Lord Alistair's Rebellion

The September sun was shining on Beers Cooperage, shining as brightly on the dingy London yard as on the glittering emerald seas of France.

The inhabitants of the Cooperage were rejoicing in the light and warmth. The cripple had brought out a rocking-chair, with its cane seat patched up with string, and was swinging himself with half-shut eyes in front of the little row of flowers which assiduous watering had kept alive during the summer drouth. A new canary in the mended cage of its predecessor chirruped gaily from the open window of one of the tiny row of cottages; the window of another revealed a trophy of travel, a box bearing on its lid a photograph of Southend Pier, framed in polished mussel-shells, which its owner, with an altruism not often found in the denizens of lordlier neighbourhoods, had disposed so that its beauty could be enjoyed by the passer-by at the expense of the inmates of the house themselves.

Over the whole of the Cooperage there was an atmosphere of freshness and content. The little gates and palings on the window-sills were newly painted in artistic green and white. Many of them now revealed their inner utility by guarding pots of musk or mignonette, with here and there a bright red geranium. The pavement of the yard was clean beyond its former wont, and the refuse heap that had once marked the abode of Mike Finigan had disappeared.

It was over Mike Finigan’s house that the greatest change of all had come. Not a single broken window was any longer to be seen in the front of the dwelling. The door had been painted green to match the five-barred gates, and decorated with a handsome old brass knocker that shone like an imitation sun. The window of the ground-floor was open, and through it could be seen a perfectly æsthetic kitchen—a kitchen after the heart of South Kensington, with a high-backed settle, a Cromwellian table and armchairs, all of the finest black oak, a dresser lined with willow-pattern plates of deepest blue, and a mantelshelf glorious with copper saucepans scoured to the grain.

The transformation had extended to, or rather it had begun with, the inhabitants of the regenerated hovel. The bewildered dwellers in the Cooperage dated their present era of peacefulness and brightness from the appearance of a remarkable announcement in the Times:

Following on the step thus disclosed to the world Lord and Lady Alistair had taken up their residence in what might have been described with truthfulness as the home of her ladyship’s family, vacated beforehand by her brother.

Stuart had not attempted to reform Mike Finigan. He had adopted the easier and simpler plan of reforming Mike Finigan’s surroundings by obtaining him a post as water-bailiff to a friend who rented some fishing in the heart of the Finigan country. Mike was now living his natural life among his own people, breaking their heads and getting his own broken to their mutual contentment, and earning the character of the best water-bailiff in green Connacht.

Alistair would have been glad to adjust his own life as successfully as he had adjusted his brother-in-law’s.

In the first flush of her joy at his return, and gratitude for the rank he had given her, he had found it easy to persuade Molly to try the experiment of life in Beers Cooperage. He allowed the little woman to consider the scheme as a sort of practical joke, one of those slaps in the face to the hated middle class which she had learned to relish as a proof of aristocratic feeling.

To their humble neighbours the invasion of such a spot as the Cooperage by such a figure as Lord Alistair—Mr. Stuart, he called himself to them—could only be understood in the light of those settlements and missions by which the well-disposed had recently striven to irradiate the gloom of darkest London. One of the great public schools had planted a hall in adjacent Battersea, the Wesleyans had a settlement somewhere Walworth way, the Church of England was bestirring itself in Southwark. The Cooperites were convinced that the new resident had come amongst them on evangelizing thoughts intent. They accepted the green paint and the flowers as a preliminary sop, and awaited with stolid resignation the tracts and the lectures on wireless telegraphy and the Andaman Islands that would surely follow.

Alistair himself was surprised to find how little was changed in his life by the transmigration. The brief episode which lay behind him at Dinard took its place as a dream from which he had awakened. Respectable society, as represented by the Secretary of State for the Home Department, had dropped him once more, and his old friends had welcomed him back. The marriage announcement had been hailed in the circle of which he was the acknowledged chief as a masterpiece, reflecting more glory on him even than the bankruptcy which was now formally complete. If Alistair Stuart had gone under he had proved himself, like Samson, most formidable to the Philistines in his end.

He was able to estimate the greatness of his triumph when he found that his first visitor was the Chevalier Vane.

It was true that the Chevalier came as to the house of mourning, to condole and patronize rather than to congratulate, but Stuart knew him well enough to be sure that he would not have come at all unless he considered that there was still some distinction to be drawn from the association.

