Paul Muniment had fits of silence, while the others were talking; but on this occasion he had not opened his lips for half an hour. When he talked Hyacinth listened, almost holding his breath; and when he said nothing Hyacinth watched him fixedly, listening to the others only through the medium of his candid countenance. At the ‘Sun and Moon’ Muniment paid very little attention to his young friend, doing nothing that should cause it to be perceived they were particular pals; and Hyacinth even thought, at moments, that he was bored or irritated by the serious manner in which the little bookbinder could not conceal from the world that he regarded him. He wondered whether this were a system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a manifestation of that superior brutality, latent in his composition, which never had an intention of unkindness but was naturally intolerant of palaver. There was plenty of palaver at the ‘Sun and Moon’; there were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place, and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much insistent ignorance and flat-faced vanity. Then every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying, “Them was my words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to – what I say I stick to;” and others who perpetually inquired of the company, “And what the plague am I to do with seventeen shillings – with seventeen shillings? What am I to do with them – will ye tell me that?” an interrogation which, in truth, usually ended by eliciting a ribald reply. There were still others who remarked, to satiety, that if it was not done to-day it would have to be done to-morrow, and several who constantly proclaimed their opinion that the only way was to pull up the Park rails again – just to pluck them straight up. A little shoemaker, with red eyes and a grayish face, whose appearance Hyacinth deplored, scarcely ever expressed himself but in the same form of words: “Well, are we in earnest, or ain’t we in earnest? – that’s the thing I want to know.” He was terribly in earnest himself, but this was almost the only way he had of showing it; and he had much in common (though they were always squabbling) with a large red-faced man, of uncertain attributes and stertorous breathing, who was understood to know a good deal about dogs, had fat hands, and wore on his forefinger a big silver ring, containing some one’s hair – Hyacinth believed it to be that of a terrier, snappish in life. He had always the same refrain: “Well, now, are we just starving, or ain’t we just starving? I should like the ’vice of the company on that question.”
When the tone fell as low as this Paul Muniment held his peace, except that he whistled a little, leaning back, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the table. Hyacinth often supposed him to be on the point of breaking out and letting the company know what he thought of them – he had a perfectly clear vision of what he must think; but Muniment never compromised his popularity to that degree: he judged it – this he once told Hyacinth – too valuable an instrument, and cultivated the faculty of patience, which had the advantage of showing one more and more that one must do one’s thinking for one’s self. His popularity, indeed, struck Hyacinth as rather an uncertain quantity, and the only mistake he had seen a symptom of on his friend’s part was a tendency to overestimate it. Muniment thought many of their colleagues asinine, but it was Hyacinth’s belief that he himself knew still better how asinine they were; and this inadequate conception supported, in some degree, on Paul’s part, his theory of his influence – an influence that would be stronger than any other on the day he should choose to exert it. Hyacinth only wished that day would come; it would not be till then, he was sure, that they would all know where they were, and that the good they were striving for, blindly, obstructedly, in a kind of eternal dirty intellectual fog, would pass from the stage of crude discussion and mere sharp, tantalising desirableness into that of irresistible reality. Muniment was listened to unanimously, when he spoke, and was much talked about, usually with a knowing, implicit allusiveness, when he was absent; it was generally admitted that he could see further than most. But it was suspected that he wanted to see