Mainwaring

Front matter

*A

Gift of THE HEARST CORPORATION

CA^

Chapter I

There's nothing for it but to begin at the beginning, I don't mean of Mainwaring for nobody knows his beginning now that he himself can't tell it — I mean rather the beginning of my commerce with him — which was at Marseilles in the 'seventies. The history of a man — I know that very well — can't be rounded up into a tale in the artist's sense. Nature won't have anything to say to your antithetical light and shade, your balance and chiaroscuro and climax. Form, which all the poets talk of and none of them understand, is no concern of Nature's, occupied with her enormous affair of production, absorption, and reproduction. Things happen in life because other things have already happened. You souse into a puddle because you have tripped over a stone; you tripped over a stone because you were looking at Thompson's wife. All is predetermined, but fortuitously, by the Fairies of gestation and birth. So Mainwaring burned his way through the England and London of the last generation because a Doctor Benjamin and Maria his wife were what they were, and did what they did — I never knew them, nor can guess at their affairs — in far-off Ballymena, or because remoter Mainwarings and their obscurer Marias, or perhaps Bridgets, burned and fused in their loves. Heredity ! Doom ! Is that all ? Is it so simple? And yet Mainwaring — my Mainwaring, England's (since she adopted him) Richard Denzil Blaise Mainwaring — was a genius, and could drive men like sheep down steep places into the sea; whereas Dr Benjamin his father drove nothing but a gig, and drove that so badly when drunk one foggy day that he drove it into a stone wall, overturned it and broke his neck. Yet mark : it was because of that untimely indiscretion of his that Mainwaring himself went to Marseilles, saw me there, and involved me in his dangerously heady fortunes. It was because of that — but no more philosophy. I could go on for ever — and it is a sign of age.

He had perhaps been there a year when I first went there, meaning to spend a few days in a January sun as fierce as ours of June, and in leisurely, happy contemplation of all the jolly things I might do next. My old uncle Mompesson, the Dean of St Neots, had died and left me five hundred a year, very unexpectedly. It chimed in so happily with my marked distaste for any kind of regular work that together they rang down the curtain on my acts in the Temple. I had headed due South like a belated swallow, only stopping at Marseilles because there were so many roads out of it. The Messageries Maritimes would take me to Madeira, to Morocco, to Algiers, to Genoa, Naples, Messina, Smyrna, Constantinople; and I was ready for all of them. Meantime I loved the smell of oranges, the dust and glare, the shipping and Arabs of the Cannebiere, so there I stayed, smoking and drinking coffee, and reading the novels of Alphonse Daudet, through a more splendid January month than I had ever dreamed of.

It was on the Cannebiere that Mainwaring stalked into my notice. I saw him at once, he riveted my eyes; I saw him again at the same hour of the next morning; after that I looked for him and scarcely ever missed him. A tall, very black-and-white, gaunt, starved and distraught young man, outrageously thin, with cheek-bones like knives and elbows like hedgestakes, in a thin broadcloth frock, closely buttoned, withered black trousers, and a hat and pair of boots which, I give my word, were for tears. Nobody but a Frenchman — you will say, a stage Frenchman — could have worn them as he did, with a flourish, and a kind of bitter gaiety; but I confess that I admired the gallantry, done, as it must have been, on a gnawing stomach and through aching eyeballs. If it was cold — and it can be shrewishly cold in Marseilles— he wore a double-breasted brown overcoat, far too thin, which had the odd effect of making him look less clad, and more blackly clad than ever. I don't pretend to explain that — but I state it. Atop of all that I should like to add that I never believed him a Frenchman. I could hardly tell you why, except it may have been that in his rare detached moments I seemed to see that quite unwarranted air of being a lord of the earth, free to range above it, on it and below it, which is the badge of my own nation. But his detached moments were few. He was nearly always absorbed in his thoughts, his head either sunk to his breast or uplifted, convening with the blue sky; but when, as often happened, he tilted into another wayfarer — to see his bow, to see the flourish of his deplorable hat was to be transported to the great days of France, when the Comte de Guiche paid his court to Madame de Brissac, or Monsieur made way for her adorable friend and critic. That was French enough — and yet, he could not be a Frenchman. He was not handsome; he stooped his head, he was of an unwholesome pallor, his jaw was slightly twisted — but there was an air of nobility about him, and a wrung and rather terrible seriousness, all the more arresting because, as I believe, it was due to hunger. He wore a thin black beard, a French student's beard, which fluttered in the least breeze. Under that it was easy to see that his mouth was well-shaped, though he had a trick of pressing the lips hard over the teeth which was ugly. His chin jutted forward like the cutwater of a destroyer. His eyes, as I found when I came to be intimate with him, were remarkable — of a deep and steady gray which had the power of dilation and the quality of fire to a very high degree. It was impossible not to believe him when those stern eyes, absorbing you, enforced the tale. They were his greatest asset in this world of gullible men and too kind women.

