‘That butler of hers—’
‘Jarniman, you mean: he’s her butler, yes, the scoundrel—h’m-pah! Heaven forgive me! she’s an honest woman at least; I wouldn’t rob her of her little: fifty-nine or sixty next September, fifteenth of the month! with the constitution of a broken drug-bottle, poor soul! She hears everything from Jarniman: he catches wind of everything. All foreseen, Fenellan, foreseen. I have made my stand at Lakelands, and there’s my flag till it’s hauled down over Victor Radnor. London kills Nataly as well as Fredi—and me: that is—I can use the words to you—I get back to primal innocence in the country. We all three have the feeling. You’re a man to understand. My beasts, and the wild flowers, hedge-banks, and stars. Fredi’s poetess will tell you. Quiet waters reflecting. I should feel it in Paris as well, though they have nightingales in their Bois. It’s the rustic I want to bathe me; and I had the feeling at school, biting at Horace. Well, this is my Sabine Farm, rather on a larger scale, for the sake of friends. Come, and pure air, water from the springs, walks and rides in lanes, high sand-lanes; Nataly loves them; Fredi worships the old roots of trees: she calls them the faces of those weedy sandy lanes. And the two dear souls on their own estate, Fenellan! And their poultry, cows, cream. And a certain influence one has in the country socially. I make my stand on a home—not empty punctilio.’
Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, ‘Punctilio,’ and not emphatically.
‘Don’t bawl the word,’ said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it rang and sang. ‘Here in the City the woman’s harmless; and here,’ he struck his breast. ‘But she can shoot and hit another through me. Ah, the witch!—poor wretch! poor soul! Only, she’s malignant. I could swear! But Colney ‘s right for once in something he says about oaths—“dropping empty buckets,” or something.’
‘“Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as heavily as the ready devil himself,”’ Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase. ‘Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he’s what the critics call sententious. We’ve all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us.’
‘Come, Fenellan, I don’t think…’
‘Oh, yes, but it’s true of me too.’
‘You reserve it for your enemies.’
‘I ‘d like to distract it a bit from the biggest of ‘em.’ He pointed finger at the region of the heart.
‘Here we have Skepsey,’ said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach of a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed javelin’s cast, shot from the doorway to the table.
CHAPTER IV. THE SECOND BOTTLE
This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism. His lean slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest of prominent large eyes. He placed his master’s letters legibly on the table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.
Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.
‘How about the Schools for Boxing?’ that gentleman said.
Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: ‘I have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously: a person of no station:—it does not appear of national importance. Ladies are against. They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because of the blood; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not; and it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex. They seem to be unaware of their own interests—ladies. The contention all around us is with ignorance. My plan is written; I have shown it, and signatures of gentlemen, to many of our City notables favourable in most cases: gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly. The clergy and the medical profession are quite with me.’
‘The surgical, perhaps you mean?’
‘Also, sir. The clergy strongly.’
‘On the grounds of—what, Skepsey?’
‘Morality. I have fully explained to them:—after his work at the desk all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment. He needs it, must have it. I propose to catch him on his way to his music-halls and other places, and take him to one of our establishments. A short term of instruction, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves; it would delight him more than excesses-beer and tobacco. The female in her right place, certainly.’ Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his hearer, and pursued,
‘It would improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his sense of personal dignity.’
‘Would you teach females as well—to divert them from their frivolities?’
‘That would have to be thought over, sir. It would be better for them than using their nails.’
‘I don’t know, Skepsey: I’m rather a Conservative there.’
‘Yes; with regard to the female, sir: I confess, my scheme does not include them. They dance; that is a healthy exercise. One has only to say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency. I look to that. And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent of—I have to say—sex. Not that there is harm in sex. But we are for training. I hope my meaning is clear?’
‘Quite. You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic recreation.’
‘Recreation is the word, sir; I have often admired it,’ said Skepsey, blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic.
‘I was a bit of a boxer once,’ Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height and breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him.
‘Something might be done with you still, sir.’
Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful summary of his gifts in a glimpse. Mr. Fenellan bowed to him.
Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters perused.
‘Skepsey’s craze: regeneration of the English race by boxing—nucleus of a national army?’
‘To face an enemy at close quarters—it teaches that, sir. I have always been of opinion, that courage may be taught. I do not say heroism. And setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable citizens. Protection to the weak in streets and by-places—shocking examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd.’
‘One strong man is an overmatch for your mob,’ said Mr. Fenellan.
Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion of the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn.
‘Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant mob:—strong, you say, sir? I venture my word that a decent lad, with science, would beat him. It is a question of the study and practice of first principles.’
‘If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman?’ Skepsey conjured the scene by bending his head and peering abstractedly, as if over spectacles.
‘I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake.’
Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting.
‘My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first principles, I think?’
‘Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir: exceedingly quick and clever; a hard boxer to beat.’
‘You will not call him captain when you see him; he has dismissed the army.’
‘I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him. Captain Dartrey Fenellan was a beautiful fencer. He gave me some instruction; unhappily, I have to acknowledge, too late. It is a beautiful art. Captain Dartrey says, the French excel at it. But it asks for a weapon, which nature has not given: whereas the fists…’
‘So,’ Mr. Radnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey: ‘No sign of life?’
‘It is not yet seen in the City, sir.’
‘The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth’s maziest penetralia, where no tides are! is it not so, Skepsey?’ said Mr. Fenellan, whose initiative and exuberance in loquency had been restrained by a slight oppression, known to guests; especially to the guest in the earlier process of his magnification and illumination by virtue of a grand old wine; and also when the news he has to communicate may be a stir to unpleasant heaps. The shining lips and eyes of his florid face now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy jack-o’-lanterning over it. ‘Business hangs to swing at every City door, like a ragshop Doll, on the gallows of overproduction. Stocks and Shares are hollow nuts not a squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight of the milky kernel mouldered to beard.