further than was necessary; as one of the most inveterate frequenters of the club remarked one evening, if a man could see as far as he could chuck a brick, that was far enough. There was an idea that he had nothing particular to complain of, personally, or that if he had he didn’t complain of it – an attitude which perhaps contained the germs of a latent disaffection. Hyacinth could easily see that he himself was exposed to the same imputation, but he couldn’t help it; it would have been impossible to him to keep up his character for sincerity by revealing, at the ‘Sun and Moon’, the condition of his wardrobe, or announcing that he had not had a pennyworth of bacon for six months. There were members of the club who were apparently always in the enjoyment of involuntary leisure – narrating the vainest peregrinations in search of a job, the cruelest rebuffs, the most vivid anecdotes of the insolence of office. They made Hyacinth uncomfortably conscious, at times, that if he should be out of work it would be wholly by his own fault; that he had in his hand a bread-winning tool on which he might absolutely count. He was also aware, however, that his position in this little band of malcontents (it was little only if measured by the numbers that were gathered together on any one occasion; he liked to think it was large in its latent possibilities, its mysterious ramifications and affiliations) was peculiar and distinguished; it would be favourable if he had the kind of energy and assurance that would help him to make use of it. He had an intimate conviction – the proof of it was in the air, in the sensible facility of his footing at the ‘Sun and Moon’ – that Eustache Poupin had taken upon himself to disseminate the anecdote of his origin, of his mother’s disaster; in consequence of which, as the victim of social infamy, of heinous laws, it was conceded to him that he had a larger account to settle even than most. He was ab ovo a revolutionist, and that balanced against his smart neckties, a certain suspicious security that was perceived in him as to the h (he had had from his earliest years a natural command of it), and the fact that he possessed the sort of hand on which there is always a premium – an accident somehow to be guarded against in a thorough-going system of equality. He never challenged Poupin on the subject, for he owed the Frenchman too much to reproach him with any officious step that was meant in kindness; and moreover his fellow-labourer at old Crookenden’s had said to him, as if to anticipate such an impugnment of his discretion, “Remember, my child, that I am incapable of drawing aside any veil that you may have preferred to drop over your lacerated personality. Your moral dignity will always be safe with me. But remember at the same time that among the disinherited there is a mystic language which dispenses with proofs – a freemasonry, a reciprocal divination; they understand each other with half a word.” It was with half a word, then, in Bloomsbury, that Hyacinth had been understood; but there was a certain delicacy within him that forbade him to push his advantage, to treat implications of sympathy, none the less definite for being roundabout, as steps in the ladder of success. He had no wish to be a leader because his mother had murdered her lover and died in penal servitude: these circumstances recommended intentness but they also suggested modesty. When the gathering at the ‘Sun and Moon’ was at its best, and its temper seemed really an earnest of what was the basis of all its calculations – that the people was only a sleeping lion, already breathing shorter and beginning to stretch its limbs – at these hours, some of them thrilling enough, Hyacinth waited for the voice that should allot to him the particular part he was to play. His ambition was to play it with brilliancy, to offer an example – an example, even, that might survive him – of pure youthful, almost juvenile, consecration. He was conscious of no commission to give the promises, to assume the responsibilities, of a redeemer, and he had no envy of the man on whom this burden should rest. Muniment, indeed, might carry it, and it was the first article of his faith that to help him to carry it the better he himself was ready for any sacrifice. Then it was – on these nights of intenser vibration – that Hyacinth waited for a sign.
