Sooner or later I too may passively take the print Of the golden age—why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
—tennyson, Maud (1855)
When Charles at last found himself on the broad steps of the Freeman town mansion, it was already dusk, gas-lamped and crisp. There was a faint mist, compounding the scent of the spring verdure from the Park across the street and the old familiar soot. Charles breathed it in, acrid and essential London, and decided to walk. The hansom that had been called for him was dismissed.
He walked with no very clear purpose, in the general direction of his club in St. James; at first beside the railings of Hyde Park, those heavy railings whose fall before a mob (and under the horrified eyes of his recent interlocutor) only three weeks later was to precipitate the passing of the great Reform Bill. He turned then down Park Lane. But the press of traffic there was disagreeable. Mid-Victorian traffic jams were quite as bad as modern ones—and a good deal noisier, since every carriage wheel had an iron tire to grate on the granite setts. So taking what he imagined would prove a shortcut, he plunged into the heart of Mayfair. The mist thickened, not so much as to obscure all, but sufficiently to give what he passed a slightly dreamlike quality; as if he was a visitor from another world, a Candide who could see nothing but obvious explanations, a man suddenly deprived of his sense of irony.
To be without such a fundamental aspect of his psyche was almost to be naked; and this perhaps best describes what Charles felt. He did not now really know what had driven him to Ernestina’s father; the whole matter could have been dealt with by letter. If his scrupulous-ness now seemed ab-surd, so did all this talk of poverty, of having to regulate one’s income. In those days, and especially on such a fog-threatening evening, the better-off traveled by carriage; pedestrians must be poor. Thus almost all those Charles met were of the humbler classes; servants from the great Mayfair houses, clerks, shop-people, beggars, street sweepers (a much commoner profession when the horse reigned), hucksters, urchins, a prostitute or two. To all of them, he knew, a hundred pounds a year would have been a fortune; and he had just been commiserated with for having to scrape by on twenty-five times that sum.
Charles was no early socialist. He did not feel the moral enormity of his privileged economic position, because he felt himself so far from privileged in other ways. The proof was all around him. By and large the passers and passed did not seem unhappy with their lots, unless it was the beggars, and they had to look miserable to succeed. But he was unhappy; alien and unhappy; he felt that the enormous apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian species. His step slowed at this image of a superseded monster. He actually stopped, poor living fossil, as the brisker and fitter forms of life jostled busily before him, like pond amoeba under a microscope, along a small row of shops that he had come upon.
Two barrel-organists competed with one another, and a banjo-man with both. Mashed-potato men, trotter-sellers (“Penny a trotter, you won’t find ‘otter”), hot chestnuts. An old woman hawking fusees; another with a basket of daffodils. Watermen, turncocks, dustmen with their backlap caps, mechanics in their square pillboxes; and a plague of small ragamuffins sitting on doorsteps, on curbs, leaning against the carriage posts, like small vultures. One such lad interrupted his warming jog—like most of the others, he was barefooted—to whistle shrill warning to an image-boy, who ran, brandishing his sheaf of colored prints, up to Charles as he stood in the wings of this animated stage.
Charles turned hastily away and sought a darker street. A harsh little voice sped after him, chanting derisive lines from a vulgar ballad of the year:
“Why don’cher come ‘ome, Lord Marmaduke, An’ ‘ave an ‘ot supper wiv me?
An’ when we’ve bottomed a jug o’ good stout
We’ll riddle-dee-ro-di-dee, ooooh,
We’ll riddle-dee-ro-di-ree.”
Which reminded Charles, when at last he was safely es-caped from the voice and its accompanying jeers, of that other constituent of London air—not as physical, but as unmistakable as the soot—the perfume of sin. It was less the miserable streetwomen he saw now and then, women who watched him pass without soliciting him (he had too obvious-ly the air of a gentleman and they were after lesser prey) than the general anonymity of the great city; the sense that all could be hidden here, all go unobserved.
Lyme was a town of sharp eyes; and this was a city of the blind. No one turned and looked at him. He was almost invisible, he did not exist, and this gave him a sense of freedom, but a terrible sense, for he had in reality lost it—it was like Winsyatt, in short. All in his life was lost; and all reminded him that it was lost.
A man and a woman who hurried past spoke French; were French. And then Charles found himself wishing he were in Paris—from that, that he were abroad ... traveling. Again! If I could only escape, if I could only escape ... he mur-mured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphori-cally shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.
He passed a mews, not then a fashionable row of bijou “maisonettes” but noisily in pursuit of its original function: horses being curried and groomed, equipages being drawn out, hooves clacking as they were backed between shafts, a coachman whistling noisily as he washed the sides of his carriage, all in preparation for the evening’s work. An as-tounding theory crossed Charles’s mind: the lower orders were secretly happier than the upper. They were not, as the radicals would have one believe, the suffering infrastructure groaning under the opulent follies of the rich; but much more like happy parasites. He remembered having come, a few months before, on a hedgehog in the gardens of Winsyatt. He had tapped it with his stick and made it roll up; and between its erect spines he had seen a swarm of disturbed fleas. He had been sufficiently the biologist to be more fascinated than revolted by this interrelation of worlds; as he was now sufficiently depressed to see who was the hedgehog: an ani-mal whose only means of defense was to lie as if dead and erect its prickles, its aristocratic sensibilities.
A little later he came to an ironmonger’s, and stood outside staring through the windows at the counter, at the ironmonger in his bowler and cotton apron, counting candles to a ten-year-old girl who stared up at him, her red fingers already holding high the penny to be taken.
Trade. Commerce. And he flushed, remembering what had been offered. He saw now it was an insult, a contempt for his class, that had prompted the suggestion. Freeman must know he could never go into business, play the shopkeeper. He should have rejected the suggestion icily at its very first mention; but how could he, when all his wealth was to come from that very source? And here we come near the real germ of Charles’s discontent: this feeling that he was now the bought husband, his in-law’s puppet. Never mind that such marriages were traditional in his class; the tradition had sprung from an age when polite marriage was a publicly accepted business contract that neither husband nor wife was ............