Generally he stalked alone, but rarely a friend, a French gentleman of dapper appearance and comfortable rotundity, was with him. On such occasions Mainwaring talked vehemently, in fierce and urgent whispers, enforcing his impetuous, stabbing eloquence with slaps of the palm; or standing still in mid-pavement, his friend firmly gripped by the lapel, he would raise his bony free hand higher and higher towards Heaven, his whole person straining up after it, as if the scarecrow he was were on the point of flight upon the wings of his words. His friend, too polite to reveal the embarrassment he was suffering, but anxious to end it, used to agree with him quickly. 'En effet' I have heard him say more than once or twice, and at frequent intervals, 'tout est dity which it never was — but 'On nous ecoute' underlay whatever he may have said — and that was true, and no wonder at all. I was never fortunate enough to be one of his overhearers, but was sufficiently filled with his fiery flow to be indifferent to its purport. It poured forth of him like a lava stream, and was punctuated, as that is, by the frequent fling-up of some great rock of oratory, some bursting proof, some pounding, shattering conclusion. I suppose it must be politics. Nothing else stirs an Englishman to the very deeps — in those days I assumed his Englishry. I was right about his matter, anyhow. Politics it was. He had an infallible means of saving the world for ever on the tip of his tongue, and spilling over.

My interest grew fast and carried me to lengths. It came to this, that I lay in wait for him, like a beast of chase, to catch him at a meal. Noon was the consecrated hour in Marseilles, but the feedinggrounds were innumerable, and it took time. I quested far and wide — beginning with the cremeries and enlarging into more vinous and less savoury dens. He was a shy bird — there was no finding him. And then one afternoon I almost fell over his shocking boots, at the hour of absinthe. There he was, his opalescent bane beside him, with folded arms and a frown upon him, stretched in the declining sun of the Cannebiere. With a murmur and touch of the hat, which he just acknowledged, I sat at his table and ordered my poison. I had the Petit Marseillais in my hand, and presently showed him a paragraph of home news, taking my courage in both hands.

'This is how they feed us exiles, sir/ I said. He withdrew himself from his visions and knitted his brows over the paragraph. It had been to the effect that 'Sir Bentivoglio, premier ministre d'Angleterre' — this was their shot at our Right

Hon. Isaac Bentivoglio, exotic leader of the Tory party at that time — that Sir Bentivoglio had received a deputation of 'merchants of the highest consideration in London' and promised them, with a good deal of high-sounding phrases, a Royal Commission about something or other. Its brazen emptiness still adhered to it.

Mainwaring read, and nodded once or twice as he did so. Then he returned me the paper with a fine air of detachment. 'I despise um/ he said — and I knew his nation — 'as you despise the rat in your bread-pan.' He let it go at that, but then, warming to his own metaphor, 'If I could fasten me teeth fairly in him, I'd shake him like the Ghetto rat he is and fling him out to a Brixton ashbin. Then let them see the ticks of rhetoric stream off him to find warmer quarters.'

Once launched, he held on to this vein for half-an-hour, pursuing it in all its ramifications; and, if you'll believe me, never once let go of his metaphor. Bentivoglio was a Ghetto rat to the end, and the flowers of rhetoric which he threw up were all Oriental and rodent. It was really a fine feat, and enabled me to understand how literary the man was. His speech was exactly what Sir Walter Scott calls 'artificial and combined narrative.' The end was laid in the beginning, the climax foreseen, the swift descent prepared for; but something more genuine lay behind, whether sheer literary inspiration or strong conviction I was not then able to say. I know very well which it was, now.

We parted on very good terms, not without an understanding that we were to meet again. Indeed, he asked me to dinner for a certain day fixed, at a certain restaurant specified. So good a house was that that I may have betrayed surprise — to him, I mean, preternaturally sharp as his poverty had made him. He took it very easily. 'Have no fear/ he said; 'they pay me on the 15th of the month. It's a day you may be sure of.' I laughed it off, naturally, but found out afterwards how truly he had spoken. He received £60 a year as teacher of English in a School of Languages — that and some very occasional and precarious journalism kept body and soul together.

In the course of that dinner, at the Bon Provengal, he discovered to me the length and depth of his ambition. It was simply, as we say now, to make good; but I did not get then, and it was many years before I could get, a full view of the outrageous, exorbitant state of being which he would have allowed to be 'good/ As he put it at the time, it was, 'I have got it in me, d'ye see. There's a furnace roaring in me guts. Let it out then and lick the grease off the skins of the English. They are no countrymen of mine, why should I be squeamish?'