They came oftener, this second winter, for the season was terribly hard; and as in that lower world one walked with one’s ear nearer the ground, the deep perpetual groan of London misery seemed to swell and swell and form the whole undertone of life. The filthy air came into the place in the damp coats of silent men, and hung there till it was brewed to a nauseous warmth, and ugly, serious faces squared themselves through it, and strong-smelling pipes contributed their element in a fierce, dogged manner which appeared to say that it now had to stand for everything – for bread and meat and beer, for shoes and blankets and the poor things at the pawnbroker’s and the smokeless chimney at home. Hyacinth’s colleagues seemed to him wiser then, and more permeated with intentions boding ill to the satisfied classes; and though the note of popularity was still most effectively struck by the man who could demand oftenest, unpractically, “What the plague am I to do with seventeen shillings?” it was brought home to our hero on more than one occasion that revolution was ripe at last. This was especially the case on the evening I began by referring to, when Eustache Poupin squeezed in and announced, as if it were a great piece of news, that in the east of London, that night, there were forty thousand men out of work. He looked round the circle with his dilated foreign eye, as he took his place; he seemed to address the company individually as well as collectively, and to make each man responsible for hearing him. He owed his position at the ‘Sun and Moon’ to the brilliancy with which he represented the political exile, the magnanimous immaculate citizen wrenched out of bed at dead of night, torn from his hearthstone, his loved ones and his profession, and hurried across the frontier with only the coat on his back. Poupin had performed in this character now for many years, but he had never lost the bloom of the outraged proscript, and the passionate pictures he had often drawn of the bitterness of exile were moving even to those who knew with what success he had set up his household gods in Lisson Grove. He was recognised as suffering everything for his opinions; and his hearers in Bloomsbury – who, after all, even in their most concentrated hours, were very good-natured – appeared never to have made the subtle reflection, though they made many others, that there was a want of tact in his calling upon them to sympathise with him for being one of themselves. He imposed himself by the eloquence of his assumption that if one were not in the beautiful France one was nowhere worth speaking of, and ended by producing an impression that that country had an almost supernatural charm. Muniment had once said to Hyacinth that he was sure Poupin would be very sorry if he should be enabled to go home again (as he might, from one week to the other, the Republic being so indulgent and the amnesty to the Communards constantly extended), for over there he couldn’t be a refugee; and however this might be he certainly flourished a good deal in London on the basis of this very fact that he was miserable there.
“Why do you tell us that, as if it was so very striking? Don’t we know it, and haven’t we known it always? But you are right; we behave as if we knew nothing at all,” said Mr Schinkel, the German cabinet-maker, who had originally introduced Captain Sholto to the ‘Sun and Moon’. He had a long, unhealthy, benevolent face and greasy hair, and constantly wore a kind of untidy bandage round his neck, as if for a local ailment. “You remind us – that is very well; but we shall forget it in half an hour. We are not serious.”
“Pardon, pardon; for myself, I do not admit that!” Poupin replied, striking the table with his finger-tips several times, very fast. “If I am not serious, I am nothing.”
“Oh no, you are something,” said the German, smoking his monumental pipe with a contemplative air. “We are all something; but I am not sure it is anything very useful.”
“Well, things would be worse without us. I’d rather be in here, in this kind of muck, than outside,” remarked the fat man who understood dogs.
“Certainly, it is very pleasant, especially if you have your beer; but not so pleasant in the east, where fifty thousand people starve. It is a very unpleasant night,” the cabinet-maker went on.
“How can it be worse?” Eustache Poupin inquired, looking defiantly at the German, as if to make him responsible for the fat man’s reflection. “It is so bad that the imagination recoils, refuses.”
“Oh, we don’t care for the imagination!” the fat man declared. “We want a compact body, in marching order.”
“What do you call a compact body?” the little gray-faced shoemaker demanded. “I dare say you don’t mean your kind of body.”
“Well, I know what I mean,” said the fat man, severely.
“That’s a grand thing. Perhaps one of these days you’ll tell us.”
“You’ll see it for yourself, perhaps, before that day comes,” the gentleman with the silver ring rejoined. “Perhaps when you do, you’ll remember.”
“Well, you know, Schinkel says we don’t,” said the shoemaker, nodding at the cloud-compelling German.
“I don’t care what no man says!” the dog-fancier exclaimed, gazing straight before him.
“They say it’s a bad year – the blockheads in the newspapers,” Mr Schinkel went on, addressing himself to the company at large. “They say that on purpose – to convey the impression that there are such things as good years. I ask the company, has any gentleman present ever happened to notice that article? The good year is yet to come: it might begin to-night, if we like; it all depends on our being able to be serious for a few hours. But that is too much to expect. Mr Muniment is very serious; he looks as if he were waiting for the signal; but he doesn’t speak – he never speaks, if I want particularly to hear him. He only considers, very deeply, I am sure. But it is almost as bad to think without speaking as to speak without thinking.”
