her perfection as not to be full of ungratified aspirations; she had an idea it might be to her advantage some day to exhibit a sample of that learning; and at the same time, when, in consideration for instance of a jeweller’s gas-lighted display in Great Portland Street, Hyacinth lingered for five minutes in perfect silence and she delivered herself according to her wont at such junctures, she was a thousand miles from guessing the perverse sentiments that made it impossible for him to speak. She could long for things she was not likely to have; envy other people for possessing them and say it was a “regular shime”; draw brilliant pictures of what she should do with them if she did have them; and pass immediately, with a mind unencumbered by superfluous inductions, to some other topic equally intimate and personal. The sense of privation with her was often extremely acute; but she could always put her finger on the remedy. With her fellow-sufferer the case was very different; the remedy for him was terribly vague and inaccessible. He was liable to moods in which the sense of exclusion from all he would have liked most to enjoy in life settled on him like a pall. They had a bitterness, but they were not invidious—they were not moods of vengeance, of imaginary spoliation: they were simply states of paralysing melancholy, of infinite sad reflexion, in which he felt how in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and how a sordid struggle in which one should go down to the grave without having tasted them was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull demoralisation it would involve.
In such hours the great roaring indifferent world of London seemed to him a huge organisation for mocking at his poverty, at his inanition; and then its vulgarest ornaments, the windows of third-rate jewellers, the young man in a white tie and a crush-hat who dandled by on his way to a dinner-party in a hansom that nearly ran over one—these familiar phenomena became symbolic, insolent, defiant, took on themselves to make him smart with the sense that he was above all out of it. He felt, moreover, that there was neither consolation nor refutation in saying to himself that the immense majority of mankind were out of it with him and appeared to put up well enough with the annoyance. That was their own affair; he knew nothing of their reasons or their resignation, and if they chose neither to rebel nor to compare he at least, among the disinherited, would keep up the standard. When these fits were on our young man his brothers of the people fared, collectively, very ill at his hands; their function then was to represent in massive shape precisely the grovelling interests which attracted one’s contempt, and the only acknowledgment one owed them was for the completeness of the illustration. Everything which in a great city could touch the sentient faculty of a youth on whom nothing was lost ministered to his conviction that there was no possible good fortune in life of too “quiet” an order for him to appreciate—no privilege, no opportunity, no luxury to which he mightn’t do full justice. It was not so much that he wanted to enjoy as that he wanted to know; his desire wasn’t to be pampered but to be initiated. Sometimes of a Saturday in the long evenings of June and July he made his way into Hyde Park at the hour when the throng of carriages, of riders, of brilliant pedestrians was thickest; and though lately, on two or three of these occasions, he had been accompanied by Miss Henning, whose criticism of the scene was rich and distinct, a tremendous little drama had taken place privately on the stage of his inner consciousness. He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place. In the midst of this his sense was vivid that he belonged to the class whom the “bloated” as they passed didn’t so much as rest their eyes on for a quarter of a second. They looked at Millicent, who was safe to be looked at anywhere and was one of the handsomest girls in any company, but they only reminded him of the high human walls, the deep gulfs of tradition, the steep embankments of privilege and dense layers of stupidity fencing the “likes” of him off from social recognition.
And this was not the fruit of a morbid vanity on his part, or of a jealousy that couldn’t be intelligent; his personal discomfort was the result of an intense admiration for what he had missed. There were individuals whom he followed with his eyes, with his thoughts, sometimes even with his steps; they seemed to tell him what it was to be the flower of a high civilisation. At moments he was aghast when he reflected that the cause he had secretly espoused, the cause from which M. Poupin and Paul Muniment (especially the latter) had within the last few months drawn aside the curtain, proposed to itself to bring about a state of things in which that particular scene would be impossible. It made him even rather faint to think that he must choose; that he couldn’t (with any respect for his own consistency) work underground for the enthronement of the democracy and yet continue to enjoy in however platonic a manner a spectacle which rested on a hideous social inequality. He must either suffer with the people as he had suffered before, or he must apologise to others, as he sometimes came so near doing to himself, for the rich; inasmuch as the day was certainly near when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple. Hyacinth thought himself obliged at present to have reasons for his feelings; his intimacy with Paul Muniment, which had now grown very great, laid a good deal of that sort of responsibility upon him. Muniment laughed at his reasons whenever he produced them, but appeared to expect him nevertheless to have them ready on demand, and Hyacinth had ever a desire to do what he expected. There were times when he said to himself that it might very well be his fate to be divided to the point of torture, to be split open by sympathies that pulled him in different ways; for hadn’t he an extraordinarily mingled current in his blood, and from the time he could remember wasn’t there one half of him always either playing tricks on the other or getting snubs and pinches from it?
That dim, dreadful, confused legend of his mother’s history, as regards which what Pinnie had been able to tell him when he first began to question her was at once too much and too little—this stupefying explanation had supplied him first and last with a hundred different theories of his identity. What he knew, what he guessed had sickened and what he didn’t know tormented him; but in his illuminated ignorance he had fashioned forth an article of faith. This had gradually emerged from the depths of darkness in which he found himself plunged as a consequence of the challenge he had addressed to Pinnie—while he was still only a child—on the memorable day that had transformed the whole face of his future. It was one January afternoon when he had come in from a walk. She was seated at her lamp, as usual, with her work, and had begun to tell him of a letter one of the lodgers had got describing the manner in which his brother-in-law’s shop at Nottingham had been rifled by burglars. He had listened to her story, standing in front of her, and then by way of response had suddenly said to her: “Who was that awful woman you took me to see ever so long ago?” The expression of her white face as she looked up at him, her fear of such an attack all dormant after so many years—this strange, scared, sick glance was a thing he could never forget, any more than the tone, with her breath failing her, in which she had repeated “That awful woman?”