'You think of politics?' I inquired. 'Home Rule, I suppose ? ' But he tossed his hair back.

'No such thing. Home Rule, my dear sir? Vestryman's work. I shall stand for an English constituency, and root myself in the fat English loam. Wait till I have my roots well in, and see if I heave up the soil. Labour, my friend, is the ticket. There's dirty weather brewing in your island. Find a labourer who knows what he is talking about, has a grudge, and a fire in his guts, and you may expect a conflagration. I haven't starved for five-and-twenty years without a cud of gall. I have it in me white as vitriol and as bitter.'

'Labour' had not then the significance it has now. It now means an organised political force, but it had no such implication in the 'seventies. I took it from him, therefore, as a sporting proposal, very light-heartedly. 'We shall weather it, I daresay,' I said; and he gloomed.

'There'll be dirty weather,' he said, 'when I've warmed to the work.' After a pause he burst out : 'How's this for a tool in your hand? When they leave their middens and mixens, their rathaunted hovels, and see the rich in Park Lane, and the pretty rich in Wimbledon and Hampstead ? See them with eyes washed out in bitter gall? There's a few of you, they will say, and begod there's millions of us — starving, stewing, swarming like maggots in an old cheese. Come now, will you fight it out — or will you hand over? What then, my friend?'

He seemed to me like a man who knew what he io MAINWARING

could do. I didn't credit him with any scruples — yet I sheltered me behind the British character. These things never have come off since the time of Richard the Second. Not a high philosophy, I own; the philosophy, indeed, ascribed to the ostrich. But it has served us for six hundred years.

He mellowed as the Volnay began to work, faced ways and means, warmed to the idea that journalism might get him out of his ushership — which he said stripped the skin off him and rubbed salt into the raw flesh. Even that had its graces, he would allow. 'Every now and then I get one of 'em by the ankle and sweep the room with him/ he said. 'And, after all, I love a fight.'

With all his copiousness — and he never stopped talking, except to bolt his food or to drink — I noted then a characteristic of him, which has been more than confirmed since, that all his zest was for the future; that the past indeed did not really exist for him. I was told nothing — I never learned anything but the bare bones — of his birth and upbringing. He hardly spoke of Ireland, and when of Irishmen it was with the utmost scorn. 'The black Irish,' they were for him. He had been educated — that was obvious : he had classics, languages, history, literature. He knew the byways too : he knew eighteenth-century poetry extremely well — much better than I, who professed poetry. But he cared nothing for his scholarship. He had got it — and the sources were therefore

SQUAB MAINWARING n

dried up. Facts then were entirely to seek in Mainwaring's conversation, though I am quite sure that his prospective actions were facts to himself. I never met a man so sure of himself as he was. He was so sure that he was not at all in a hurry. Gnawing his fingers, or dipping his crusts, he was content to starve in exile, with his hollow eyes fixed firmly upon the years to come. So he was fated, though I didn't know it, to mew his squabhood out for another four years. How old was he at this time? Twenty-eight to thirty, I put it.

We parted, after that first dinner of ours, the best of friends, to all appearance, though I did not then flatter myself — nor have I ever — that I was more than a convenience to Mainwaring : a sort of washpot. Yet it was he who dated our next meeting; and named the place. As for me, I was glad of his company, and admit I was interested in him. He had plain marks of genius — complete self-absorption, and that quiescence under the ravages of the inner and more remote ego which only geniuses have. With all the rest of us the citizen who sits in the parlour window holds the latch-key. If he occasionally leaves it about and suffers the loss of it, he gets it back again. Not so with Mainwaring. There was, apparently, no citizen-lodger — or perhaps there was no parlour-window. He was from within outwards a non-moral being. His good pleasure was his law. The policeman was simply fate. m. b

I had two or three funny instances of that, in the course of our dinners together. It had been arranged, I ought to say, that we dined each other in turn. The host of the turn chose the eatinghouse, ordered the meal, and naturally paid for it. All went well at first; but as the month waned Mainwaring's purse emptied — while his will to feast remained as imperative as ever. Then came the inevitable. How was I to guess that he had not a stiver to his name? We had, I recollect, a bouillabaisse , soubise cutlets, ortolans, and two bottles of Hermitage which must have cost eighteen francs apiece at the least. Brandy of 1834 with our coffee. We sat late, and he talked all the time with a red-hot, biting gaiety quite impossible to reproduce. It was the kind of wild mockery a wit might have played with the night before his execution. Then came the hats and sticks — and the folded bill on a salver.