Vane’s restless vanity had just stimulated him to make a bid for notoriety on his own account, on lines more congenial to his cautious temper. Inspired by the example of certain distinguished writers of the French decadent school who had exchanged the Bacchic ivy for the Christian palm with evident benefit to their reputations, he had conceived the felicitous idea of publicly entering the Church of Rome. He had already in the press a volume of hymns composed in honour of various medieval saints, collectively entitled “A Rosary of Twilight,” and he trusted that the contrast between its mystic piety and the erotic breathings of his unregenerate muse would at last stir the reviewers out of their apathy.

He had cherished the hope that a man of his importance would be deemed a proper subject for conversion by a Bishop. But the Roman authorities had taken, as usual, a severely practical view of the situation, and had intimated that the reception of a convert, however illustrious, was a matter to be regulated, like other ecclesiastical ceremonies, by the mundane consideration of fees. The cost of an episcopal welcome proved too severe a wrench for the mercenary instincts of the poet, but after a good deal of haggling he secured a monsignor, whose violet stockings made the function a moderate success in the dearth of by-elections and divorce suits.

Wickham Vane, after a severe internal struggle, revolted on this occasion from his allegiance, and struck out a line of his own by embracing the tenets of the Theosophists. But the two brothers continued to live together in the same harmony as before, and it was remarkable that the priests who came from time to time to confirm the new Catholic in his faith found Wickham a much more interested listener, while the yogis and mahatmas who visited Wickham went away under the firm impression that it was his brother who was their disciple.

The author of “A Rosary of Twilight” brought with him a presentation copy as an inexpensive form of wedding-present. Molly received it with gratification as a homage offered to her in the serious character of a Christian matron. But the page containing the inscription to Lord and Lady Alistair was the one that she read with most pleasure; indeed, it was the only one that she could understand.

Her promotion had not wrought much change in Molly’s manners; there was no reason why it should, having regard to the tone of the most fashionable circles; but it had infused a distinct shade of condescension into her treatment of such of her acquaintance as were commoners. To the Chevalier Vane she accorded the courtesy due to his rank, but the untitled Wickham found himself almost snubbed.

Stuart showed the brothers over his new dwelling. The front-door opened directly into the art kitchen, behind which there was a tiny wash-house, where real cooking could be accomplished on a gas-stove. Lady Alistair volunteered the information that they usually dined out, and that the household work was attended to by a plebeian neighbour. Overhead there were two small bedrooms, one of which Alistair had had fitted up as a dressing-room and study for himself.

The Vanes were charmed with the whole establishment, Egerton merely advising a cuckoo clock for the foot of the stairs as a finishing touch, and Wickham inclining to think old tapestry more suitable than wallpapers for the rooms upstairs. In his enthusiasm the Chevalier even expressed himself as seriously disposed to install himself in the house adjoining.

“We might set a fashion,” he declared, with that naïve vanity by which Alistair hardly knew whether he was more amused or annoyed. “In time we might draw other men of letters round us, and have the whole court occupied.”

“Then it would have to be called Poet’s Corner,” Alistair observed.

“That is just what I was going to say,” Vane snapped back, becoming almost rude in his greediness to appropriate the suggestion. “Such a settlement would be like a lighthouse of civilization.”

“I hope not,” Stuart retorted. “We have had too many attempts to civilize the slums. I have come here to barbarize them.”

This time the Chevalier was compelled to acknowledge the master’s superiority.

“You are right,” he heroically confessed. “But I am certain my idea is a good one. It will make a sensation. We shall have pilgrims coming to visit us from all parts of Europe and America.”

And already in his egoistic fancy he pictured himself receiving a stream of reporters in his own cottage, seated in state in some exotic garb, and dictating interviews on the subject of the poetry of the Catholic renascence, which would be wired to the ends of the earth.

Stuart read his thoughts, and smiled rather sadly. Vane’s proposal had pleased him at first, corresponding as it did more or less with the project dimly shaping in his own mind. He had always had a soft corner in his heart for the two brothers. He knew his own need of intellectual fellowship, and both the Vanes, under their absurd affectations, possessed some real taste. Egerton could be a pleasant enough companion on those too rare occasions when he was not iterating the tedious personal note, and Wickham shone as a mildly agreeable moon. Stuart was not blind to their faults, but, then, no master has ever found faultless disciples. If the disciple were equal to the master there would be no masterhood.