Hyacinth always admired the cool, easy way in which Muniment comported himself when the attention of the public was directed towards him. These manifestations of curiosity, or of hostility, would have put him out immensely, himself. When a lot of people, especially the kind of people who were collected at the ‘Sun and Moon’, looked at him, or listened to him, at once, he always blushed and stammered, feeling that if he couldn’t have a million of spectators (which would have been inspiring) he should prefer to have but two or three; there was something very embarrassing in twenty.
Muniment smiled, for an instant, good-humouredly; then, after a moment’s hesitation, looking across at the German, and the German only, as if his remark were worth noticing, but it didn’t matter if the others didn’t understand the reply, he said simply, “Hoffendahl’s in London.”
“Hoffendahl? Gott in Himmel!” the cabinet-maker exclaimed, taking the pipe out of his mouth. And the two men exchanged a longish glance. Then Mr Schinkel remarked, “That surprises me, sehr. Are you very sure?”
Muniment continued, for a moment, to look at him. “If I keep quiet for half an hour, with so many valuable suggestions flying all round me, you think I say too little. Then if I open my head to give out three words, you appear to think I say too much.”
“Ah, no; on the contrary, I want you to say three more. If you tell me you have seen him I shall be perfectly satisfied.”
“Upon my word, I should hope so! Do you think he’s the kind of party a fellow says he has seen?”
“Yes, when he hasn’t!” said Eustache Poupin, who had been listening. Every one was listening now.
“It depends on the fellow he says it to. Not even here?” the German asked.
“Oh, here!” Paul Muniment exclaimed, in a peculiar tone, and resumed his muffled whistle again.
“Take care – take care; you will make me think you haven’t!” cried Poupin, with his excited expression.
“That’s just what I want,” said Muniment.
“Nun, I understand,” the cabinet-maker remarked, restoring his pipe to his lips after an interval almost as momentous as the stoppage of a steamer in mid-ocean.
“’Ere, ’ere!” repeated the small shoemaker, indignantly. “I dare say it is as good as the place he came from. He might look in and see what he thinks of it.”
“That’s a place you might tell us a little about, now,” the fat man suggested, as if he had been waiting for his chance.
Before the shoemaker had time to notice this challenge some one inquired, with a hoarse petulance, who the blazes they were talking about; and Mr Schinkel took upon himself to reply that they were talking about a man who hadn’t done what he had done by simply exchanging abstract ideas, however valuable, with his friends in a respectable pot-house.
“What the devil has he done, then?” some one else demanded; and Muniment replied, quietly, that he had spent twelve years in a Prussian prison, and was consequently still an object of a good deal of interest to the police.
“Well, if you call that very useful, I must say I prefer a pot-house!” cried the shoemaker, appealing to all the company and looking, as it appeared to Hyacinth, particularly hideous.
“Doch, doch, it is useful,” the German remarked, philosophically, among his yellow clouds.
“Do you mean to say you are not prepared for that, yourself?” Muniment inquired of the shoemaker.
“Prepared for that? I thought we were going to smash that sort of shop altogether; I thought that was the main part of the job.”
“They will smash best, those who have been inside,” the German declared; “unless, perhaps, they are broken, enervated. But Hoffendahl is not enervated.”
“Ah, no; no smashing, no smashing,” Muniment went on. “We want to keep them standing, and even to build a few more; but the difference will be that we shall put the correct sort in.”
“I take your idea – that Griffin is one of the correct sort,” the fat man remarked, indicating the shoemaker.
“I thought we was going to ’ave their ’eads – all that bloomin’ lot!” Mr Griffin declared, protesting; while Eustache Poupin began to enlighten the company as to the great Hoffendahl, one of the purest martyrs of their cause, a man who had been through everything – who had been scarred and branded, tortured, almost flayed, and had never given them the names they wanted to have. Was it possible they didn’t remember that great combined attempt, early in the sixties, which took place in four Continental cities at once and which, in spite of every effort to smother it up – there had been editors and journalists transported even for h............