Mainwaring didn't touch it, but stared at it, poking his head forward, as if he saw something dead — say, John the Baptist's head — on the charger, and expected to smell the taint. That may have lasted sixty seconds, and then he plunged his hands into his trouser-pockets (which were straight-cut and high under his waistcoat), tossed back his shock of black hair with a great gesture of scorn, and strode out of the place like Irving in The Corsican Brothers. I admit that I paid the waiter, and even paid him again, when Mainwaring repeated the gran' rifiuto. But when, once more, he was under the same tragic necessity he funked it, and asked me to lend him the money. I said, when I had settled up for him, that I had wondered whether he would use his short way a third time, and he looked at me like a soul in grief. 'My dear, don't ask it of me. It would involve killing the waiter/ 'Killing him? Why killing him?' 'My friend, he would insult me, and I should be bound to take notice. Observe this as an elementary rule of public life, that your opening pitch rules the day. If you begin with a scream, you must end with a yell. If you stand up against tyranny, you must have the tyrant's head on a pike before you go home to bed. To that rule there's no exception — or none for me, at any rate. No, no. That place is shut to me.' Such was the callow Mainwaring, mewing his youth in France, with his far, angry sight fixed upon the singing-birds in English woodlands. I left him in Marseilles and went Eastward in a Messageries boat. I heard nothing more of him for five years; and then there he was, up to the neck in the thing. You shall have it as it came to me in Allenby's letter.

Chapter II Report From Trafalgar Square

Allenby was a junior in those days, with a fair Chancery practice which would have been fairer if he had not had a weakness for journalism of the lighter kind, and for the gadding and gaping at side-shows which play catchball with the profession. I had been in chambers with him five years before, and he now wrote to me about a business in which we had both been then concerned. I omit all that as unimportant, but he wound up with a brisk description of the London news which we shall want. His letter, I ought to have said, had been hunting me since June and Qnly ran me to ground in October.

'Great doings here on May Day/ he wrote: 'red flag, bloody pikes, broken heads, reign of terror, but that of Saturn in full view, we understand. The out-of-works of last winter were really responsible : they sowed, but the Trade Unions watered. There's no doubt of it. ... I was out and about, you will readily believe, and saw it all rather well from the steps of the National Gallery, where, at need, I was prepared to protect the mild-eyed Madonnas tending their babes

REPORT FROM TRAFALGAR SQUARE 15

within, and (if looting were to become general) to have ^ ready hand for the little Van Eyck of What-do-you-call-him and his teeming wife which we both admire . . . There was an enormous crowd swaying like a tide at the turn round a platform at the feet of Nelson. On that rostrum I made out by his superb gestures Ferdinand, of course, the Quixotic Ferdinand; with him Bill Birks, M.P., in a tall bowler : he made a good Sancho till he lost his temper. But the great man was a new man, at least to me; a black-headed, black-bearded cadaver called Mainwaring, who figured afterwards on the charge-sheet as Richard Denzil Blaise Mainwaring, "of no occupation/' Blaise is good, but Blazes were better. He is an anarchist with a sense of humour, and therefore should go far; but at present he won't go any farther than Wormwood Scrubbs. He has all the arts of riot at his finger-tips, speaks with a steady flow, a kind of maddening monotony, vitriol out of a feed-pipe. The effect is that of the Moorish tom-tom, to stir the blood to boiling, or to give you an internal itch. You have to scratch or rave — and, by George, sir, you do scratch. It was he who brought on the fighting, for fighting there was. Ferdinand got a raw sconce, Bill Birks six months.

'It came about like this. While Mainwaring was driving it in, steadily, monotonously, inevitably— but good matter, you know, coherent, cogent, syntactical matter; very French matter, however; much about the " right" to work and nothing at all about the duty of doing it decently — the police were forming a line across the Square, trying to push the mob north and south, and by all means to head them off Cockspur Street and the way to the clubs. Some of them got up Pall Mall afterwards — but I did not see that part. Mainwaring sees their game, but keeps up his deadlevel tom-tom business until he judges the moment come. His crescendo begins, his voice rises to a wail, to a long howling like wolves at sundown; then he is transformed; he tosses back his head; his long forelock flies up like sea-weed on the crest of a wind-blown wave. "To Hell with the peelers ! " — that gave me his nation — came like a great foghorn; and he jumped off the platform.

'Then chaos and old night. Mainwaring is a tall man, and I could see him, at work, swimming rather than hitting out, forging a way for himself towards the steps, with a very nasty-looking, evidently organised band of followers. Marry, here was miching mallecho, but I give you my word that what followed his conquest of the steps was sheer fun. He and his lot, having turned the position, charged the police from behind. "Helmets, my lads," I heard from him, and have sworn to it in Bow Street and at the Bailey, where he also got six months.