As it is natural for a leader to crave for followers, so it is natural that he should bear much from those who seem disposed to follow him. Stuart, without analyzing his motives, had made many efforts to attach the Vanes to himself. He had tried to melt the adamantine selfishness of the elder by generous praise of all in him that was possible to praise. He had tried to fan what little sparks of individuality he had detected in the younger. He had shut his eyes as much as he could to their humiliating vanity and meanness, vices which he hoped might exhale in the sunshine of a little success.

Now he was moved to despair of them. It was evident that the real attraction for Egerton in the project he had embraced so feverishly was not the companionship of congenial minds, but the notoriety conferred by reporters. His soul thirsted not after the praise of the judicious, but after the paragraphs of Fleet Street. Regretfully Alistair made up his mind to abandon the half-formed scheme, unless the two brothers could be persuaded to abandon him. The participation of such a man as Egerton Vane would degrade any movement in which he played a part to the level of his own vanity. It did not deserve even to be called vanity—it was vulgarity. Instead of the vanity of genius, it was the vulgarity of the charlatan.

Happily unconscious of the reflections passing through Lord Alistair’s mind, the Chevalier Vane was occupying his mind with the problem of his neglected volume, which Lady Alistair had laid aside. The poet of the Catholic renascence was anxious to read some of his work to the company, unworthy though they seemed to feel themselves of such a privilege, and he began forcibly turning the conversation towards the end in view.

“The new poetry will be distinguished from the old by its form not less than its spirit,” he proclaimed magisterially. “I have come to the conclusion to discard the sonnet in favor of the acrostic.” (There was an acrostic in the “Rosary of Twilight.”) “Form is the essence of art, and the acrostic represents form in its severest limitations.”

“Form is art,” flashed Alistair, who saw through the visitor’s strategy, and felt maliciously disposed to balk him. It had always been an honourable understanding among the Decadents that they were to listen to each other’s poems and look at each other’s pictures, as some slight mutual compensation for the deafness and blindness of the middle class. But it seemed scarcely fair to extend the benefit of this arrangement to the poetry of the Catholic renascence.

Vane blinked, but recovered himself promptly.

“That is what I said. Form is art or its essence. For that reason it ought not to be concealed. In the acrostic form takes its right place as the governing condition of the whole.”

Wickham dutifully came to his brother’s reinforcement.

“That is why I find tapestry so far superior to painting,” he murmured. “The limitations of the needle are so much severer than those of the brush; their influence over the composition is so much more obvious. There is something vulgar in dexterity.”

“Is there not something vulgar in expression itself?” Stuart put in. “Surely the unexpressed is always higher than the expressed?”

This was a wedge driven between the opposing forces. Wickham, whose claims to consideration rested entirely on the meditations in which he was believed to indulge, could not reject the principle which justified his existence. Egerton, fretting with impatience, began to fear that he should be reduced to the coarse manœuvre of openly seizing his book and reading unasked.

But even this was not to be permitted him.

“For my part,” Stuart said, “I consider that as the first word of literature was the riddle, so it must be the last. Poetry is falsehood, and we should never be allowed to tell the truth. Remember that when Shakespeare ventured to talk poetry to Ben Jonson in the Mermaid Tavern, he ‘had to be stopped.’ The poet will always be stopped by respectable people when he talks prose, and that is why he has to talk poetry, which they can’t understand. Take my advice, throw your acrostics overboard, and write riddles. Write them in Sanskrit if possible, and use a cipher. That will give you all the limitations you want. And the middle class will form a Vane Society, as they have formed a Shakespeare Society and a Browning Society, to interpret you; and when you are dead they will write biographies to prove that you were fairly orthodox and perfectly respectable.”

The author of the “Rosary of Twilight,” as he walked home in dudgeon, observed to the fraternal satellite:

“I am afraid Stuart is deteriorating. He seems to be incapable of high seriousness.”

“He needs to surround himself with pale green tapestry,” was the melancholy response.

Others of Alistair’s old circle came round him in his new home, and rejoiced in this fresh defiance to the Victorian proprieties. But there was one notable absentee. The figure of the Brazilian banker was never seen in the little high-art kitchen. Since Molly Finucane had become Lady Alistair, Mendes had been struck off her visiting-list.