'It is the fact that they dis-helmeted a round dozen of our bobbies. They tipped the helmets

REPORT FROM TRAFALGAR SQUARE 17

forward from behind and then tossed them into the air. The crowd in front caught the idea. The air seemed thick with helmets; bandied about like footballs — or a snowstorm in Brobdingnag. Everyone but the police enjoyed himself, and personally I don't doubt that Mainwaring saved us from a good deal of shop-looting or even bloodshed. But the police got cross and used their truncheons; then one or two were pulled down and rather badly mauled. Mainwaring himself — I saw him — unhorsed a mounted man, and got up himself. That little vanity was his ruin. They nabbed him easily. The Life Guards did the rest. But a wag, don't you think?

'He defended himself, both before Sir John and afterwards at the Old Bailey. Very well, too — but he was savage and feared not God, nor man either. You easily forgive the first, but not the second. That put the jury's back up. If he had excused the thing as a joke, which indeed it was, as funny a thing as I ever saw, he might have got off — but he didn't. He was solemn and savage, like a serious cannibal at a feast. He made a mess of it, in fact. Now he's in chokey, thinking it over : a made man if he sticks to it. Don't you wish you had been there? . . .'

There was more, but that was more than enough. I was young enough in those days to like mischief. It meant movement, anyhow. One's great fear was stagnancy. And of course I remembered Mainwaring as the hungry young pion of Marseilles whose tossing up of his forelock, as Allenby described it, had so often solved the difficulties arising out of a dinner eaten and an empty pocket. Looking back upon him as he then was I had no trouble in seeing him a candidate for tribunitial powers. Here he was, then, arrived. I wrote to him in his prison, recalling myself to his mind, and our feasts and speculations in the little eatinghouses of the Cannebiere; but I had no answer. However, not long afterwards — in the ensuing spring, I believe — I met him in Venice,

Chapter III

Venice is a first-rate meeting-place for acquaintance, because there is nothing whatever to do but to go on being acquainted. The nights are soft; nobody dreams of going to bed. Florio's one evening, Quadri's the next : you talk and talk and talk. The mornings you have to yourself; the afternoons you use for sleep and tea-drinking. Before dinner you canter in the Lido — and all the time you talk and go on being acquainted.

It was there that I met again the hero of Trafalgar Square in the not at all surprising company of Lady Whitehaven. But by that time I knew enough of her not to be surprised. You make a row, you get a broken pate, you go to jail. If it's politics you are somebody. If you are somebody you are drawn into Lady Whitehaven's {were, alas ! That generous pretty woman is no more) hospitable net. Here then was Mainwaring, swimming with the best — Lord Gerald Gorges among them, on his way to his duties in Rome — and bullying his captor — which she allowed. Lord Whitehaven himself was the first of the party I saw, Lord Whitehaven himself, with his hat on one side of his head, and his tilted white moustaches, looking, as ever, like a General in an Offenbach opera-comique; permanently satisfied with himself and the universe. He hailed me by saying that he thought I had been dead, and adding, 'Sorry — of course it was your uncle.' He told me, 'I've got the Zenobia off the mole. We've been nosing about in the Greek islands. Ever see Santorin? Worth it, I assure you. It's so hot there that they harvest their grapes by moonlight. You can light a match by holding it to one of the rocks.'

I asked him whom he had on board. Her ladyship, he said, and a convoy of lions : Gerald Gorges, Llanfrechfa, Miss Blint, a poetess and hanger-on whom I recollected, old Windover. That was all. And where did he come in? At meal-time, he said, and at the wings. 'Thank God, I've done with women ! Now I can enjoy my food, and look on. It is amusing me a good deal.' His rogue's eyes — blue as nemophilas, but rogue's eyes for all that — twinkled. Then malice lit a little fire in them.

'By George, I forgot him altogether. We have Mainwaring with us, the very last lion littered. My dear chap, you must know Mainwaring. He's a snorter.'

I laughed. 'Oh, but I do know him. I knew him years ago, when he snorted in a whisper.'

'He snorts through a speaking-trumpet now, my boy/ said the lord. 'Whether he means it or not I can't say. My mind is open. But there's no doubt of one thing that he means.'

I asked him what he thought. He said, 'I fancy Mainwaring is abroad with an oyster-knife. Of course, he may be a Saviour of Society, and all that — as well — but I doubt it.'

I said that he struck me as having a grudge against the world at large, and that he had some reasons for it.